Island Voices
Pidgin — it's still a language
By Kalani Mondoy
An ex-patriate Hawai'i resident living in California
After leaving Hawai'i 12 years ago, I had to quickly learn to adjust. One big change for me was my level of English.
I always thought I spoke English well, considering that I lived on O'ahu for four years after moving from Moloka'i. But I realized that people knew I was from someplace else based on my English. The most noticeable feature was my pronunciation and inflection.
For years we have been taught to shun pidgin. Many educators and especially our English teachers pushed the issue of speaking proper English.
But isn't it funny that these same people who stress proper, or standard, English do not have a very good command of the English language themselves? Their level is able to impress anyone, except those from the Mainland. Dialectal differences, not limited to pronunciation, are noticeably detectable.
Although their intentions were good as far as attempting to have everyone speak standard English, their methods had an adverse effect by giving the impression that pidgin is a bastardized speech and was looked down upon.
If we compared it to the Hawaiian immersion schools, would they teach in these schools that English is a bad thing? Would they be negative with the students in order to gain fluency in Hawaiian by making students feel that speaking English is shameful?
Because that is exactly what happened to most of us with pidgin. We should have been encouraged to speak standard English, not discouraged from speaking pidgin in place of English.
Hawai'i, with its immigrant population, became well known for language loss. There were generations of people growing up not having the ability to speak the language of their parents or grandparents — something that many of us regret today and probably would have benefited from by having the ability to speak multiple languages. Instead, the result was pidgin.
Linguists refer to pidgin as Hawai'i Creole English. A pidgin language is basically a makeshift language. It is initiated by groups of people who speak different languages and communicate with each other by using basic parts of a base language.
For Hawai'i, the base language became English. Eventually each group contributes words from their own language to pidgin, thereby enriching the language.
After these groups of people who speak the makeshift language (pidgin) have children, their children speak what they learn from their parents and then go to school to learn the common or base language (English). In turn, these children now speak a slightly different version of the makeshift language spoken by the immigrants. They are the native speakers of this new language commonly referred to as a Creole language.
A common misconception often heard is that "Pidgin is just slang." However, slang comes and goes and is limited to certain groups of people in society. But pidgin has its own grammatical structure. It has tenses and essential words, along with other words from various languages. Even its word order is different, patterned after the Hawaiian language. There are ways to form the past and future tenses as well as three ways of making a sentence negative depending on the tense of the verb.
Understanding the history of pidgin and its structure allows us to appreciate what we speak in Hawai'i. Pidgin is not a bad thing as previously thought. It may not have its place with mainstream America or in the business world, but we certainly can appreciate it and not be ashamed to use it.
Just as Italians speak standard Italian along with their localized dialect, or Catalonians speaking their first tongue Catalan as well as Spanish, we too can speak pidgin and standard English.
