Hawaiian, English, and “Pidgin”

Shortly after Cook’s ‘discovery’ of Hawai’i, fur traders, sandalwood merchants and whalers began employing a reduced form of English as a lingua franca in Hawaiian port communities, which resulted in an early pidgin blended from Hawaiian, English and

462 Gloria Anzaldúa, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” in Ferguson et al. 1990: 203-11, here 207.

463 Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari, “What Is a Minor Literature?” In Ferguson et al. 1990: 59-69, here 59.

464 Lisa Linn Kanae, Sista Tongue, Honolulu 2002: n. p.

Cantonese words.⁴⁶⁵ In the 1820s, American missionaries adapted the Hawaiian oral language to their writing system so as to convert and educate the natives. However, by the 1870s, English had become the administrative language of the Islands, due to factors such as population decline and economic necessity: The first sugar plantation had been established in 1835, and by 1850, labor demands were met by recruiting indentured workers from China, Japan, and the Philippines. The overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 and the subsequent annexation in 1898 entailed the use of English as the language of instruction in all schools. This policy of Americanization and mass education ran counter to the needs of plantation owners, whose contract workers were housed by national origin, ideally ignorant of both Hawaiian and English, hence isolated in ethnic groups. However, plantation overseers, or lunas, gave their instructions in “a condensed, minimal form of English.”⁴⁶⁶ The evolving pidgin – first Hawaiian-based, then consisting of English and Hawaiian vocabulary combined with the phonology and syntax of its speakers’ first languages – became a means of interethnic communication, thus defying segregation policies. When a pidgin acquires native speakers, as in this case it did through the children of immigrant workers, it stabilizes and extends into a creole.

From a linguist’s viewpoint, creoles are languages in their own right, regardless of standardization. For example, Hawaiian Creole English “has an elaborate system for marking tense, aspect and modality.”⁴⁶⁷

465 While linguists have long assumed that contact languages are European-based, there is ample evidence for an early Maritime Polynesian Pidgin. In a recent article Emanuel J. Drechsel addresses the “question of a hypercorrected interpretation of Anglophone and Anglophile historical documentation in terms of Pidgin English:” “That over time native peoples indeed adopted European-based pidgins and creoles is not an issue, but only confirms the end result, the success of European-American colonialism.” (“Language Contact in the Early Colonial Pacific,” in John R. Rickford/Suzanne Romaine (eds.), Creole Genesis, Attitudes and Discourse: Studies Celebrating Charlene J. Sato, Amsterdam 1999: 71-96, here 72-3). A similar position is taken by Julian M. Roberts who traces the development from pidgin Hawaiian to pidgin English in his article “Pidgin Hawaiian: A Sociohistorical Study” (in Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 10 No. 1 (1995): 1-56). Statistics and sentence examples to support his thesis are collected in his 1993 paper “The Transformation of Hawaiian Plantation Pidgin and the Emergence of Hawaiian Creole English” (typescript from a paper delivered at the Annual Conference of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, Amsterdam 11/06/1993).

466 Kanae 2002: n.p.

467 Sato 1989: 193. In a short essay on teaching literature to Local students, Kevin O’Leary mentions some easily observable grammar rules, like the substitution of “stay” for Standard English “to be:” “I tink she stay ovah by da Seven-Eleven. My sistah stay cleaning da house.” The past tense affirmative is constructed by using “wen” (went) with the infinitive of the verb, as in “Yesterday we wen go da store,” while the past tense negative requires a “neva” (never) with the infinitive: “He neva come to school all week” (Kevin O’Leary, “Pidgin Power,” in Bamboo Ridge No. 79 (Spring 2001): 59-62, here 60).

HCE became a vehicle for local group identity formation. As Lisa Linn Kanae rightly states, this “was especially important to the plantation laborers’ children who could neither connect ancestrally with their own native culture nor to a relatively foreign mainstream American culture.”⁴⁶⁸ After Hawai’i had become a territory in 1900, these children had to attend public school, while the growing English-speaking middle class sent their offspring to the mostly missionary-established private schools. By 1924, the English Standard School System with its language proficiency entrance exams in effect institutionalized ethnic and class segregation. In her short story “Fourth Grade Ukus,”

Marie Hara portayed such an entrance test from the child’s viewpoint: “‘Da bolocano,’ I repeated politely at the cone-shaped mountain where a spiral of smoke signaled into the crayon-shaded air. She must have drawn it. […] ‘It’s the vol-cano,’ she enunciated clearly, forcing me to watch her mouth move aggressively.”⁴⁶⁹ The continued isolation of creole-speaking children in turn resulted in a strengthening and stabilizing of HCE, defiantly called Pidgin by its speakers. Although “Pidgin was the result of a multi-ethnic working class’s attempt at solidarity,” it soon was “perceived as an impairment to one’s education, entering the job market, and Hawaii’s future in general:” ⁴⁷⁰ After World War II, the military and tourism replaced sugar as the main economic resources, which drew the working class from plantation to urban areas. A poem by Cathy Song describes the ambivalence of a family’s move from the ubiquitous “pineapple fields” to the city:

Don’t talk like you came from the pineapple fields meant we couldn’t talk with our mouths

full of broken sentences […]

We remained silent instead,

our tongues harnessed by the foreign shoelaces of syntax

restrictive as the new shoes Father brought home for us to wear.⁴⁷¹

Also, in the drive for statehood, the English Standard School System was abolished due to the efforts of the newly empowered Democratic Party – which consisted mainly of

“reform-minded Asian-Americans […] who had not been represented in the English

468 Kanae 2002: n. p.

469 Marie Hara, “Fourth Grade Ukus,” in Chock et al. 1998: 32-42, here 32-3.

470 Kanae 2002: n. p.

471 “The Pineapple Fields,” in Song 2001: 5-6.

Standard system.”⁴⁷² In any case, speaking ‘good English’ seemed a mandatory skill for upward mobility, and even though sociolinguists by the 1960s were advocating Pidgin’s cultural value, its stigmatization continued. However, as local linguist Charlene Sato observed, “‘Tawking laik wan haole’ associated one with the economic and political exploitation practiced by such outsiders [tourists, real estate speculators, and outside corporate investors] and was therefore behavior to be avoided.”⁴⁷³ As a result, two conflicting attitudes, stigmatization and defiance, continue to affect the use of HCE, both in speech and in writing.

Usually, the history of contact languages concludes with decreolization, “the process through which a creole merges over time with its lexically related standard language.”⁴⁷⁴ This process seems to have decelerated in Hawai’i after cumulative attacks on HCE’s usage had led to an intense public debate in the late 1980s: In 1987, public discussion erupted over a State Board of Education language policy draft which would

“officially ban pidgin from the classroom, and sanction the use of Standard English only.”⁴⁷⁵ In the media coverage, a prevailing “mismatch between social perception and observable linguistic behavior” often cast the conflicting attitudes as a choice between HCE and Standard English, “as if one could easily draw linguistic boundaries between these varieties.”⁴⁷⁶

472 Kanae 2002: n. p. The so-called ‘Democratic Revolution’ broke the monopolist position of missionary descendants, sugar planters, and members of the ‘Big Five’ companies in local politics: “Following World War II, however, the Japanese in Hawai’i joined forces with the International Longshoremen and

Warehousemen Union (I.L.W.U.), which represented plantation and dock workers in the Democratic Party, and overturned the Republican Party” (Fujikane 1996: 161).

473 Quoted in Gima 1997: 82.

474 Sato 1989: 194.

475 Suzanne Romaine, “Changing Attitudes to Hawai’i Creole English,” in Rickford/Romaine 1999: 287-301, here 296. Charlene Sato stated: “Never before in Hawai’i’s history had such widespread, frequently rational, discussion of language politics consumed the community” (Sato 1989: 203). She goes on to register that “the openly defiant attitude of some of the students indicates increasing political awareness among young HCE speakers today, a distinct shift from the historical pattern of self-denigration in matters of verbal ability” (204). A second trigger for public discussion was a federal lawsuit against the National Weather Service, which brought up the subject of job discrimination because of an HCE accent. As the involved employees “could and did use standard Hawai’i English of the sort spoken by the majority of highly educated, locally born professionals,” members of this group “were particularly troubled by the implications for their own careers” (206).

476 Sato 1989: 208. She mentions another interesting aspect in the perpetuation of negative attitudes towards HCE: Recalling the WWII experience of the second generation Japanese, who were influenced by

assimilation campaigns during the 1940s, she argues that “this generation of now middle-class Japanese Americans has largely controlled government and education in post-war Hawaii,” which accounts for language policy in the school system that reflects “their strongly assimilationist viewpoint” (207).

Today, half a million people, or about half of the State’s population, speak HCE.

Although mostly a language of informality, it is also a powerful social marker indicating who is and who is not Local. Nevertheless, the ability to code shift to Standard English is necessary for “vocational and out-of-Hawaii use.”⁴⁷⁷ This, in effect, leads to a situation of diglossia, aside from the high percentage of bilingual or multilingual residents. Kanae contends that “resistance is an intrinsic element of Pidgin,” quoting Ngugi’s Decolonising the Mind: “Thus a specific culture is not transmitted through language in its universality but in its particularity as the language of a specific community with a specific history.”⁴⁷⁸ One can argue that Pidgin serves as a Local equivalent to the Caribbean concept of ‘nation language,’ most convincingly so in its transformation into a literary language. This transformation entails the danger of HCE being standardized and contained. In her dissertation on Pacific ‘communities of difference,’ Charlene Gima asks: “Even after – or especially after – Local literature has become partially academized, the question of pidgin still remains a difficulty: how does an anticolonial language remain resistant in the very institution that it resists?” She goes on to show that the language

begins to be shaped by certain literary conventions and expectations, especially in fiction. Many pidgin narratives involve an adolescent narrator, or a now-adult narrator looking back on ‘small kid time,’ a period which for most meant playground pidgin in the public schools, […] the unconscious assumption being that only children, uneducated adults, or those from working class backgrounds, would write in pidgin english.⁴⁷⁹

In spite of this, Hawai’i by now has both a vernacular literary tradition and a host of writers who test its limitations and try to expand Pidgin literature beyond them.

477 Theodore Rodgers, “Poisoning Pidgins in the Park: The Study and Status of Hawaiian Creole,” in James E. Alatis/Carolyn A. Straehle/Maggie Ronkin/Brent Gallenberger (eds.), Linguistics, Language Acquisition, and Language Variation: Current Trends and Future Prospects, Washington 1996: 221-35, here 225. The contemporary mix is summed up in a short newspaper article as follows: “The word order is Hawaiian. The rhythm, to some people, sounds Portuguese. The tendency to append a rising ‘yah?’ at the end of each sentence is analogous to the Japanese ne? (‘are you following me?’) And the use of ‘Eh!’ at the start of a sentence comes from the Hawaiian interjection E, which makes the sentence a command, like ‘Listen up!’”

(quoted from a Honolulu Advertiser clipping that was included in the Welcome Package for visiting scholars). Pidgin is thus also marked by a specific accent and speech melody.

478 Kanae 2002: n. p. (quoting Ngugi 1986: 15).

479 Gima 1997: 82-3.

In spite of its widespread appeal in the islands, the use of pidgin in Hawaii’s literature is seen as an implied declaration of independence from the standards imposed on Hawaii’s polyethnic culture by a dominant one; and as can be expected, not everyone is willing to endorse such a declaration.

Stephen Sumida – And the View from the Shore⁴⁸⁰