Talk:Hawaiian Pidgin
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History/Etymology

The most interesting part of pidgin to me is the word origins (etymology) of pidgin. Hopefully someone that has studied pidgin can contribute to this part of the page because people are going to find it to be the most interesting part of the article. Aloha —Preceding unsigned comment added by Joe82493 (talk • contribs) 05:44, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

Malcontributions

If you can't actually speak Hawaiian Pidgin, do not edit this article. You'll just introduce errors into it. Unsigned comment by User:198.148.166.5 at 02:06, February 4, 2006

Help!

Eh, I nevah know Pidgin stay so complicated! I think I've probably got this article going to a good start, and touched on the basics, but anyone who wants to really delve into detail on this article, e.g. grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, etc....eh, chance 'em!  :) KeithH 07:13, 5 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Hawaiian Pidgin seems to be a dialect of english, rather than a separate language. (Unlike Tok pisin, which largely is unintelligible to a speaker of standard english.) To an outside viewer, it seems to be similar to Ebonics. What do you think?

Ho! How you call Pidgin a creole language? Its a dialect brah! I gon' get bold, and change da' category!

Wot!!! Like beef?!?  :) :) Nah...I can see your point. The last thing I want is to get into an edit war. Sure it's a dialect, as in a variant of English. AND, it fits the definition of pidgin, when two or more language groups improvise a common language so that they can communicate. Hawaiian, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, English..you can't get much different. AND, since most locals nowadays learned Pidgin from grandma, from mom and dad, from the schoolyard, we've become native speakers...that's the point when a pidgin becomes a creole. So just think of creole as the most specific term. And as for intelligibility, just put yourself in the shoes of a tourist from Nebraska visiting the islands for the first time and overhearing two locals speaking full-on Pidgin...'nuff said.  :) KeithH 06:04, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)

If Hawaiian Creole English isn't actually a creole, then why are there such differences in da Pidgin and standard English? Locals will constantly switch between both "dialects", (what linguists call code switching), and each language variety contains context bound information or social commentary about Hawaiian culture and social relationships. Will code switching prove that HCE or Pidgin English is really a seperate language from standard English? Why bother to switch at all if they're the same language?

try scots for unintelligible dialects

Well, I don't want an edit war either, so I surrender. I suppose I'm interpreting the definitions of dialect pidgin and creole language to mean that Hawaiian Pidgin is a dialect of English, not a separate language, so therefore it couldn't be considered a Creole language. I was going to prove my point by pointing out that if you want to hear unintelligible versions of English, then go to Scotland. (I lived there for a few months) But then I looked up scots language and the article acknowledges the dispute between calling it a dialect or a language. And they fall on the side of calling it a separate language.

Here's what they said about the dispute:

Whether the varieties of Lowland Scots are dialects of English or constitute a separate language in their own right is often disputed. There is little doubt that, had Scotland remained independent, Lowland Scots would be regarded as a separate language from English. This has happened in Norway with Norwegian. Norwegian, once regarded as a dialect of Danish, has been regarded as a language in its own right since Norwegian independence in the 19th century. All the same, the British government now accepts Lowland Scots as a regional language and has recognised it as such under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.

--Frogcat 01:31, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I'm not sure how much you mean by invoking Norwegian for comparison. Are you alluding to a Scottish language struggle?  Randall Bart   Talk  20:25, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Creole or dialect?

I would agree with those who dispute its status as a creole. As has been said, when compared to other creoles like Sranan Tongo or Tok Pisin, its grammatical structure is very much like any other English dialect. It might have been a creole in the past, but if so it seems to have gone through enough "decreolization" (by increased contact with standard American English) so that its creole origins are not apparent anymore.

Why not avoid the issue entirely and use the term polyglot? the grammar is substantially different, I think the point people are trying to make is that much of the vocabulary is similar. "Jesus wen go down" doesn't make any sense in a traditional english (grammar) sense, but the meaning can (almost) be derived from context and vocabulary. Avriette 05:02, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

I guess you have to decide if it is "English" spoken in a different way than the standard (a dialect), or if it is a composite of many languages that start as a pidgin then stabilized (a creole). If you only hear downtown Honolulu Pidgin you might feel that Hawaiian Pidgin has incorporated way more English than the other languages so must have lost its "creole" status, and has morphed into an English dialect. If you get the chance to leave townside and make it to the smaller towns or even to the boonies of the outer islands you might have a harder time convincing some that it is just English with a weird accent and a few non-English words thrown in for style. As long as your argument acknowledges that Pidgin developed as a way for the workers to communicate between themselves and not an attempt at speaking English (not an official language of Hawai`i back then, and absolutely not the language spoken by the majority) you might still have a case. The sentence structure looks a lot more like Asian/Polynesian that it does English and that is something that must be addressed, because no matter how many English words get incorporated into Pidgin, the grammar seems to stay, no matter where you live. --Billy Nair (talk) 09:21, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

Help?

Please see discussion here. It's gotten kind of ugly, and I would like assistance from somebody who is formally trained in linguistics, or at least has a better grasp of the subject than I do. I'm more of a hobbyist, and I know the terminology. However, I think in this case, it's a grey area. I would also ask that before making a quick judgement based on the nature of the article, that you think about some of the comments. I am fairly certain we're not talking about a slang here, as it's a constructed grammar, which is dynamic. I also don't think we have a pidgin. A dialect may be the right word, but because it is so drastically different, I have doubts about that. Really, I'd just like a chance to discuss the matter. I'll be placing this comment over at Singlish as well, as I think there may be people there who could help. Thanks. Avriette 15:42, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

I might be of some help. I attend the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa for linguistics. There is a research group on campus which specializes in the study of HCE called “Da Pidgin Coup”. I can consult their members if anything with serious depth is necessary. Otherwise, I can work from what I know of Pidgin both as a learner, a friend of several native speakers, and as a linguist with more than passing knowledge of it. BTW, I informally call it “Pidgin” with a capital <P> because that’s the term I use daily and with speakers. It’s not an official term of any sort, but it will suffice here.

First off, the old dialects of Pidgin that were spoken up through the 1920s were significantly influenced by Hawaiian. It was at the time nearly unintelligible to English speakers without a long period of custom, essentially passive second language learning. As the English speaking population of the territory increased, particularly with the influx of military personnel during and after WWII, Pidgin began to take on more and more features of English. What is spoken today is much closer to English than what was spoken in the 1920s.

However, Pidgin is today still not English. I offer the example sentence “How come I go stay come and you go stay go?” which is essentially unintelligible to native English speakers even when written in the purely English orthography. It means “Why are you leaving when I just got here?” in a rough translation. In English it is essentially meaningless gibberish.

There is on the otherhand a very obvious cline between what speakers often call “deep Pidgin” and what is known as Hawaiian English, the dialect of English spoken by nearly all people raised in Hawaiʻi. The two languages share many features, such as the “downfall question” pattern inherited from Hawaiian, a lack of interdental fricatives, etc. Most Pidgin speakers today can shift at will between a nearly pure Pidgin and a nearly pure English to varying degrees, however there are still a number of people even in the bustling city of Honolulu who have only a passive knowledge of either Pidgin or English and cannot speak it.

The current theory that I’ve overheard in the hallway is that basically Pidgin is undergoing a gradual shift towards English, but that in the mouths and minds of many speakers this shift is not complete. As such, Pidgin, is still a separate language and not a dialect of English.

Feel free to ask any more questions and I’ll try to answer them or find answers for them. — Jéioosh 03:05, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

'“How come I go stay come and you go stay go?” ' haha, good stuffs!! I cant read that without Rap's voice in my head. (followed by the inevitable "Pardon me?")

I can see the shift from the old Pidgin toward a dialect of English as more and more people from the mainland move with their families to Hawaii and locals going to the mainland for school and such, even in my own family I can see it. I was raised in the old side of Laie, a small town but still a noticeable division between the the halves, "Old Laie" and "the Haole Side" (mainly based on the division when the dominant faith split into 2 sub divisions). Before my youngest brother was born we moved to the Haole side and although he can still speak Pidgin it is noticeably less thick than what me and my sister use, but still a few generations away from looking like a dialect of English. --Billy Nair (talk) 09:43, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

Portuguese connection

Though I feel it is valid to say that Portuguese has had an impact on HCE, I do not care for the examples cited.

To say that "You no can do dat" results from Portuguese syntax is making a massive assumption. In many languages the negation of phrases results from using the word for no before the verb (English is a rarity because of our modal verbs, auxiliary verbs and syntax reflecting them). Wo bu shi meiguoren (Mandarin - without tone markers - Chinese for "I'm not American.) -- the order would be seen literally as "I no am American." Now the Portuguese: Eu nao sou (norte)americano. "I no am American."

What can you draw from this? Both Chinese and Portuguese are purported to be contributing languages to the formation of the pidgin and subsequent creole in Hawai'i.

Also, the "dis-dat-dem" construction is referenced as following Spanish/Portuguese form - I assume the writer means phonetically speaking. In reality, the sounds of [theta] and [edh] (both written as "th" in English and respectively illustrated in the Standard American English words: think and leather) are both infrequent in contemporary languages across the globe. In Europe, the sounds are most common in English, Spanish (central Iberian variety), and Greek - though they are not limited to those languages worldwide, nor are they both necessarily present in any given language's soundstock just because one is present. I follow from this by saying that depending on the proximity of the sound to a more familiar sound in any other language (French, Portuguese, or Chinese for example), a given speaker of one of these languages will try to approximate the sounds that they cannot make when speaking English. So, let's say you're German, perhaps /s/ and /z/ respectively come closer to the sounds of [theta] and [edh]. In many Spanish speakers' versions, /t/ and /d/ (respectively may come closer. So, again, to say that only a Portuguese speaker would make these approximations is a fallacy of logic.

The last I will mention is familiar: the comparison of the "-da" ending and its frequency in English. What you have here is the coincidental and totally superficial link of modern Portuguese's tendency to pronounce an unstressed final "a" as a [schwa] and the fact that in several dialects of English, the ending "-er" is often pronounced without rhoticity - that is to say that the final vowel will be made often as a [schwa] and the final "r" will not be pronounced (other dialects of English modify this final cluster of "er" differently). Also, the examples cited do not have a -da ending in the Portuguese translation, nor related words. Brada (brother) is "irmao" in Portuguese, for example.

I'm just a former student of Anthro. Linguistics and a Portuguese speaker - and, therefore, I do not think my research and contribution would be apt for this section, but I urge someone with better knowledge on this subject to post something more empirical. I'm not trying to berate the contributer(s), but the evidence used to support the Portuguese connection is weak and often a popular convention in several languages. 13:48, 6 June 2007 (UTC)13:48, 6 June 2007 (UTC)13:48, 6 June 2007 (UTC)13:48, 6 June 2007 (UTC)13:48, 6 June 2007 (UTC)~

I agree with what you have said. Although I was surprised of the example of ficar. I'm not sure if that was mentioned in the book "Da Kine Talk" or if that was taken from my own website. There were no sources cited. I wrote about "ficar" on my website because I learned Portuguese and realized the connection. Mamoahina (talk) 02:54, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

The Chinese connection is equally unsupported by the eample given: "Another word in pidgin that was derived from the Chinese which is also seen in America is "lie dat", which means "like that" but in Hawaii it is pronounced "ladat"." Clearly this is derived from the English words "like that" and is perhaps pronounced in a Chinese-influenced manner. Evelyn

Huh?

I have to wonder whether it's a good idea to call "Hawaiian English" one of the official languages of Hawai'i, when the State Constitution at http://www.hawaii.gov/lrb/con/conart15.html just calls it English. I think it is reasonable to make the point that it may constitute its own dialect, but until that dialect is named by the state government in its constitution, it's probably unwise to say it's an "official" language. Bugmuncher 03:33, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Absolute NONSENSE

I strongly agree with Bugmuncher. Whoever wrote the line that "Hawaiian English" is an "official" language under "state law" needs to either (1) quote the law, or (2) delete the deliberate deception. (Writing is not accidental; it is deliberate.)

Speaking as a person who holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics, the claim that the alleged mandatory use of okinas and kahakos effectively creates a dialect of American English is absolute NONSENSE. It's equivalent to claiming that ee cummings created a dialect of American English by merely writing in all lowercase.

This article is an embarrasment to Wikipedia. It should be swiftly deleted. Agent X 20:28, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

Instead of putting in a citation needed stamp after every phrase, I think it would be clearer just to put a box at the top. It's a little jarring to read the article with all those stamps and, to be honest, after reading your comments, it sounds like it was done out of spite. Perhaps that was not your intention, but that's how it came out. I'm going to remove the little tags and put one at the top of the article.--Stella luna 16:20, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

First, I did not put a tag "after every phrase". So you have misrepresented what I did. I put the tags at specifically selected points where a supporting citation is needed. It so happens that the article/stub lacks even one citation, and it makes numerous unsupported (false) claims.

Second, it is not "clearer just to put a box at the top", in terms of knowing exactly where supporting citations are needed. The box fails to pinpoint any specific claims, and for that reason, is inferior to the use of specifically placed tags.

As for "spite", that's an irrelevant, subjective perception on your part. Nonsense and false claims should not masquerade as a Wikipedia article, nor stub. Agent X 21:20, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Constitution of the state of Hawaii, Article XV, Section 4

The relevant text is quoted here:

"OFFICIAL LANGUAGES

Section 4. English and Hawaiian shall be the official languages of Hawaii, except that Hawaiian shall be required for public acts and transactions only as provided by law. [Add Const Con 1978 and election Nov 7, 1978]" (italic added for emphasis)

1. As correctly noted above by Bugmuncher, there is NO SUCH THING as "Hawaiian English" in "The Constitution of the State of Hawaii". It is "English", NOT "Hawaiian English", that is an official language of the State of Hawaii. The stub/article makes a FALSE statement and misrepresents the law.

2. Hawaiian language is NEVER REQUIRED in any State of Hawaii activities UNLESS specifically "provided by law". There are NO STATE LAWS requiring the use of Hawaiian language. The stub/article makes another FALSE statement, and again misrepresents the law.

3. The mere optional use of a macron and an opening single quote (so-called `okina), by certain enthusiasts (zealots), does NOT create a "dialect" of English.

4. The claim that use of the two marks is preferred by the majority of Hawaii's people is the DELUSION of an "okina lunatic".

5. The stub/article uses the word "Standard" to describe "Hawaiian English". There is NO SUCH THING as "Standard Hawaiian English". Where are the alleged "standards"? Where are they published? Who has the authority to fabricate such "standards"?

6. The stub/article has NOT ONE reference, and NOT ONE citation. According to Wikipedia:Citing Sources, "any material that is challenged and has no source may be removed by any editor". According to Wikipedia:Verifiability, "The obligation to provide a reputable source lies with the editors wishing to keep the material, not on those seeking to remove it."

Agent X 09:11, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

Citecheck needed for Further Reading section

I checked a few of the resources that were helpfully added to the Further Reading section a few days ago. The ones I was able to find with my university library access were talking about Hawaiian Creole English or a Pidgin dialect, rather than the subject of this article, which supposedly differs in only a few minor ways (accent when speaking and use of native phonic symbols when writing) from standard American English. Because of this, I have removed those citations and will now add them to the appropriate article, where they may be more useful. I suggest that the rest of the Further Reading be checked by those with access to resources I do not have. Andrew Levine 23:27, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia policy and justification for removing content

The policy states:

In accordance with Wikipedia policy, I am challenging and removing content from this stub/article which lacks citations to reputable published sources. Agent X 13:08, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

The following content was removed by me. Agent X 13:15, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

• Hawaiian English is the standard of the English language as used in the U.S. state of Hawaiʻi.

The following content was removed by me. Agent X 13:24, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

• Under Hawaiʻi state law, Hawaiian language words and names (including the name of the state) are represented in full Hawaiian phonics when written in an English context, including the ʻokina and the kahakō in spelling. Otherwise, it is the same as the American English of the continental United States. Hawaiian English is not to be confused with Hawaiian Pidgin, a dialect that developed among multi-ethnic local residents since the 19th century.

• As a written standard, English with Hawaiian phonics is used in all state publications and widely in regional magazines and newspapers. It has a somewhat lesser impact as a spoken language standard, as a portion of Hawaiian residents—particularly those who were not born in, raised in, nor have roots in the islands—speak Hawaiian words and names with a more anglicized pronunciation more common to the continental United States. However, Hawaiian English still has an accent which is noticeably different from that of general American English.

Wrong?

Words ending in "da", for instance the words "brada" or "wada" which mean "brother" and "water" were contributed by the Spanish and the Portuguese; which are actually the only languages that have words ending with "da" at the end of them.

I thought of "soda" and "agenda".. probably many others exist. Can someone clarify?

69.84.125.242 05:17, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

It's a ridiculous claim. I've removed it from the article. --Ptcamn 07:25, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Honda?

It is not a contribution of any Romance languages where nouns are either masculine or feminine. Rather, it is the result of the New England pronunciation where the final R and the R before consonants are absent. Mamoahina (talk) 02:50, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

Original research

At first glance this article appears to be professionally written.  But after taking time to read through more carefully I decided to tag this article as being original research.  My reason for doing so is that, as has been previously cited, the author has made many unreferenced assertions, which makes it difficult for readers and editors to determine if the author's assertions are fact or just the author's opinions.  For example, the author's claim that the "da" endings are derived from Portugues/Spanish is just one case in point.  If the author can't prove that particular assertion with an accurate reference, then that assertion certainly should be deleted — as should any other assertions in the article that the author can't provide "da kine" (an acceptable reference) for.

I'm sure the author was (and is) means well, and has personal experience with Hawaiian pijin. But the bottom line is that criticism has been leveled about the lack of references in the author's assertions, and the author appears not to have done anything at all to correct the problem.  I gather from the discussions on this talk page that AgentX (whoever that is) apparently (and if so, correctly) added the "fact" template tag to several of the author's questionable assertions, which an editor subsequently (and unfortunately) deleted.

Without adequate and appropriate references and footnotes to the author's assertions, I believe this article can be classifed as "original research", and if not corrected within a reasonable period of time, then I think the article certainly should be renominated as an article for deletion.   K. Kellogg-Smith 14:31, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

It needn't be nominated for deletion, just rewritten. --Ptcamn 09:33, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

I have seen Hawaiian Pidgin/Creole cited as a pidgin that has become a creole. It only takes one generation raised with a pidgin as their primary language for a creole to emerge. The lines are fuzzy of course, but I understand Hawaiian Creole has a distinct grammar.  Randall Bart   Talk  20:25, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Deletion of pidgin word articles

No doubt there are/will be more of these. I'm noting this here so that there can be awareness of activity. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 23:34, 24 November 2007 (UTC)