I write about Pidgin as a 'native' speaker, and not as a linguist. Even to call oneself a native speaker of Pidgin does not feel exactly right, because Pidgin is, above all, not a native language. It is a local language with strong ties to specific places and groups of people but it can make no claim to purity or authenticity. It is corrupt. It is fragmented. It is make-shift and informal. Hawaiian Pidgin resulted from the living and working conditions of the sugar plantations, which until the last few years dominated the economy of Hawaii. The native population having been nearly decimated by the diseases introduced with Western contact, the plantation owners recruited workers from those countries where labor was plentiful and cheap: China, Japan, Korea, Portugal, the Philippines. Pidgin was the medium of communication both between the American plantation owners and these workers, and between the workers of different ethnic backgrounds. Hawaiian Pidgin derives primarily from English and Hawaiian, with smatterings of words from every ethnic group that made up the plantation work-force.

Perhaps the most fundamental element of Pidgin is rhythm and intonation. This alone makes a Pidgin sentence, though it may be composed entirely of English words, difficult for an outsider to understand. Pronunciation is also different from the original language, for instance, English "the" is pronounced "da," Hawaiian "hemo" is pronounced "hamo." Another major difference from English is the limited use of the verb "to be." Pidgin substitutes "wen," "go," and "stay" to express the states of being, location, and intention expressed in English by the intricate conjugation of the verbs "be" and "have," as in "will have been living". Some examples: "She stay all mad" means 'she is very angry'. Another way of saying this would be to use the Hawaiian word "nuha" for 'angry'. "She go stay her mudda's house" means either ' she will be going to her mother's house soon' or 'she has been at her mother's house for a while,' depending on the context of the conversation. "She wen fin out da numba" means 'she found out the number.' "She go fin out da numba" means 'she will find out the number.' M.G.