PIDGIN

Pidgin is a beautiful, expressive language. It was originally created so that the immigrants, the Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese and Filipinos as well as the Hawaiians and the Americans could do business. What evolved is a true language. Almost all people who live here weave some pidgin into their daily conversation, education and upbringing notwithstanding. The tourist or newcomer should listen and attempt to understand it, but refrain from speaking it unless very capable of doing so. Here are some examples of the more common pidgin you will hear on Big Island. I have attempted to give you a pronunciation, where necessary and an example of usage.
akamai (ah-kah-MY). Smart, intelligent. Actual Hawaiian word as well. Dat Jimmy Boy plenny akamai. He wen mek one computah. any kine (enee kyne) . Anything. No listen to dat tita, she say any kine, brah. an den (en den). What's up or expression of boredom. An den? Coasteeng, brah, how you? ass why. That is the reason. Grind too much, ass why you come so momona. boddah you? Are you disturbed by this? Darlene wen go foa da beach wid me. Wot?Boddah you? brah. Brother. Eh, brah, get one nuddah beer? brok da mout. Broke the mouth. Absolutely delicious. Ho, Tutu's malasadas so ono, brok da mout. bruddah, braddah. See brah. buggah. A chap, fellow. Ho, lolo dat buggah, Junior. bumbye. By and by, eventually. Eh! You get dirty lickins bumbye you no stop dat! choke. A vast amount. Ho, get choke mangoes dis yeah, brah! cockaroach. To steal. Eh, who wen cockaroach all da manapua? da kine. The kind. The ultimate pidgin phrase. Can mean virtually anything. 1)Eh, you get any da kine? 2)Ho, brah, dat's da kine. 3) She wen da kine foa get da kine foa da kine. da cute. Oh how precious! Did you see Pua's new keiki? Da cute! foa. For, used in place of "to". Easy foa say, hahd foa do. geev 'um. Give them. Go for it. Ho, look at Waltuh Boy on dat beeg wave. Eh, geev 'um,brah! grind. To eat. So what you like grind? We no moa da kine. No worries, brah, I grind any kine.

hana hou. Once more, again. Chee, LaVerne, do dat hana hou! haole (HOW-lay). Person of Anglo persuasion. Another actual Hawaiian word.Can be explanatory or insulting. 1)My mom guys all haole, but my dad guys Hawaiian. 2) @#$*@haole! hapai (ha-PIE). With child. Charlene wen come hapai, ass why she no moa surfing. howzit? How are you? Eh, howzit, brah. You get any da kine? kay den. All right. Kay den, I no show you mine. like beef? Would you like to fight with me? Not a choice of entrees. Eh, haole boy, youlike beef? Kay den. lolo. The antithesis of akamai. Not smart. Dat Junior, he so lolo he wen call Dwayne one mahu an he wen crack him. Now Junior stay all bus up. mahu. A homosexual. See above. moke (rhymes with coke). A very big, very local Hawaiian. See Dwayne in definition of lolo. momona (mo-MO-nah). Actual Hawaiian word, meaning obese or ripe. In pidgin it always means fat. I thought Charlene stay momona, but she come hapai no can. Unable to. I like foa go, but no can. no moa. Completely out of, no more, none. Chee, we get no moa da kine. Bummahs. one. Used in place of "a". Eh, can get one ride foa da beach, brah? ono (OH-no). Actual Hawaiian word, meaning delicious. In pidgin can also mean several other things. Ho, Junior, look at dat Charlene. She so ono, yeah? pau (pow). Actual Hawaiian word, used constantly, meaning finished or done. Chee, I thought you pau already! pau hana (pow HAH-nah). Another actual Hawaiian phrase. Means after work. Also after work drink. Junior wen bus up his truck. Get too many pau hana. slippah (SLEE-pah). Thong, slipper. Chee, I wen bus my newslippah in dat puka. stink eye. Dirty look. Ho, brah, Pua wen spok me in da cah wid Charlene an geev me stink eye. tita (TIT-ah). Usually large, always tough, very local female version of moke. Eh, brah, nevah mess wid dat tita, she go'n bus you up. try. Please. Try wait, eh? I come back bumbye. Get plenny customahs. For further elucidation and erudition the inquisitorial and analytical reader may peruse the following outstanding websites. Also highly recommended are all the Pidgen to the Max books from Peppo.

Common traits among pidgins

Since a pidgin develops as an immediate means of communication, its grammar tends to be straightforward, apparently reflecting 'default' or more common patterns found in the world's languages:
y y y y y y y

A default subject-verb-object word order; Uncomplicated clause structure (e.g., no embedded clauses, etc.); Few or no syllables closed by final consonants (e.g. English tin); Basic vowels, such as /a/ /i/ /u/ /e/ and /o/; No tones, as are common in West African and East Asian languages; Separate words to indicate tense, usually preceding the verb; Words may be reduplicated to represent plurals, superlatives, and other parts of speech that represent the concept being increased;

A lack of morphophonemic variation, e.g. word endings are uncommon and rarely appear in multiple forms, such as /z/, /s/ and / z/ for the English plural -s.

Pidgin creation
A pidgin is a language that is created through a contact situation - typically, users employ words, or wordlike units, from one or more languages they have some knowledge of, underlain by some of the grammar of their own native languages as well as novel rules that arise through the processes of language acquisition. As the goal is basic communication rather than the acquisition of a new language, the result is a rudimentary language with fewer 'rules' than others - there are fewer sentence types, for instance, so expressing certain complex ideas may be difficult. The pidgin is fine -tuned to the immediate needs of the speakers, who may primarily use it for bartering, friendly introductions, or some other specific purpose. It therefore has no immediate need to be elaborated unless it proves useful for the speech community to develop an extended pidgin, used for more purposes and with increasingly rigid rules. In a minority of cases, extending a pidgin may lead to creolisation.

pidgin, originally, a language that typically developed out of sporadic and limited contacts between Europeans and non-Europeans in locations other than Europe from the 16th through the early 19th century and often in association with activities such as trade, plantation agriculture, and mining. Typical pidgins function as lingua francas, or means for intergroup communication, but not as vernaculars, which are usually defined as language varieties used for ordinary interactions that occur outside a business context. Pidgins have no native speakers, as the populations that use them during occasional trade contacts maintain their own vernaculars for intragroup communication. The communicative functions and circumstances of pidgin development account for the variable degree of normalization within their often reduced systems. Among other things, they often lack inflections on verbs and nouns, true articles and other function words (such as conjunctions), and complex sentences. They have thus been characterized from time to time as broken languages and even as chaotic, or apparently withoutcommunal conventions.

Nevertheless, several pidgins have survived for generations, a characteristic that indicates a fairly stable system. Some of the pidgins that have survived for several generations are also spoken as vernaculars by some of their users, including Nigerian Pidgin, Cameroon Pidgin, Tok Pisin (Papua New Guinea), and Bislama (Vanuatu), all of which are based on a predominantly English vocabulary. Such vernaculars have developed systems as complex as those of relatedcreoles and are called expanded pidgins. However, some linguists who assume that creoles are erstwhile pidgins that were nativized and expanded by children tend to lump both kinds of vernaculars as creoles. A more plausible explanation for the distinction is the fact that in their histories pidgins have not been associated with populations that consider themselves to be ethnically Creole. Some scholars of creole languages think that Lingua Franca, the variety that developed during the Middle Ages out of the contact between Romance languages and Arabic and other Levantine languages, was a pidgin. If this extension of the term pidgin is justified, then many other such contact varieties must have developed during the course of human history. Like creole, the term pidgin has been extended to language varieties that developed out of contacts between indigenous groups for instance, Chinook Jargon (U.S. and Canada), Delaware Pidgin (U.S.), and Hiri Motu (Papua New Guinea). As is evident from the name of the first of these examples, the term pidgin has also alternated with jargon in common speech despite the scholarly stipulation that a jargon is developmentally an unstable pre-pidgin. This interpretation is consistent with what scholars have crystallized as the pidgin-creole life cycle, according to which a contact situation produces a jargon, which may die or develop into a pidgin, which in turn may die, remain as such, or develop into an expanded pidgin, which likewise may die, remain as such, or develop into a creole. Accordingly, some linguists posit that a creole may remain as such or decreolize (i.e., lose its creole features) as it assimilates to its lexifier (the language from which it inherited most of its vocabulary) if both are spoken in the same polity. Until the end of the 19th century, there was no developmental or technical correlation between creoles and pidgins. The term pidgin was first recorded in English in 1807, as English was adopted as the business and trade language of Canton (Guangzhou), China. At the time, the term business English was often written as pigeon English, a spelling that reflects the local pronunciation. Though the term business has been accepted as the etymon, pidgin may also have evolved from the Cantonese phrase bei chin pay money or from a convergence of both terms. The communication necessitated to effect trade between the English and the Cantonese led to the development of Chinese Pidgin English. As trade spread, there proved to be too few interpreters among the local Cantonese traders and their European counterparts. Many local traders applied what little English they had learned from their sporadic contacts with morefluent speakers. This caused the business English spoken in Canton to diverge increasingly from more-standard English varieties. Since the late 19th century, linguists have extended the term pidgin to other language varieties that emerged under similar contact conditions. Pidgin was subsequently indigenized in several languages, as with pisin in Tok Pisin. However, European businessmen actually used other, and often derogatory, lay terms for such varieties, including

jargon, baragouin, and patois, because the new varieties were not intelligible to native speakers of their lexifiers. This explains why pidgins have often been characterized derisively by lay people as broken languages. Several creolists have argued that creoles, or at least those of the Atlantic and Indian oceans, started without antecedent pidgins. For instance, according to the French creolist Robert Chaudenson, plantation communities were preceded by homesteads on which approximations of the colonial varieties of European languages, rather than pidgins, were spoken bymasters, servants, and slaves alike. As foreign settlements in the tropics evolved into plantation colonies, their populations grew more by importation than by birth, and model speakers for the newcomers consisted more and more of seasoned slaves that is, nonnative speakers who had arrived earlier and acclimated to the region and therefore spoke some approximations of the local colonial varieties of relevant European languages. This practice caused the colonial European varieties to diverge more and more from their original lexifiers until they eventually became identified as creole languages. The divergence was thus gradual from closer approximations of the lexifier to varieties more and more different, an evolutionary process identified as basilectalization (basilect being the variety that is the most divergent from the European lexifier).