Languages tend to have more power than we lend them credit sometimes. This is especially true for colonized areas, such as Hawaii. I had the opportunity to spend about a year in total on the Big Island of Hawaii in a town called Hilo, where I went to the University of Hawaii at Hilo. There I experienced a culture that I had never been in before, and also experience the variety of languages that exist in the area. One of the most prominent languages is Hawaiian Pidgin, a mixture of local languages such as English, Japanese, and Hawaiian [an appositive used after a language in order to better describe it].
The issue that many people who speak this particular language face, however, is that because it is a mixture of languages, largely based in English, it is seen as a more uneducated form of communication. A typical Hawaiian Pidgin phrase, for example, might be something like, "Ho brah, you like go beach, ya?" which simply means "Hey dude, do you want to go to the beach?", a phrase that would be considered "proper English". If a phrase in Hawaiian Pidgin can translate exactly into a "proper English" phrase, then why should it be viewed as less educated in the first place? I assert this challenge: it is viewed this way because the colonizing country, America, is inherently attempting to make it seem less educated simply by bringing their own cultural values to Hawaii and warping the view of this language into debauchery.
For my project, I will bring attention to this issue of colonization inherently devaluing and damaging local languages focusing specifically on colonization's effect on Hawaiian Pidgin. I will delve a bit into the history of the Hawaiian Pidgin language, and utilize the resources I have back in Hawaii--a friend who was born in Hilo but refuses to use Pidgin himself because it is seen as uneducated even by some locals. I hope by utlizing this resource, as well as journal articles and other sources online, I can form an argument for why Pidgin should have this stigma removed from it.
I believe that I incorporated the pattern of the week pretty well into my post. I was able to use it effectively in order to give the reader a better idea of what Hawaiian Pidgin is precisely, and do so in a concise manner.
