A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

issue of who has speaking power. Moreover, the choice depends on who will be included
in/excluded from the Hawaiian nation and/or the Local cultural nation.
You speak in the Master’s tongue/You may as well not speak. English, many critics argue, is the master’s
discourse and by writing/speaking in the master’s discourse, one writes for the master, one is always
5.3.4 The Hawaiian Language in Local Literature
already colonized, always native informant.
Aneil Rallin – “Texting Bodies: Notes on Language, Writing, Desire” 522
In the assessment of Theodore Rodgers, psycholinguist and chief planner for the Hawaii
English Program (HEP), a curriculum development and implementation program, from
1968 to 1983, “the loyalty that many local residents presently display towards HCE as the
community patois might be transferred to the Hawaiian language.” 523 He points to the
possible combined impact of the sovereignty movement and Hawaiian Language
Immersion education which could soon lead to “some form of Hawaiian sovereignty –
some kind of redirection of Hawaii resources to Hawaiian people.” This in turn would
massively increase the “interest in the revival of Hawaiian language and its role as a
marker of sovereign identity.” Rodgers elaborates:
Among professionals, those who conduct sociolinguistic research on HCE and
Hawaiian often come from the same academic departments, publish in some of
the same journals, and generally have considered themselves allies in the
nonstandard English periphery. As yet these alliances have not been threatened by
funding competition or public favoritism. In the larger public arena, there are
those who find fault with both the HCE and Hawaiian language movements on the
grounds of their isolationism and inutility. And there are those who find glory in
both on the grounds of their re-enforcement of island uniqueness and identity. It
will be interesting to see how the likely growth of the Hawaiian sovereignty and
522 Aneil Rallin, “Texting Bodies: Notes on Language, Writing, Desire,” in Franklin et al. 2000: 132-42,
here 135.
523 Rodgers 1996: 234. The following quotes are all taken from that passage.
198