Language: Hawaiian Creole English
Language: Hawaiian Creole English
Number of L1 Speakers: 600,000
Classification: Creole, English Based, Pacific
Video overviewing HCE; Video of a woman speaking HCE (not vetted)
Hawaiian Creole English (HCE), often referred to Hawaiian Pidgin English, is a Creole Language spoken in Hawaii. Though colloquially known as Pidgin, the language is not technically a pidgin language. Pidgin languages and creole languages differ in the fact that creoles come from pidgin and that creoles have a set form of grammar whereas pidgins sound like a foreigner with little knowledge of the local language, seemingly grammarless and a very limited vocabulary.
HCE has an entertaining history. As with all creoles, they begin with a pidgin, and the pidgin's themselves begin with 'languageless' environment. In the late 1800's and the early 1900's, sugar plantations in Hawaii began to produce on a wide scale and needed more workers to keep up with the production. Many of the workers came from China, Japan, The Philippines, and Korea. The interesting part is the rate of return to one's home country between 1852 and 1930. The total number of foreigners workers coming into Hawaii at this time tops at nearly 370,100 people with a return rate of Chinese was 38%, Japanese 55%, Korean 16%, and Filipino 36%. This data suggest that over this period, around 199,300 people from these different lands with their different languages stayed in Hawaii. This number crunch excludes the rate of return of Portuguese immigrants, but approximetely 20,000 Portuguese came to work and live in Hawaii around 1913. This brings the number up to nearly 220,000 immigrant workers that stayed.
With many different nationalities coming together to work, there was little time to learn each other's languages. English being the language of work, short sentences with basic English vocab backed by one's individual language were constructed to get meaning across. This was the creation of the Hawaiian pidgin. And over time with many workers claiming home to Hawaii, the many languages that came from abroad and the local languages of English and Hawaiian, eventually the creole was born.
This birth comes about from the children of these workers. It would seem that since more than likely homogeneous couples would come together, this would prevent a creolization to occur. But most of the migrant workers were actually men. This, in a way, would ensured heterogeneous relationships. So with many children coming together, with parents that spoke a similar pidgin but not similar native language, they began to 'invent' grammar and vocabulary, things that lacked in their parents' tongue.
As for the actual production of the language, two aspects stick out the most. One involves pronunciation and the other is grammar. On the pronunciation front, the voiceless and voiced dental fricatives, [θ] and [ð], became the voiceless and voiced alveolar plosives, [t] and [d]. In grammar, the copula 'to be' is omitted from sentences where it is a stative verb. Also, sentences containing the absent copula can be inverted to show emphasis. For example, Da baby cute (or) Cute, da baby would translate as The baby is cute in English, with the noticeable omittion of the word is. Furthermore, if the verb to be is used as a temporary state or location, it is swapped out for the word stay. An example of this would be the HCE sentence Da book stay on top da table, which follows in English as The book is on top of the table.
For a quick read on HCE, check out its Wiki article. For more information on HCE, I suggest reading works by Derek Bickerton.
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