"Pidgin Guerrilla" Lee Tonouchi has unleashed his latest weapon in the fight to keep pidgin thriving and relevant in a Hawai'i where the youth are as influenced by the language they hear on MTV as the talk-story they have with Moki and Lito down the street.

"Da Kine Dictionary," some four years in the making, began hitting bookstore shelves several weeks ago. A successor of sorts to the "Pidgin To Da Max" series of the 1980s, the book contains about 360 pidgin words, their meaning, sentences using the words and, when relevant, word origins. They also include the names for those contributing each word, as well "wea an' what yea dey wen grad" information.

For Tonouchi, it comes at a critical time in pidgin's history.

"Get lotta old pidgin words young pidgin people dunno, and get lotta new words das coming out too," Tonouchi said. "Den, by making da book we able for make da kine twin turbo action for both preserve and perpetuate da language."

If he had his druthers, Tonouchi said, "I tink would've been mo' bettah if we wen make 'Da Kine Dictionary' mo' earlier, cuz lotta da old-time pidgin peoples dying off so we probably already losing some vocabularies."

For instance, words such as "kaukau tin," a plantation lunchbox, have faded along with the dusty cane-haul roads from whence they came.

Fortunately for Tonouchi and other pidgin supporters, Bess Press approached him several years ago about putting together a dictionary of pidgin words.

Rather than come up with the words himself, Tonouchi turned the effort into "Da Hawai'i Community Pidgin Dictionary Projeck." He sought contributions from across the Islands — plus Las Vegas — flooding libraries, classes and bookstores with forms for people to submit their own favorite pidgin words. A Web site was also set up.

"Ukubillion" submissions were received, the author said.

The one people turned in the most: "hammajang," defined as "junk" or "busted up." Said Tonouchi: "Dunno why, but we had choke submissions for dat."

Tonouchi insisted that "Da Kine Dictionary" remains a work in progress. The hope is to sell out the first edition and then come out with a second, more "bumboocha" edition. The Web site remains up and Tonouchi, in the introduction of "Da Kine Dictionary," calls on readers to continue feeding him "stuffs."

The fight doesn't stop there for the 'Aiea High grad, class of '90. An English instructor in the University of Hawai'i system, Tonouchi is spending the summer at Hawai'i Pacific University, where he is teaching a pidgin literature class.

"It's time now cuz we have enough literature, right?" Tonouchi said. "So, should study 'em, brah. Maybe 20 years ago, we might not have enough source material for go make one class, maybe. But now, we get so much brah, was hard for choose."

The 10 or so students in the class get hefty doses of local pidgin from authorities such as Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Rap Reiplinger, Darrell Lum and Andy Bumatai. On Friday, the class listened to pieces by Sudden Rush and Bu La'ia and read from Mahealani Kamauu.

HPU nursing student Lindsey Okamoto, 23, said Tonouchi encourages pidgin in the class, but, "I don't try to speak like that in my nursing class." The situation is different, she said, in the field where she is a student nurse and needs to communicate with pidgin speakers. Going to Tonouchi's class, she said, makes it easier for her to use pidgin with those patients who may be more comfortable with it.

While Tonouchi and others who think of pidgin as its own language readily acknowledge some pidgin words of yesteryear are now rarely heard, they dismiss the notion that it's a dying language, and instead take the position that it is merely changing.

Kent "Yoda" Sakoda, a linguistics professor at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa and chairman of the Charlene Sato Center for Pidgin, Creole and Dialect Studies, says that a lot of what is pidgin nowadays is so close to regular English that it's often hard to tell the difference.

For instance, Sakoda said, there is a proper English way of saying "Are you going to the movies?" and a pidgin way of saying the same thing, with the difference being in the inflections, or pitch or tone, in the voice.

Sakoda is also breaking new ground this summer, teaching the first-ever pidgin language class at HPU.

"The one thing that has now happened is that people now say that pidgin is a language," he said. "Whether they believe it or not is something separate. People mouth it, but sometimes they have a hard time believing it."

But not everyone agrees with the likes of Tonouchi and Sakoda.

Eric Chock, co-editor of the UH literary magazine Bamboo Ridge, said some could argue that pidgin has been evolving so radically that it may not be considered pidgin at all.

While Tonouchi and others may consider the incorporation of words such as "phat" into pidgin as part of an evolution, Chock said he doesn't.

"It's clearly changing, you could call it evolving," Chock said. "But also, a lot of people would admit that some of what we used to call pidgin is dying out, and that's part of the catalyst for (Tonouchi's) project, right? To perpetuate or revitalize the language with some of those phrases that are dying out. And if on top of the dying out, you have the replacement of other nonstandard words which are simply contemporary, American slang, you lose that political sense of what pidgin means for the culture."

Despite the friendly, academic disagreement, Chock said he respects Tonouchi, a former student, for his work trying to revitalize and perpetuate pidgin.

Tonouchi disagrees vehemently that pidgin is dying.

"Pidgin has always had da ability fo' incorporate other languages into it and call it pidgin, right?" he said. "So to me, that's the newer-generation form of pidgin. 'Cause the grammar is still rooted in pidgin, it's just that we have more hip-hop vocabulary now."

When people first told him pidgin was on death's door, Tonouchi said, he made it a point to perk up his ears. "I listened extra good, right, every time I would go out," he said. "And pretty much I hear 'em all over the place."