U.S. Census Bureau recognizes Pidgin as ‘official’ language

HILO — Pidgin, the local lingua franca that emerged so the many different ethnicities who toiled on sugar plantations could converse with each other, is now recognized as one Hawaii’s official languages by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Fo’ real!

A list in which both Pidgin and Hawaiian Pidgin — known to academic linguists as Hawaii Creole English — are recognized among more than 100 languages in the islands was released earlier this month by the census.

The addition of Pidgin, which has been spoken in Hawaii for more than a century, came as a result of a survey of more than 325,000 bilingual Hawaii residents between 2009 and 2013. It was not explained whether Pidgin and Hawaiian Pidgin are different languages or if those surveyed used differing names for the same language.

Only 1,275 surveyed identified themselves as speakers of Pidgin and 335 as speakers of Hawaiian Pidgin, but those numbers likely will increase in the next census once residents realize Pidgin and Hawaiian Pidgin — are now recognized languages. The two most common non-English languages spoken by those surveyed are both from the Philippines, Tagalog with 56,345 speakers, and Ilocano, with 54,005 speakers. Japanese came in third, with 45,633 speakers. In fourth place was Spanish with 25,490 respondents. Hawaiian was spoken by 18,610 people, making it the fifth most common non-English language in the islands.

Jackie Pualani Johnson, a University of Hawaii at Hilo drama professor whose original stage play “Hilo: Da Musical” contains more than a smattering of Pidgin, said Friday she’s “thrilled beyond belief.”

“When I did ‘Hilo: Da Musical,’ it was clear the Pidgin that I wrote wasn’t necessarily the Pidgin of this generation. And it was neat because some of the young kids in the show said, ‘Hold on. We have to learn anuddah way to speak.’ I suddenly became afraid that we were going to lose the nuances and some of the beautiful music of the language. So learning we’re moving in that proper direction is thrilling to me.”

Johnson said she converses in Pidgin “usually when I’m relaxed and hanging out with family.”

“We went to a Catholic school (St. Joseph’s) where proper English was spoken, but we also use Pidgin for emphasis,” she said. “Even in those situations where it’s expected that you’re speaking proper English it still appears because it gives a whole different timbre to what you’re saying and what you mean.”

Pidgin has often been slighted as a sub-standard form of English. Linguists, including Suzanne Romaine, an affiliate professor of English at UH-Hilo who has studied numerous pidgin and creole languages, are working to dispel that perception.

“It’s spoken by a vibrant community of people as a first language and fulfills all the communicative functions you would expect a language like that to fulfill,” said Romaine, who for 30 years was Merton professor of English language at the University of Oxford in England. “A Yiddish linguist once said a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”

“This is where my take is that the census bureau act is basically meaningless,” she continued. “There’s no army or navy backing Pidgin, but if you compare the situation with, say, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, they’re all very similar to each other. And any linguist looking at it without knowing the political situation would say, ‘Yeah, they’re just dialects of a language, they’re so similar.’ And there’s less difference between Swedish and Norwegian than there is between the heaviest forms of Pidgin and English. So why do we not recognize a language? In the case of Pidgin, it’s a political act.”

Romaine noted the 1978 Hawaii Constitutional Convention, which made Hawaiian a co-official language with English.

“That doesn’t mean that Hawaiian has equal status, even though that’s a far more official act,” she said. “Until last year, you couldn’t even take the driver’s license test in Hawaiian, although you could take it in a number of immigrant languages: Korean, Tongan, Japanese, Chinese and so on. Despite this official recognition, signs are not required to be bilingual. The Legislature, the courts, etc., operate monolingually. So even the so-called ‘official recognition’ doesn’t confer equal rights to Hawaiian.”

Johnson said local authors over the past several decades have published “serious writing that’s in Pidgin (that) just knocks you off your feet.” She said her “favorite short story in the universe” is Darrell H.Y. Lum’s “Primo Doesn’t Take Back Bottles Anymore,” published in Bamboo Ridge, a groundbreaking Hawaii literary journal.

“It oozes with understanding that comes from Pidgin,” she said. “And the very last poignant moment in the story has to do with misspelling a profanity that says everything in the Pidgin language.”

Jeanne Kawelolani Kinney, a Hilo poet who has been published in Bamboo Ridge, said Pidgin contains “all kinds of regional variations” and added, “It’s a cultural thing.”

“There are writers like Lisa Matsumoto and Lois Ann Yamanaka, they’re trying to translate what they hear from people to the page, which is really hard, I think,” she said. “Lee Tonouchi, a Bamboo Ridge writer, has taken that to an extreme. He’s written one book about his dad that’s in total Pidgin. And I think his Pidgin is really accurate, because a lot of it is for emphasis. A lot of Bamboo Ridge Press is about preserving that accurate sound.”

And Hawaii radio has long been a purveyor of Pidgin, with personalities such as Robert “Lucky” Luck, Walter “Waltah” Pacheco and Larry Price dominating the airwaves with the local lingo.

“I remember, as a kid, listening to radio and people saying, ‘They sound too local.’ And I went, ‘Wait a minute.’ And all of that is not true anymore. It’s a desired thing to sound local, to have Pidgin on your radio, to hear it on the streets,” Johnson said.

“This just seems to be the frosting on the cake.”

Email John Burnett at jburnett@hawaiitribune-herald.com.