A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

Standard system.” 472 In any case, speaking ‘good English’ seemed a mandatory skill for
upward mobility, and even though sociolinguists by the 1960s were advocating Pidgin’s
cultural value, its stigmatization continued. However, as local linguist Charlene Sato
observed, “‘Tawking laik wan haole’ associated one with the economic and political
exploitation practiced by such outsiders [tourists, real estate speculators, and outside
corporate investors] and was therefore behavior to be avoided.” 473 As a result, two
conflicting attitudes, stigmatization and defiance, continue to affect the use of HCE, both
in speech and in writing.
Usually, the history of contact languages concludes with decreolization, “the
process through which a creole merges over time with its lexically related standard
language.” 474 This process seems to have decelerated in Hawai’i after cumulative attacks
on HCE’s usage had led to an intense public debate in the late 1980s: In 1987, public
discussion erupted over a State Board of Education language policy draft which would
“officially ban pidgin from the classroom, and sanction the use of Standard English
only.” 475 In the media coverage, a prevailing “mismatch between social perception and
observable linguistic behavior” often cast the conflicting attitudes as a choice between
HCE and Standard English, “as if one could easily draw linguistic boundaries between
these varieties.” 476
472 Kanae 2002: n. p. The so-called ‘Democratic Revolution’ broke the monopolist position of missionary
descendants, sugar planters, and members of the ‘Big Five’ companies in local politics: “Following World
War II, however, the Japanese in Hawai’i joined forces with the International Longshoremen and
Warehousemen Union (I.L.W.U.), which represented plantation and dock workers in the Democratic Party,
and overturned the Republican Party” (Fujikane 1996: 161).
473 Quoted in Gima 1997: 82.
474 Sato 1989: 194.
475 Suzanne Romaine, “Changing Attitudes to Hawai’i Creole English,” in Rickford/Romaine 1999: 287-
301, here 296. Charlene Sato stated: “Never before in Hawai’i’s history had such widespread, frequently
rational, discussion of language politics consumed the community” (Sato 1989: 203). She goes on to
register that “the openly defiant attitude of some of the students indicates increasing political awareness
among young HCE speakers today, a distinct shift from the historical pattern of self-denigration in matters
of verbal ability” (204). A second trigger for public discussion was a federal lawsuit against the National
Weather Service, which brought up the subject of job discrimination because of an HCE accent. As the
involved employees “could and did use standard Hawai’i English of the sort spoken by the majority of
highly educated, locally born professionals,” members of this group “were particularly troubled by the
implications for their own careers” (206).
476 Sato 1989: 208. She mentions another interesting aspect in the perpetuation of negative attitudes towards
HCE: Recalling the WWII experience of the second generation Japanese, who were influenced by
assimilation campaigns during the 1940s, she argues that “this generation of now middle-class Japanese
Americans has largely controlled government and education in post-war Hawaii,” which accounts for
language policy in the school system that reflects “their strongly assimilationist viewpoint” (207).
183