A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

Today, half a million people, or about half of the State’s population, speak HCE.
Although mostly a language of informality, it is also a powerful social marker indicating
who is and who is not Local. Nevertheless, the ability to code shift to Standard English is
necessary for “vocational and out-of-Hawaii use.” 477 This, in effect, leads to a situation of
diglossia, aside from the high percentage of bilingual or multilingual residents. Kanae
contends that “resistance is an intrinsic element of Pidgin,” quoting Ngugi’s
Decolonising the Mind: “Thus a specific culture is not transmitted through language in its
universality but in its particularity as the language of a specific community with a specific
history.” 478 One can argue that Pidgin serves as a Local equivalent to the Caribbean
concept of ‘nation language,’ most convincingly so in its transformation into a literary
language. This transformation entails the danger of HCE being standardized and
contained. In her dissertation on Pacific ‘communities of difference,’ Charlene Gima
asks: “Even after – or especially after – Local literature has become partially academized,
the question of pidgin still remains a difficulty: how does an anticolonial language remain
resistant in the very institution that it resists?” She goes on to show that the language
begins to be shaped by certain literary conventions and expectations, especially in
fiction. Many pidgin narratives involve an adolescent narrator, or a now-adult
narrator looking back on ‘small kid time,’ a period which for most meant
playground pidgin in the public schools, […] the unconscious assumption being
that only children, uneducated adults, or those from working class backgrounds,
would write in pidgin english. 479
In spite of this, Hawai’i by now has both a vernacular literary tradition and a host of
writers who test its limitations and try to expand Pidgin literature beyond them.
477 Theodore Rodgers, “Poisoning Pidgins in the Park: The Study and Status of Hawaiian Creole,” in James
E. Alatis/Carolyn A. Straehle/Maggie Ronkin/Brent Gallenberger (eds.), Linguistics, Language Acquisition,
and Language Variation: Current Trends and Future Prospects, Washington 1996: 221-35, here 225. The
contemporary mix is summed up in a short newspaper article as follows: “The word order is Hawaiian. The
rhythm, to some people, sounds Portuguese. The tendency to append a rising ‘yah?’ at the end of each
sentence is analogous to the Japanese ne? (‘are you following me?’) And the use of ‘Eh!’ at the start of a
sentence comes from the Hawaiian interjection E, which makes the sentence a command, like ‘Listen up!’”
(quoted from a Honolulu Advertiser clipping that was included in the Welcome Package for visiting
scholars). Pidgin is thus also marked by a specific accent and speech melody.
478 Kanae 2002: n. p. (quoting Ngugi 1986: 15).
479 Gima 1997: 82-3.
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