The language spoken by the laborers at work was still a “pidgin” with many words and expressions coming from the admixing of languages and cultures, but it became increasingly English-language based as time went on. Pidgin Hawaiian died out in the first part of the 20th century, as English supplanted Hawaiian as the language of the new Territory of Hawaiʻi. Thus we call this now extinct form of Hawaiian-language based communication “Pidgin Hawaiian”. The English language of the plantation managers in the late 1800s increasingly influenced the lexical and grammatical choices of the plantation and ranch workers as time went on, but predominantly underlying interpersonal public communication was the Hawaiian language. Along with them came the Japanese, who numbered in the hundreds of thousands by the time immigration for plantation work essentially stopped in the mid-1920s. They were followed later by almost 20,000 Portuguese, many of whom became ranch hands known as “paniolo” (from Spanish Español), machinists, and even ranch and plantation supervisors. Pidgins are used to quickly get meaning across in short transactions and there is no fixed grammar or body of vocabulary thus there are no “native speakers” of a pidgin language by definition.Īs the first waves of foreign plantation laborers were arriving in Hawaiʻi in the mid- to late 1800s, Hawaiian was the predominant language of the country, so the immigrants learned rudimentary Hawaiian and added into it many words and grammar structures from their own various languages in a very “loose” and “ad-hoc” fashion.įirst arrived the Chinese plantation workers by many tens of thousands.

Pidgin languages naturally develop between people who want or need to communicate but who do not share a common language. It’s basic knowledge for any Hawaiian language speaker, and along with this goes the list of Hawaiian words I have made for you in A Glossary of Hawaiian Words in Hawaiian Pidgin English.

The following is a very brief history of how we came to have “Hawaiian Pidgin English” here in Hawaiʻi.