Da Kine! An Introduction to Hawaii Creole English
Taru Markkula, Fall 2007
FAST-US-1 (TRENPK2) Introduction to American English (Hopkins)
The FAST Area Studies Program
Department of Translation Studies, University of Tampere

Hawaii is an exceptional state because it has two official languages: English and Hawaiian. The thing that makes it even more out of the ordinary is that the majority of local residents use neither of these in their day-to-day activities and conversations (Gordon). This ‘language of the people’ is called Hawaii Creole English, though among the locals it is simply known as 'Pidgin'1.

A pidgin is normally a variety of language that has developed for some practical purpose, for example trading, among people who don’t speak each other’s languages. As such it has no native speakers. A pidgin develops into a creole when the children of pidgin speakers pick it up as their first language. Thus, the major difference is that creoles have large numbers of native speakers. Hawaii Pidgin is described as an English creole because English is the main source of words, the lexifier, in Pidgin (Yule 201—02).

The variety first started evolving in the 18th century when European ships involved in trading with Asia used Hawaii as a stopover on their way. Roughly a hundred years later thousands of laborers were brought from all over the world to work on the rapidly expanding sugarcane industry. A common language was needed for the people from many different nationalities to make themselves understood. At first this common language was Hawaiian, but towards the end of the century the language started to develop. From the 1870s onwards many families started to form on the plantations, and not surprisingly more and more children were born. The children learned their parents’ languages plus English, which was taught at schools. A new mixture of languages started to lift its head when these children interacted with each other on the playground or at school. This ‘mashup’ was influenced by the Pidgin English earlier brought to Hawaii, by the Hawaiian spoken by the locals, and by their own first languages, especially Portuguese. This was the beginning of Hawaii Creole English, which came to be the first language for many children, and which by the 1920s was spoken by the majority of Hawaiians (Hargrove).

Nowadays Pidgin is used everywhere on the Hawaiian Islands and also on some parts of the USA mainland, especially on the west coast, Las Vegas and Orlando, FL. It is estimated to have 600,000 speakers in the state of Hawaii, many of whom speak Standard American English poorly (Gordon).

The people of the Aloha state have very mixed feelings about their Pidgin. Some consider it to be a substantial marker of their cultural identity while others see it as a constant reminder of plantation domination and American English hegemony (Hargrove). Many people also view Pidgin as a ‘lower’ variety in comparison to Standard American English, though attitudes are beginning to change due to vigorous Pro-Pidgin work. The University of Hawaii has a small group of graduate students and faculty members called Da Pidgin Coup who have worked hard to improve the status of Pidgin in the educational world (Da Pidgin)2. Another Pidgin promoter is Lee Tonouchi, who considers himself Da Pidgin Guerrilla, and has become widely known by that name. Tonouchi has published a lot of material written in Pidgin, including a descriptive dictionary called Da Kine Dictionary in 2005 (Pang).

Though English is the lexifier language of Pidgin, the pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar rules between the two languages differ a lot, and Pidgin even has its own spelling system. Here are some of the most distinctive characteristics of Pidgin from those fields of the language3.

Vocabulary

The most common phrase in Pidgin is probably da kine, which is pronounced [dA kain] [WAV] (Extreme, Talk). da kine can be used to refer to almost anything, from people to abstract things, and can truly mean "anything," for example:
Eh, you get any da kine?
Ho, brah, dat's da kine.
She wen da kine foa get da kine foa da kine. (Lowell)

The humorous dictionary Pidgin to Da Max (Simonson) has its definition for da kine, too:

DA KINE (da KINE) Da kine is the keystone of pidgin. You can use it
anywhere, anytime, anyhow. Very convenient. What would we do without
DA KINE? ‘Ey, I no can da kine if you no like da kine, too!’

Loan words and calques are very characteristic of Pidgin. Here are some examples and their origins:

pau -- ‘finished’
akamai -- ’clever’
puka -- ’hole’
okole -- ’buttocks’ (from Hawaiian)

obake -- ‘ghost’
shi-shi -- ‘urinate' (from Japanese)

malasada -- ‘donut’ (from Portuguese)
(Hargrove)

brah,
bruddah,
braddah -- ‘brother’,’friend’
Boddah you? -- ‘Are you disturbed by this?’
bumbye -- ‘by and by', ’eventually’
Like beef? -- ‘Would you like to fight with me?’
Try wait. -- ‘Please wait.’
Howzit? -- ‘How are you?’ (from English)
(Lowell)

Pronunciation

The sounds of Pidgin are very different from those of English. Especially the vowels differ a lot from Standard American English. Pidgin favors ‘pure’ vowels, or monothongs, whereas English often uses diphthongs4.

In words that have originated from English, the voiceless and voiced [th] sounds are often replaced with plain [t] or [d]:

tink -- ‘think’
dis -- ‘this’
dat -- ‘that’

When the letter ‘r’ appears after a vowel it is often omitted or replaced by another vowel:

fo -- ‘for’
paking (pronounced like "pahking") -- 'parking'
sked -- ‘scared’
dia -- ‘dear’
welfea -- ‘welfare'
(Hargrove, Yule 29—39)

Pidgin also has a falling intonation in questions that can be answered ‘yes’ or ‘no’, whereas the same question in Standard American English would have a rising intonation (Hargrove).

Grammar

When Pidgin speakers talk about location, they use the word ste, ‘stay’.

Da kaet ste in da haus. -- ’The cat is in the house.’

Ste can also be used to indicate something that is happening just now, an event in progress.

Da kaet ste it da fish. -- ’The cat is eating the fish.’

The English utterances ‘there is/are’ are expressed with get and ‘there was/were’ are replaced with haed, 'had'.

Get tu mach turis naudeiz. -- ‘There are too many tourists nowadays.’
Haed dis ol grin haus. -- ’There was this old green house.’

Auxiliary verbs are often dropped, and some sentences can be grammatical with no verbs at all.

Mai sista skini. -- ’My sister is skinny.’
Nau yu da hed maen. -- ’Now you are the head man.’

Past tense is commonly indicated by using wen in front of the verb.

Dey wen pein hiz skin. -- ’They painted his skin.’

Pidgin has many ways of making negatives. Here are a few examples:

Mai sista nat skini. -- ’My sister isn’t skinny.’
Jo no kaen plei. -- ’Joe can’t play.’
Nomo kaukau in da haus. -- ’There’s no more food in the house.’

Verbal complements are introduced by fo, ’for’, instead of ‘to’:

Eribadi kam fo si daet haus. -- ’Everybody comes to see that house.’
(Hargrove)

Here are two Pidgin poems that are also great illustrations of the points made earlier (Extreme, Postcards).


Stay Miss'n You

    I been tinking bout you
    Da funny tings you wen say
    Da stuffs dat you like do

    Togettah we had good fun
    Planny time in da sun

    Still yet wen I stay look at da moon
    Make me hope fo see you soon
    © Full on Pidgin 2001

        * * *

No Mo Nahting

    I no like beef
    I no like fight

    No mattah if I wrong
    No mattah if I right

    Sometimes it haard fo say
    Sometimes it haard fo do

    But my life no mo nahting
    If I no mo you!!
    © Full on Pidgin 2001

Notes

  1. Throughout this paper, ‘pidgin’ refers to pidgin languages in general, whereas ‘Pidgin’ (capitalized) refers to Hawaii Creole English.
  2. See their position paper Pidgin and education for further information.
  3. The written forms of these examples may vary depending on the used source.
  4. See, for example, the pronunciation of the word akamai [WAV], ‘clever'.

Works Cited

Further Reading

  • Full On Pidgin by Extreme Hawaii FUN Pidgin Team. A fun site where you can for example learn how to pronounce Pidgin and take a Pidgin proficiency test.

  • Tonouchi, Lee. Da Kine Dictionary. Hawaii: Bess Press, 2005. A descriptive dictionary on Pidgin.

  • Sakoda, Kent, Jeff Siegel. Pidgin Grammar: An Introduction to the Creole Language of Hawai’i. Hawaii: Bess Press, 2003. This is the first Pidgin grammar book that was targeted for the general public.

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Last Updated 22 November 2010