Hawaiian Pidgin

Not to be confused with Pidgin Hawaiian.
Hawaiian Pidgin
Hawaiʻi Creole English
Native toHawaii (Hawaiʻi), United States
Native speakers
600,000 (2015)[1]
400,000 L2 speakers
English Creole
  • Pacific
    • Hawaiian Pidgin
Language codes
ISO 639-3hwc
Glottologhawa1247
Linguasphere52-ABB-dc
External audio
audio icon There is a video of Hawaiian Pidgin English on this news report HERE

Hawaiian Pidgin (alternately, Hawaiʻi Creole English or HCE, known locally as Pidgin) is an English-based creole language spoken in Hawaiʻi. An estimated 600,000 residents of Hawaiʻi speak Hawaiian Pidgin natively and 400,000 speak it as a second language.[2][3][4][5] Although English and Hawaiian are the two official languages of the state of Hawaiʻi,[6] Hawaiian Pidgin is spoken by many residents of Hawaiʻi in everyday conversation and is often used in advertising targeted toward locals in Hawaiʻi. In the Hawaiian language, it is called ʻōlelo paʻi ʻai – "hard taro language".[7] Hawaiian Pidgin was first recognized as a language by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2015. However, Hawaiian Pidgin is still thought of as lower status than the Hawaiian and English languages.[2]

Despite its name, Hawaiian Pidgin is not a pidgin, but rather a full-fledged, nativized and demographically stable creole language.[8] It did, however, evolve from various real pidgins spoken as common languages between ethnic groups in Hawaiʻi.

Although not completely mutually intelligible with Standard American English, Hawaiian Pidgin retains a high degree of mutual intelligibility with it compared to some other English-based creoles, such as Jamaican Patois, in part due to its relatively recent emergence. Some speakers of Hawaiian Pidgin tend to code switch between or mix the language with standard English. This has led to a distinction between pure "heavy Pidgin" and mixed "light Pidgin".[9]

  1. ^ Hawaiian Pidgin at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
  2. ^ a b Sasaoka, Kyle (2019). "Toward a writing system for Hawaiʻi Creole".
  3. ^ Velupillai, Viveka (2013). "Hawaiʻi Creole". In Michaelis, Susanne Maria (ed.). The Survey of Pidgin and Creole Languages. Vol. 1: English-based and Dutch-based languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 252–261. ISBN 978-0-19-969140-1. OCLC 813856184 – via Google Books partial preview.
  4. ^ "Hawaii Pidgin". Ethnologue. Retrieved 2018-06-25.
  5. ^ Velupillai, Viveka (2013), "Hawaiʻi Creole structure dataset", Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online, Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, retrieved 2021-08-20
  6. ^ "Hawaii State Constitution". Archived from the original on 5 July 2007. Retrieved 2 October 2017.
  7. ^ Pukui, Mary Kawena; Elbert, Samuel H. (1991). New pocket Hawaiian dictionary: with a concise grammar and given names in Hawaiian. Honolulu: University of Hawaii press. ISBN 978-0-8248-1392-5.
  8. ^ "Hawai'i Pidgin". Archived from the original on 9 March 2015. Retrieved 2 October 2017.
  9. ^ Cite error: The named reference :4 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).