Korean pidgin english in hawaii full#

They came from Japan, Korean, the Philippines, China (Canton), and Portugal, and together melded a language which uses a simplified English as its base, but incorporates vocabulary and grammar from all its source languages. Pidgin English was born of necessity, when immigrants started coming (or being brought) in hordes to labor on sugar plantations. While Hawaiian would eventually be somewhat influenced by other immigrant languages (mostly in a barrage of English loanwords for Christian terms) it was mostly spared any large transformations due to the arrival of a new language: Hawaiian Pidgin English! What started as a linguistic mishmash was learned by a second generation as their native language, giving it standardized grammatical structures and turning it into what linguists consider a 'fully-realized Creole,' or, what you might call a 'real' language.Ī post shared by Sara Maria Hasbun (韩梅/사라) on at 8:14pm PST It is born from the diverse tongues of plantation laborers who spoke Japanese, Portuguese, Cantonese, and Korean, mixed with Hawaiian and English. Funnily, to me it sounds a lot like Singaporean English, even though it has a very different linguistic recipe.

This is a different language from Hawaiian, and not quite mutually intelligible with English, but out of all world English creoles, it is supposed to be the one that is the most comprehensible to English speakers. In the Hawaiian language, Hawaiian Creole English is called 'ʻōlelo paʻi ʻai', which literally means 'pounding-taro language'. This makes Hawaiian a serious challenge for non-heritage speakers.

Korean pidgin english in hawaii full#

And to make matters worse, Hawaiians are notorious for their artful speech and literature full of subtleties, puns, and purposeful ambiguities. Grammatically, however, it is hardly a breeze. Phonetically it is very easy for English speakers to learn as we have every sound in our repertoire already, although we’re not accustomed to using glottal stops in the middle of words, as in the word “Hawai’i” itself.

Hawaiian is a beautiful language, with almost no consonant clusters (that means no consonants can be next to each other) except in some borrowed words, and lots of repeating syllables (lulu, kuku, haha). If you have learned any Indonesian or Malay, you’ll recognize a few words here and there, like i’a (ikan in Indonesian, meaning fish) and elima (lima in Indonesian, meaning five). The language that originally came over in canoes (canoes!!!) from the nearest islands (the Marquesas Islands, and later Tahiti) were Austronesian.

The years in which the US, Spain, Russia, Japan, and a few other parties vied for possession of this resource-rich and strategically-placed island were filled with violence, backstabbing, and corruption, and the US doesn’t come out looking very righteous.īut one small upside to Hawaii’s strategic positioning was a linguistic one. Since my husband and I live in Korea, and my parents and sister live in California, this Christmas we decided to convene smack in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, on an American island called Hawaii (or, as the Koreans might call it, the American Jeju 😉 ).īefore our trip I figured I had better bone up on Hawaiian history…we don’t exactly dwell on it in our American history classes, and for good reason.