A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic
5.3 Language
identity – I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself.
Gloria Anzaldúa – “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” 462
In colonial situations, there is always a contestation of indigenous and imported/imposed
languages. Language policy and colonial education account for the relative status of each
of these. As colonization entails the obtrusion of a foreign language, decolonization
naturally focuses on the revitalization of native languages as well as on a creative
appropriation of ‘the master’s tongue.’ Through contact, the colonial language is
inevitably altered, contaminated, and creolized, and a genuine creole may evolve.
Postcolonial literatures naturally involve a questioning of the choice of one language over
another or several possible others. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have defined a
“minor literature” as inevitably political and collective, and as involving a
deterritorialization of language: “A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language;
it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language.” 463 This conception,
in which a language is distilled or intensified by focusing on its “internal tensions,”
applies to the situation in Hawai’i, especially when looking at the role of Hawaiian Creole
English.
5.3.1 Hawaiian, English, and “Pidgin”
Creole Languages are primarily born out of necessity.
Lisa Linn Kanae – Sista Tongue 464
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.
180