“No subculture’s slang could constitute a separate language. And it turns out that resistance to the misunderstood language helps explain some of the biggest challenges stymieing educational progress in the state. Until then, I didn’t even consider it a language I thought of it as, well, a “pidgin”-“a language that,” according to Merriam Webster, “is formed from a mixture of several languages when speakers of different languages need to talk to each other.” It turns out that “Hawaiian Pidgin English” is a misnomer. It was through this reporting experience-the interviews, the historical research, the observations of classrooms-that I realized how little I understood the language and what it represents. I reported extensively on the disputes over Pidgin and its role in classrooms when I was an education journalist in Hawaii, where I’m from. And it indicates that, elsewhere in the country, the speakers of comparable linguistic systems-from African American Vernacular English, or ebonics, to Chicano English-may even see similar changes one day, too. It reinforces a long, grassroots effort by linguists and cultural practitioners to institutionalize and celebrate the language-to encourage educators to integrate it into their teaching, potentially elevating the achievement of Pidgin-speaking students. It shows that the federal government acknowledges the legitimacy of a tongue widely stigmatized, even among locals who dabble in it, as a crass dialect reserved for the uneducated lower classes and informal settings. The significance of the gesture is symbolic, and it extends far beyond those who are from Hawaii and/or those who speak Hawaiian Pidgin. (Roughly 1,600 of the 327,000 bilingual survey respondents said they speak it, while other sources-albeit imperfect ones-have suggested that as many as half of the state’s population of 1.4 million does.) So why was I reverberating with a sense of, to borrow a Pidgin phrase, chee hu!? ![]() “Oh really?!” the colleague responded, surprised at my excitement.Īfter all, how could a seemingly silly decision to include the local, slang-sounding vernacular on a language survey listing more than 100 other options cause so much delight? It’s not like the five-year American Community Survey gleaned accurate data on how many people in Hawaii actually speak Pidgin at home. ![]() Census Bureau now recognizes Hawaiian Pidgin English as a language. by Peter Stockwell.“You don’t know how happy this makes me,” I wrote a colleague after she casually sent me a link to a recent news story reporting that the U.S. Trask, Language and Linguistics: The Key Concepts, 2nd ed., ed. The result is a creole, and the children who create it are the first native speakers of the creole." (R.L. This happens when the children in a community have nothing but a pidgin to use with other children, in which case the children take the pidgin and turn it into a real language, by fixing and elaborating the grammar and greatly expanding the vocabulary. Third, and most dramatically, it can be turned into a mother tongue. Second, it can remain in use for generations, or even centuries, as has happened with some west African pidgins. This has happened to Hawaiian pidgin, now almost entirely displaced by English, the prestige language of Hawaii. First, it may eventually drop out of use. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |