Thoughts on pidgin from a hapa haole.

My Hawaiian Studies class frequently sends me home in a state of deep thought. It's perplexing only because I solely expect to learn about the pacific islands, and yet, I spend hours musing on questions like, "what is your culture?" It's pertinent, and yet, vastly more intriguing than I anticipated.

Today we watched a film on pidgin English and before we left, our professor said, "Think about pidgin." Now, this almost seems like a last ditch phrase to encourage your students to study, but I found myself actually thinking about pidgin while I walked back to my car. While I drove home. While I ate dinner. Did you know that in 1920, the Hawaii school system became segregated? Not by race, but by language. Standard American English speakers went to good schools and those who spoke pidgin didn't. You think my grandma passed that oral exam? Do you think yours did?

And so the school system nipped pidgin in the bud, making it a lesser form of speaking. What, you don't have that stigma? Without being told directly, I grew up believing that pidgin speakers were associated with the lesser educated when really, pidgin is our culture. It's the dying spawn of a conglomeration of plantation workers, inventing a language through input and effort in order to communicate across barriers. My great and great great grandparents helped to found pidgin! My grandma carried it with her everywhere she went and I... well, I helped to kill it. I wanted to be distinctly different from the pidgin speaking kids at school, I wanted to be associated with words like "educated" and "proper" so I enunciated from the day I could speak. I conjugated properly and kept my tenses right, and pidgin, why, that creole never had a chance with me.

But without pidgin, we'd be that much closer to losing what's left of the identity of Hawaii. And though I travel and often find myself on the turf of others, these islands are still my home. No matter where I go in the world, no matter what I see, I always have the inherent belief that Hawaii is the most unique of them all. But filter out our language, make it pure and white, and you'll have nothing more particular than what you find on the rest of the US. The native Hawaiian culture has already taken a blow from tourism, don't let pidgin go aloha print too.