PIDGIN WRITAS: If Can Can If No Can No Can

Eh, brah, I've written in pidgin, and I'm not local. Hang out a bit on the Alohaworld Ohana Lanai to get a sense of how it might be written, and I've got a copy of Da Jesus Book if I want another take on things. Probably won't write in Hawaiian pidgin this time around, though. Though you never know; there's at least a slight Samoan influence on some of my characters, they might be from the 'aina. I write science fiction, and my previous project was about Polynesians colonizing space. Somewhere along the way, there was an odd merger between the Hawaiians' pidgin and the Scots' dialect... fit together better than you might think.

I once wen take one class from Lee Tonouchi, da Pidgin Guerilla. I love writing in Pidgin, but I no tink I gon chance 'um dis time around. To boost up yo' word choice, try fo' avoid stereotyping Pidgin; you know, having da misconception dat Pidgin get no mo' gramma, cuz Pidgin get PLANNY gramma. No need have all your charakters stay in Moke Mode, and no need make all da words kapakahi. Can use beeg words, you know. Just let 'um flow, an' you should be okay.

Have fun!

We definitely need more pidgin (rather, HCE) writers! ^_^ It's a viable dialect with a unique grammar and vocabulary, and should be taken more seriously in literature! (Look at me being a linguistics nerd. :p)

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NaNoWriMo 2006: 別の世界に (~18k - Fantasy)
NaNoWriMo 2007: Matu'a (~52k - Fantasy)
NaNoWriMo 2008: The Mountain Trenar (50k - Fantasy)
NaNoWriMo 2008: The Time-Traveller (35k - Young Adult)
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Pidgin English is simply that- people speak ing English from their native tongue. What we have in Hawaii are Japanese, Filipino, Portuguese, and Hawaiians the original sugar can laborers’ voice mouthing a particular dialect that's their sound of English so not all pigeon is the same nor is any one dialect correct. The sound that tickles me most is haole pidgin English, “Brother no act!” Lucky we live Hawaii.

"The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail." William Faulkner

However, as Composr points out, what we mostly hear in Hawaii is an inherited dialect, making it a creole. The original laborers DID speak a pidgin because that was they only way for them to communicate across language barriers, but everyone who speaks what we locally call "pidgin English" is pretty much a descendant speaker. Hawaii Creole English DOES have certain rules and patterns of grammar and usage, which is why it sounds bad when non-speakers try to speak it.

"Hawaii Creole English DOES have certain rules and patterns of grammar and usage, which is why it sounds bad when non-speakers try to speak it."

Anything sounds bad when not authentic. May be Hawaii Creole English, whatever that means, has rules but the free form of pidgin fortunately is liberated from grammatical construction that allows the speaker literary freedoms not enjoined by those tied to linguistic sanitation of ethnic expression. I’m grateful Faulkner didn’t follow your rules. “Tita please”

"The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail." William Faulkner

It is a common misconception that Hawaii Creole English (Pidgin) is not a language but is rather a simpler version of English free of its rules. In face, HCE is a genuine language like English, and has it's own rules that are different from the rules of English.

In linguistics, a "pidgin" refers to a simplified language created when people are in contact who do not share a common language. One language will usually be the lexifier, meaning it contributes most of the vocabulary to the pidgin. Nobody is a native speaker of a pidgin. However, when children of pidgin speakers grow up hearing the pidgin, they may learn it as their native tongue, but they will also change the pidgin, filling it out into a full language. At this point the newly created language is called a "creole."

It has been a long time since "Pidgin" has been a pidgin. For many people in Hawaii, HCE is their native tongue. Because English was the lexifier for HCE, to English speakers it may sound like badly spoken English, or English free of rules, but it is not. Though many of the words may be the same, the grammar of the language is different.

Another misconception here is that rules are bad. This is not so, there are two kinds of rules and they should not be confused. In linguistics, the grammar native speakers of a language use to put words together into coherent sentences is referred to as the "rules" of grammar. They are not invented by the linguist, but are an integral part of the language. An example in English is that the subject comes before the verb, and the object comes after it. So in the sentence "the boy chased the dog" we know that the boy did the chasing and the dog was chased. If you ignored this "rule" of grammar and wrote "the dog chased the boy" the sentence would mean something different. No matter how much you want it to mean the same thing, it does not because this is a real rule of English grammar.

However, there are some "rules" that have been made up by people and taught to us in English class. (This is called prescriptivism.) These are not actual rules of English grammar. Many of these can be found in the Prescriptivist's Handy Handbook of Horrors, also known as "Elements of Style." One example of a false rule is that you must never end a sentence in a preposition. Well, that's exactly what I'm going to end this sentence in. See? There was nothing wrong with that. And another example is to never start a sentence with "and." Or to never split an infinitive.

Although rules like these are false and should be ignored, the true rules of grammar of a language are obeyed naturally by native speakers automatically. Pidgin or HCE has such rules, though they differ from the rules of English. Faulkner had to have obeyed the true rules of English, or his writing would have been incomprehensible. He may have ignored prescriptivism, and good on him if he did.

Gosh that’s a lot to know and seems more troublesome to remember. Thank god for editors that edit what writers write.

"The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail." William Faulkner

I'm gonna write in Pigeon English.

Whoooo, wooo wooooooo.

Wooooo, o-o-o-o-oooooo.

>> It has been a long time since "Pidgin" has been a pidgin. For many people in Hawaii, HCE is their native tongue. Because English was the lexifier for HCE, to English speakers it may sound like badly spoken English, or English free of rules, but it is not. Though many of the words may be the same, the grammar of the language is different.

I think you may be trying to be a little more precise than is really possible here. You put your finger on the problem when you say "For many people in Hawaii, HCE is their native tongue." When you turn this sentence around, it becomes "For many people in Hawaii, HCE is a foreign language." The fact is that these non-natives, who quite often attempt to speak HCE, are in fact speaking a pidgin of a creole, and the grammar of pidgin HCE (Pidgin) is quite often wildly distorted, which is why *native* speakers of HCE can recognise the often well-meaning but unskilled "Pidgin" speakers within a few sentences, sometimes within a few words, as noted in the insightful reference to Haole Pidgin above.

So it's both true and untrue that it's "been a long time since 'Pidgin' has been a pidgin." All our languages are in flux, and "Pidgin" is no different. "Pidgin" is *many* "Pidgins," some of which are true pidgins, all being modified by the younger generations of native speakers from many linguistic and cultural backgrounds, as well as by new generations of non-natives exposed to it, just as Hawaiian English has subtle, and some not so subtle differences from Mainland English, which rise to the level of a separate dialect in some cases, and a regional accent in others, depending on how diligently the speakers are trying to imitate the "standard" Mainland language and/or avoid local vocabulary and habits of speech.

Lucky we live Hawai'i, indeed.

Aloha kakou...

Ho, people actually speak like that? That's just messed up. Then again, all I've been getting since I moved to Florida are things like, "What do you mean Hawaii is made up of mostly Asians?" And then I have to explain why the sugar cane is more historically important to us than the pineapple.

I guess you have to determine what important means. Historically what messed us up is sugar cane and pineapple. Then again it’s qualifying who “us” is as opposed to them. In it’s original context Hawai’i means the land and the people without separation. So in fact Hawai’i can only be made up of Hawai’i. Now I’m sure some one out there with their recent lexicon dictionary of relative words and grammatical construction will have a dissenting opinion but that’s an opinion from them not us.

"The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail." William Faulkner

I think you are using a different definition of the word "pidgin" than the linguistic one, but otherwise what you say is true. Just to clarify, the definition I was using was the same as found in the Oxford English Dictionary: "a language containing lexical and other features from two or more languages, characteristically with simplified grammar and a smaller vocabulary than the languages from which it is derived, used for communication between people not having a common language; a lingua franca."

There may be a colloquial definition of the word that I am unaware of, in which it means "a language as imperfectly spoken by a non-native speaker," which I think is the definition you were using. This is what I would call a "foreign accent."

By that definition, English is a "pidgin." English contains (to the frustration of many generations of English as a Second Language learners) vocabulary and grammar from many sources, is the modern lingua franca of choice for much of the non-English-speaking world, and is robust enough to survive both brutal pruning and aggressive grafting. So "English" from India is enriched with "dacoits" (thieves) and "galis" (a lane used by everyone as a traditional passage from one neighbourhood to the next) but does not lose its "Englishness."

So Hawaiian English is enriched (for almost everyone) by a considerable vocabulary, and some grammar, taken directly from the original Hawaiian language. Almost everyone *knows* that the proper spelling of Hawai'i includes the 'okina, but "Hawaiian" does not, a grammatical mutation mostly inaudible to the non-Hawaiian ear, but which can freely be omitted by fluent speakers of the Hawaiian language, because its presence can be inferred. Wheels within wheels, not to mention kaona, the hidden context that gives every language, but especially Hawaiian, a depth and richness which can only be appreciated by immersion in the source of language, the ongoing interaction of communities and their literatures, whether written or oral.

Putting together a sentence, a paragraph, is not engineering, but art, a fluid process that connects mind to mind in a very literal, and completely non-metaphorical way. There are "rules," but those rules can be broken at will by a skilled artist for any particular purpose. Prescriptivism has a long history in the formal explication of English "grammar" and "syntax," spurred on by those who want English to be Latin, but always collapses beneath the weight of reality.

We all of us move more-or-less smoothly between different registers, different vocabularies, different grammars, depending on context and company. We all of us are artists, at least with words, and can produce the literary equivalents of Picasso's Guernica as easily as Gainsborough's Blue Boy, or Warhol's Campbell's Soup. It depends only on what we want to do, and who* we want to communicate with*.

Aloha kakou,

Liorah
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* sic