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• Title: How is the English Language reflected in Hawaii Creole English?
• Author : Wiebke Vieljans
• Release Date : January 18, 2006
• Genre: Politics & Current Events,Books,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 95 KB

Description

Since 1959 they have been the 50th state of the United States, with their capital Honolulu on the Island of Oahu. English is the administrative and general language of the state, and has been the language of education for over a century.12 Hawaii’s population of about one million is of mixed backgrounds, most of them are descendants of Asian immigrants: Caucasian, Filipino, Hawaiian, Japanese and Chinese.13 Referring to some statistical data, Reinecke estimated in 1935 that 20% of the islands’ population (then 380,000) were not native speakers of English and were thus expected speakers of pidgin; 20% to 30% spoke creolized English, 30% to 40% spoke a post-creole dialect, while some 15% spoke Standard English. 70 years later, almost all of the state’s inhabitants speak either the dialect or Standard English or both.14

Hawaii was first visited by Europeans in 1778 with the arrival of an English explorer, Captain James Cook, who named this place the “Sandwich Islands”, after the Earl of Sandwich. He also observed in 1789 that the Hawaiians spoke their language to the English omitting conjunctions and articles when talking to each other, what indicates that this was rather foreigner talk than pidgin.15 At the beginning of the 19th century, New England whalers began to make Hawaii available. Afterwards, the first sugarcane plantation was established in 1835, and the rapidly expanding industry brought again thousands of labourers from other countries like China, Portugal, Japan, Korea, Puerto Rico, Russia, Spain or the Philippines.16 Thus, the population started mixing.

With so many nationalities, a common language was needed on the plantations. At first, this was Hawaiian and Pidgin Hawaiian, but later in the century, a new variety of pidgin began to develop.17 While the foreign population of Hawaii, mainly American, increased to about 20% of the total population in 1853, the Hawaiian population was reduced to 70,000. This mixed people played the significant role in the creolization of English in Hawaii. Because this English was assorted with Hawaiian words and probably mispronounced by most whites, this jargon was sometimes called hapa haole, which means “half white” or “half-foreign”.18 While on Hawaiian plantations, as Bickerton claims, “the original plantation language was, and remained for several decades, more or less a pidginized form of Hawaiian”19, hapa haole was central for Hawaii’s population to communicate with English-speaking overseas. Because the sugar and later also pineapple plantations were socially and linguistically isolated, Holm contends that

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