With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Jeffrey A. Siegel will conduct a three-year study study of Hawai'i Creole English (HCE). Locally known as "Pidgin," this creole language arose among the multi-ethnic immigrant work force on sugar plantations in Hawai'I, and is currently spoken by approximately 600,000 people. The aims of the project are twofold. The first is to describe the grammatical features of modern HCE as well as linguistic variation, both in its current use and over time. The second aim is to examine the external influences on the development of the language. These include the original languages of the plantation workers (especially Hawaiian, Portuguese, Cantonese and Japanese), as well as those of more recent immigrants to Hawai'i (such as Tagalog and Ilocano). The project will create two computer databases for analysis. The written database will include published literature using the language from the last three decades. The spoken database will include transcriptions of recordings of speakers made by HCE-speaking fieldworkers hired and trained for the project. The sources of spoken data will be of two types: recordings of a wide range of speakers telling stories, and longer recordings of a few members of two different social groups, one in an immigrant community, done over longer periods of time. In addition, follow-up recordings will be made of speakers who were previously recorded by other researchers in 1975 and 1989. This will allow an investigation of the changes that have taken place in the speech of individuals as well as in the language as a whole.
The findings of this project will have both theoretical and practical significance. First, it has been claimed that HCE shows very little influence from other languages and that, rather, it reflects universal linguistic characteristics that are part of human genetic endowment. In fact, HCE is often referred to as evidence of an innate mental faculty for language. Findings from this project will be used to critically examine these claims. Second, like other creole languages, HCE has a continuum of varieties ranging from those most different from the language which provided the bulk of the vocabulary (English, in the case of HCE), to those most similar to it. For decades sociolinguists have been arguing about whether this kind of continuum results from individuals changing their speech in their lifetimes or whether it reflects generational changes in the speech community. This project will examine the longitudinal data (from 1975 to the present) to throw some light on this question. The project will also have practical significance for educational policies. Educators have blamed HCE for poor results in national tests of reading and writing. Special educational programs for HCE speakers have been conducted in the past, attempting to use the students' own language as a bridge to standard English. But a major problem has been the lack of a resource for teachers providing general information about current HCE. This project will produce such a resource, and will also disseminate information through a non-technical web site and teacher workshops.
