The emergence of Hawai‘i Creole

At the turn of the century, the second generation of locally born Chinese and Portuguese began to appear on the scene. By this time, most parents were bilingual in their traditional language and HawPE, and many used this pidgin as their primary language. So in many cases, parents spoke to their new-born children in the pidgin, rather than in Cantonese or Portuguese, for example. The result was that many of this second generation of immigrants acquired HawPE as their first language.

At the same time, many Hawaiians had intermarried with Chinese and other immigrants and had children. The census of 1910 gave the figures of 26,041 Hawaiians and 12,506 Part-Hawaiians. It is likely that for many of these interethnic marriages, the language of the home was HawPE, so that many of the Part-Hawaiian children also learned the pidgin as their first language.

Since HawPE was now spoken as a first language, it was technically no longer a pidgin language, but rather a creole. So it was at this time that we can say that Hawai‘i Creole began to emerge. Most linguists agree that Hawai‘i Creole was established as a distinct language some time between 1905 and 1920, as more and more second generation locally born Chinese and Portuguese – later joined by larger numbers of second generation locally born Japanese – acquired it as their first language. Some time between 1920 and 1930, the number of locally born children of immigrants grew to equal the number of foreign born, and it can be said that this was the time that Hawai‘i Creole became fully established as the language of the majority of the population of Hawai‘i.