The English Dialect of Hawaii

Abstract

extent justify its nickname pidgin; like pidgin and jargon of most kinds it seeks an extreme simplicity of syntax, and depends more upon the expressiveness of the speaker than upon carefully articulated sentence structure. In saying this, however, we are only saying that the tendencies of colloquial English, ready to hand in the average speech of America, have been pushed almost to their logical extreme in a milieu which provides few informed guardians of careful speech habits. The two predominant characteristics of Island syntax appear to be wholesale confusion of the verbal forms of tense, number, and person, and wholesale omission of particles and other words not absolutely necessary in a sentencewhat may be called, by some extension of meaning, asyndeton.6 It is our impression that the former, though comprising half of the departures from correct English in any American community, is carried to an extreme in Hawaii. And only among the Southern Negroes, apparently, is asyndeton so marked as in the everyday conversation of the youth of Hawaii.7 There is a general confusion of grammatical forms which makes it difficult

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