In Hawaii, immigrants from Japan, the Philippines, Korea, and China all came to work the plantations, but their only option for communication was to create an English pidgin. In Hawaii, as well as in the Caribbean and other places, that language was English. The majority of pidgins tend to mine the vocabulary of the ruling class’s language for words. Basically, pidgins are tools: you have to speak to somebody, but you can’t use either your own language or the other person’s language, so you come up with this basic system to get your point across.
They are not considered full languages, in that they generally have limited and simplified grammar and vocabulary. It’s the last of these that brings us da kine.Ī pidgin, which is not capitalized, is a form of communication that arises when multiple groups of people need to talk with each other, but do not have a language in common, and for whatever reason choose not to, or are not able to, teach each other their native languages. There are several languages co-existing on the Hawaiian islands: Hawaiian, the Polynesian language of the original Hawaiians that’s experienced a renaissance of late English, brought to the archipelago by American imperialism the various languages brought by immigrant workers, including Japanese, Filipino, Portuguese, and Spanish and something which is now called Hawaiian Pidgin. To understand da kine, you first have to understand exactly what language modern Hawaiians speak, which is not nearly as simple as you might think. It may be the most versatile phrase on the planet. Hawaii’s “da kine” is not only an all-purpose noun, capable of standing in for objects, events, and people: it’s also a verb, an adjective, an adverb, and a symbol of Hawaiian people and the unique way they speak. Peggy2012CREATIVELENZ/CC BY 2.0Īfter I wrote about “ jawn,” the all-purpose noun that’s embedded in the culture of Philadelphia, I started getting emails telling me about a similar, and maybe even wilder, term native to a small group of isolated islands nearly 5,000 miles away.
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