Kill Pidgin?

I was amused by a Letter to the the Editor in today's Honolulu Advertiser by Wai`anae writer David Childs.

"For the benefit of Hawai'i children, pidgin should slowly become a thing of the past," Childs says. "And good riddance to a language that harkens back to an era of upper and lower classes in America. There are some things that deserve to die."

I lived in Wai`anae for 11 years, worked among the town's "burger flippers" at McDonalds, joked with the aunties in church, babysat children in my home.

I recall a Samoan woman named Ruby speak about a young lady in our church, Susan, who fell in love and got married. Susan was always beautiful but never worldly in her apppearance. Till she met the man she'd marry.

"And now," Ruby explained, "Susan, she all blossom out."

Efficient, affectionate. The line so easily and gracefully tells the story of how Susan became transformed by her new love. And it opens a window into Ruby's heart.

Ruby is a lovable older woman who always wears a smile and an occasional straw hat. She is forever throwing out clever one-liners - in pidgin, of course. And there is always a sort of tenderness embedded into what she says about others.

Pidgin is a way of life, not simply a textbook language. Pidgin somehow uncloaks its speaker, stripping her of pretension or classism. Speakers intuitively pick up on this, in between words or in the absence of prepositions like "to" or articles like "the" ("Like go beach?").

Pidgin, its music and rythmns, is often the first sound that children hear, even before they know how to put a sentence together. It is what's familiar. It's home.

It's the language of bike rides, basketball games, Fun Factory afternoons, trading marbles. It's a way of creating a pact without it ever feeling like you had made one ("Eh, you bettah call, eh").

Whether it's true or not, Mr. Childs seems like a man who never quite embraced the people in his community. Or else, why would he say such a thing? I wonder if he just sort of hangs out at home and watches CNN all day, never hanging out with the local folk.

I always challenge people to acknowledge who they are, the sounds they knew, the feelings they felt. For many kids, wrapped inside of them is this soft blanket with a whirlwind of pidgin sounds.

"No watch TV till you pau yo homework."

"Tanks, eh, for hanging da laundry."

"We go eat."

Should children learn the English of corporate America? Most definitely, if they wish to excel in school for the sake of climbing a corporate ladder (because we all know it's a wonderful, fantastic, fulfilling, heavenly place to be, complete with waterfalls and such).

But say "good riddance" to this language? There's simply a better way. Instead of restricting pidgin in the home or in school, the language should be acknowledged as a bona fide means of communication. Children should then be taught to translate what they say into standard English. This not only validates what is "home" for the child, but also gives her an opportunity to make connections from one language to another.

Now that's building intelligence. And that's embracing a people.

Comments

What a great post, Ruth.

I've been grappling with similar questions a lot lately. As it turns out, I'm a bit of a hypocrite.

As a writer, an artist, and of course a local, I love pidgin. Few things are better conveyors of the "local voice," even if it doesn't translate to written form very well.

But, well, I strongly discourage the use of pidgin in my daughter, Katie, who's definitely in the middle of the "language and speaking style acquisition phase" of her development. Everything from "no like" to "one, two, tree," to "question phrase, yeah?" It gets corrected. And there's a lot to correct, because her classmates (and her primary instructor until last week) all speak pidgin.

Part of it is, I was required to speak "King's English" (as my parents' generation called it) as a child. Slipping into pidgin almost warranted a dose of bath soap mouthwash. I considered it strict, but on the other hand, I can't help but admit that my grasp of "proper English" has been one of my greatest assets as a student, as an employee, and as a art-minded fellow (if not a real artist).

I can only barely pull pidgin off, and I have to be conversing with someone - I can't do it on demand (much to my wife's dismay). I grew up here and went to public school, but the influence of my parents won out. Ironically, I consider my inability to really break out in pidgin as a weakness.

So I think I want her to know, appreciate, love, and be able to speak pidgin. But ... just not yet. I suppose what I want is for Katie to learn pidgin as a second language. Or maybe fourth, after Hawaiian and French.

I'm no fan of pidgin myself, and I don't speak it at all. But Childs' letter just doesn't sit well with me.

The arguments he lays out -- while nothing we haven't heard before in the pidgin vs. English debate -- are only a few degrees shy of making English the official (read: only) language of the country.

This sentence in particular bothered me:

[P]lantation life was not a good time for the plantation workers and was another ugly chapter in the history of white people. What pride can be taken in that?

Slavery isn't a particularly great chapter either, but why doesn't Childs suggest changing the way black people speak? If phasing out pidgin is such a great idea, why stop with people in Hawaii? Look at all them Mexicans crossing the border -- gotta help them before they start mangling English too.

It's for their own good.

Right.

I'm being too alarmist, aren't I?

I grew up in a household that knew nothing but pidgin. My dad is (was?) among the last generation of plantation workers. He speaks pidgin, and my mom can switch it on and off. I was never punished for speaking that way, but as a product of the expansive religious/private school system, I wound up learning how to speak "properly." But pidgin was and still is something that I do associate with home. Amazingly, I remember that watching a lot of television helped me with my enunciation. So, TV doesn't just rot your brain, it helps you speak better.

Then again, I was always a weird child...

Anyway...I can slip in and out of pidgin easily. I believe it will always be a special part of me, and a huge part of local culture. Childs' letter doesn't sit well with me either. What's more heartwarming than listening to neighborhood aunties talking story with each other in pidgin? I guess if we got rid of that, we'll have to insist on everyone else in America getting rid of their dialects as well. Then there are those foreigners who have accents when they speak English. Gotta teach them to speak properly as well...

As much as I correct my daughter to speak proper English, I still find the love for pidgin. It may be that living on the mainland I'm not immersed in the culture, or language, on a daily basis. When I do hear it, it tears my heart as it makes me miss my family there.

Between this letter and that post about Local Kine Grindz sending a bad message to Hawaii kids, I have never seen so many haughty words of shallow condescension posted on this site.

Speaking as someone who is a non-resident alien - who grew up speaking the King's English and would rather encourage good grammar anyway - this letter refuses to sit well with me. One of the reasons why I decided to become an English major is the fact that it's a living language that evolves wherever it goes, even if it does become pidgin. While I would rather not encourage the use of it in my own household (yes, it also makes me look hypocritical, too - sue me) I cannot deny the cultural aspects of this language; say what you want about class structure and plantation days, but let's not forget that, regardless of who these people were in that class structure, this was the only way that they could communicate to each other. Personally, I think it's more condescending to have an alien language or culture to be inflicted upon a community - "Here is the way we want you to speak; you will not be respected if you aren't" - than to have that culture's dominant language be "subverted" by the people for their own purposes.

When I was in the Philippines, I was forced to speak English by my Filipino-born teachers, who condescendingly referred to my native Tagalog as "the dialect." The way I see it, it wasn't so much the language itself that bothered me but that sense of pretension upon which it was put upon me - if I was going to learn another language, it would serve me better to learn more about the culture behind that language so I wouldn't bastardize it. (This is how I learned Spanish and Bahasa Indonesia, incidentally - if it wasn't for my family being exposed to Hispanic and Malay culture through traveling and constant interaction with native speakers, I would never have had a proficiency in these languages.) I was following conventional wisdom, after all - I thought it would be much more respectful if I were to use both English and Tagalog in their purest forms - but I did not deny myself any slang or mannerisms that I knew I was going to pick up from everyone else, anyway. Ironically, I ended up speaking better English than any of my teachers in that school, not because I eliminated Tagalog from my daily life but because I willingly exposed myself to Western pop culture through literature and television - and when I finally left, I didn't have to take any ESL classes at all.

For an interesting, albeit scientific discussion of pidgin, I would recommend the book "The Third Chimpanzee" by Jared Diamond. The book deals with our very close genetic relationship to the great apes. Much of the book deals with the origin of languages, and how language may or may not separate us from other animals.

He explains how a pidgin language originates. Pidgin is created out of necessity when two or more cultures, with different languages, live side by side and need to communicate. Pidgin, as a way of communicating, is not unique to Hawaii. Any where two or more groups of people with a different language live and work together, a pidgin language, with simplified grammar and words borrowed and created from the different languages, will arise. Over time, the theory goes, pidgin graduates to a more formal language, creole, and then from there, to a new, formally recognized language. It is interesting how he explains the origins of English, French, German, etc from a common ancestor language. The theory is that they all originated from the same primitive language (Latin), started out as pidgins in their own geoograpical locations as Latin mixed with the local language present in that area, advanced onto creoles as time passed, and finally are now recognized as formal, seperate languages. He has several pages that discuss Hawaiian pidgin and its origins from the many different languages that have come together there.

If you believe the linguistic theories he lays out, you would want to embrace and encourage pidgin, as it will someday, hundreds of years from now, evolve into a more formal creole, (maybe it is already there?) and then a new language of its own.

It is sad to think that the original Hawaiian language is dying out, but maybe someday it will be replaced with a new Hawaiian language.

Well, as for me, I'm a product of both public and private schools and a Mainland college.

My parents weren't very strict...my dad and mom could both switch pidgin on and off. I just emulated their "pidgin off" mode. (Yes, I was a weird kid.) I'm like Ryan...standard English comes more naturally to me, and though I can speak pidgin with a credible accent, I have to be in "the mood" and around my pidgin speaking friends.

An anecdote: I recently started a new job in the IT dept. at HMSA, which is corporate Hawaii at its best. When I interviewed, I met two of my senior co-workers. Both are about my age, college-educated, and intelligent. On my first day on the job, my boss took some of us out for lunch. I carpooled over to Bubba Gump's with the two co-workers I told you about, and the pidgin flowed like water (between the two of them, anyway).

Proof positive that (pidgin) > (stupid) or (minimum wage). Put THAT in Mr. Childs' pipe and smoke it.

Patrick: If you believe the linguistic theories he lays out, you would want to embrace and encourage pidgin, as it will someday, hundreds of years from now, evolve into a more formal creole, (maybe it is already there?) and then a new language of its own.

Many scholars already believe that our pidgin is already at creole stage. As for the jump to becoming, say, Neo-Hawaiian, it sounds like a rather big jump to me.

For two languages to be considered separate, they would have to be different enough to be mutually incomprehensible. That usually comes through isolation. Hawaii isn't so isolated anymore. Mass communication can and does reach us within seconds when before it used to take days. Standard American English is a part of our daily lives.

On the flip side, I wonder if mainlanders who saw Lilo and Stitch understood the couple of places where pidgin was spoken. I like to think that they did.

Again, although I'm of the mind that pidgin should live long and prosper, it becoming another language would probably take many hundreds of years, if at all.

KEVIN H: I too doubt that pidgin will ever become a seperate language. (My comments you refer to were meant to be a bit dreamy and sentimental.)

As you state, lack of isolation and mass communication will likely prevent a neo-Hawaiian language from ever being born. Some liguists believe that mass communication and lack of isolation will lead to more and more language extintions and with time there will only be a few distinct languages left throughout the world.

I think it is interesting to know why a pidgin language arises, that pidgin languages have occurred over and over again throughout human history, and they are very natural and necessary. Knowing that history may make one better understand and appreciate pidgin and its integral part in Hawaiian history.

Should pidin pass away? For the sake of history and sentiment and, in my opinion, its beauty, I hope not. I personally envy people who are "bilingual" and can slip back and forth between pidgin and English.

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