The development of Hawai‘i Pidgin English

Texts from the early 1800s provide evidence that a pidginized variety of English was used to some extent in Hawai‘i ports, most probably brought by sailors. It was clearly not a stable pidgin, but contained some of the features found in Chinese Pidgin English and the South Seas Jargon of the time which influenced the development of Pacific Pidgin English. Some of these include the use of by and by meaning ‘later’, no as a preverbal negator, plenty used to mean ‘a lot of’, one used as an indefinite article, and been as a past tense marker.

Other features of existing stable pidgins were later brought to Hawai‘i by the early plantation laborers: Chinese Pidgin English by the Chinese, and Pacific Pidgin English (including early forms of Melanesian Pidgin) by the Gilbertese and Melanesian laborers. Texts from this time show a still unstable pidginized form of English with some of the features of these varieties but few of the features found in later Hawai‘i Creole. The more widespread pidgin that developed on the plantations of Hawai‘i was Pidgin Hawaiian.

When the plantation era began, the Hawaiians were still in control of their islands, and their language was dominant. It was the language of government and of education for all non-Euroamerican children, and it naturally became the language used to run the plantations. However, it was a pidginized form of Hawaiian that was used for communication between whites, Chinese and Hawaiians on the plantations. When laborers started coming from Portugal and other countries in the 1870s, Pidgin Hawaiian stabilized and remained as the main plantation language until the 1890s. There is evidence that some Pidgin Hawaiian was still being used early in the 20th century, especially in rural areas.

The shift in dominance from Hawaiian to English began in 1875 when the Reciprocity Treaty with the United States was signed. This allowed free trade and a greater influx of Americans. Also the number of Hawaiians continued to decline and by 1878, the number had decreased to less than 50,000. In the decade from 1878 to 1888, there was a dramatic increase in the number of English-medium schools and a decrease in the number of Hawaiian schools. At the same time, Chinese and Portuguese families began to arrive, whereas previously most of the laborers had been single men. This meant that there was an increased number of children being exposed to English in the now English-medium public schools, including substantial numbers from the first generation of locally born children of immigrants.

During this period, English also began to gradually replace Hawaiian as the language of the plantations, and an English-lexified pidgin began to develop. At this stage, Pidgin Hawaiian was still widely used as well, and this led to many Hawaiian words coming into the English pidgin. By the end of the 19th century, Hawai‘i Pidgin English (HawPE) had stabilized and had become established as a new auxiliary language.

At the beginning of the 20th century, HawPE began to be used more widely for interethnic communication outside the plantations, especially in the mixed urban areas. An important factor was the emergence of large numbers of the first generation of locally born Japanese who came into the public schools and learned HawPE from their classmates. (Another important factor was that most English speaking Euroamerican children continued to go to private schools.) Children also began to acquire HawPE from their school age siblings and use it as a second language in the home. As children grew older, many of them used HawPE more than their mother tongue.