A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

Cantonese words. 465 In the 1820s, American missionaries adapted the Hawaiian oral
language to their writing system so as to convert and educate the natives. However, by the
1870s, English had become the administrative language of the Islands, due to factors such
as population decline and economic necessity: The first sugar plantation had been
established in 1835, and by 1850, labor demands were met by recruiting indentured
workers from China, Japan, and the Philippines. The overthrow of the Hawaiian
monarchy in 1893 and the subsequent annexation in 1898 entailed the use of English as
the language of instruction in all schools. This policy of Americanization and mass
education ran counter to the needs of plantation owners, whose contract workers were
housed by national origin, ideally ignorant of both Hawaiian and English, hence isolated
in ethnic groups. However, plantation overseers, or lunas, gave their instructions in “a
condensed, minimal form of English.” 466 The evolving pidgin – first Hawaiian-based,
then consisting of English and Hawaiian vocabulary combined with the phonology and
syntax of its speakers’ first languages – became a means of interethnic communication,
thus defying segregation policies. When a pidgin acquires native speakers, as in this case
it did through the children of immigrant workers, it stabilizes and extends into a creole.
From a linguist’s viewpoint, creoles are languages in their own right, regardless of
standardization. For example, Hawaiian Creole English “has an elaborate system for
marking tense, aspect and modality.” 467
465 While linguists have long assumed that contact languages are European-based, there is ample evidence
for an early Maritime Polynesian Pidgin. In a recent article Emanuel J. Drechsel addresses the “question of
a hypercorrected interpretation of Anglophone and Anglophile historical documentation in terms of Pidgin
English:” “That over time native peoples indeed adopted European-based pidgins and creoles is not an
issue, but only confirms the end result, the success of European-American colonialism.” (“Language
Contact in the Early Colonial Pacific,” in John R. Rickford/Suzanne Romaine (eds.), Creole Genesis,
Attitudes and Discourse: Studies Celebrating Charlene J. Sato, Amsterdam 1999: 71-96, here 72-3). A
similar position is taken by Julian M. Roberts who traces the development from pidgin Hawaiian to pidgin
English in his article “Pidgin Hawaiian: A Sociohistorical Study” (in Journal of Pidgin and Creole
Languages 10 No. 1 (1995): 1-56). Statistics and sentence examples to support his thesis are collected in
his 1993 paper “The Transformation of Hawaiian Plantation Pidgin and the Emergence of Hawaiian Creole
English” (typescript from a paper delivered at the Annual Conference of the Society for Pidgin and Creole
Linguistics, Amsterdam 11/06/1993).
466 Kanae 2002: n.p.
467 Sato 1989: 193. In a short essay on teaching literature to Local students, Kevin O’Leary mentions some
easily observable grammar rules, like the substitution of “stay” for Standard English “to be:” “I tink she stay
ovah by da Seven-Eleven. My sistah stay cleaning da house.” The past tense affirmative is constructed by
using “wen” (went) with the infinitive of the verb, as in “Yesterday we wen go da store,” while the past
tense negative requires a “neva” (never) with the infinitive: “He neva come to school all week” (Kevin
O’Leary, “Pidgin Power,” in Bamboo Ridge No. 79 (Spring 2001): 59-62, here 60).
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