Scholars debate if pidgin got da pilikias

By Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writer

Lee Tonouchi didn't know what to make of it. A group of his Kapi'olani Community College students last semester volunteered to march in an international parade representing pidgin culture. He gave them signs that read "Tita out!" and "Blalah." They shot back blank looks.

Tonouchi, better known as a pidgin writer and performer than as a KCC English teacher, would never have believed that the words — roughly, "sister" and "brother" in pidgin — could drop out of popular use. But that's the way of language: If it's alive, it keeps changing.

What Island folks call pidgin — the speech that descended from the lingua franca that linked ethnic groups in plantations of old — is known to the academics as Hawai'i Creole English. A group of them from around the world, the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, is finishing up a conference this weekend at the University of Hawai'i Imin International Conference Center.

Today's program, open to the public, features readings of pidgin literature by Tonouchi and other writers (see box). At the conference, which began Thursday, scholars have pondered questions of linguistic development, from the effects of Papua New Guinea pidgin on the country's other languages to the use of Nigerian pidgin in marketplaces there.

All of this creates the perfect opportunity to raise a question discussed on the street as well as in the ivory tower: What gives with pidgin? Is it fading or simply changing?

There are no easy answers, but Jeff Siegel, Kent Sakoda and their UH colleagues are investigating. Siegel directs the Charlene Sato Center for Pidgin, Creole and Dialect Studies, where Sakoda is a lecturer; together they wrote a book on pidgin grammar launched at the conference.

The center also is involved in fieldwork aimed at taking the pulse of pidgin, Siegel said. The work is far from done, but the academics have some preliminary ideas.

Yes, they say, pidgin speakers today borrow words from urban-speak and other aspects of global popular culture, while some words have gone out of vogue.

"'Pilikia' (trouble) ... 'pupule' (crazy) ... I don't hear them much anymore," said senior researcher Ryo Stanwood. "A lot of the Hawaiian words have disappeared, and they're replaced by English."

Some in the linguistic community argue that the "decreolization" — degradation of Hawai'i's pidgin into a mere accent or dialect — is natural in language development.

"It touches my heart, but it's a losing battle," said Ted Plaister, a retired professor of English as a second language who ran workshops for teachers about dialects and language issues in the 1960s and '70s.

"My unscientific observation is there were hard-core Hawai'i creole speakers then, and after an absence of 12 years, I come back and don't hear it as much," Plaister said.

Sakoda disputes that theory, arguing that pidgin simply has morphed at each evolutionary point into something a little different — but it still exists.

"Each generation is coming on the scene at a different point," he said. "For the older speakers, some of the forms have disappeared."

"The basic structure is still there," Siegel added. "Linguists would never say a language is changing on the basis of vocabulary."

Siegel also believes that pidgin speakers may be more inclined to switch it on and off than they once were.

Tonouchi would agree. "I teach at KCC, and teachers say to me, 'I think pidgin is dying; I don't hear it in the class.' And I say, 'That's cause it's school, brah.' I don't think that's the right place for judge if it's dying," Tonouchi said.

Reach Vicki Viotti at vviotti@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8053.