ABSTRACT
Pidgin, also known as Hawai’ian Creole English (HCE), is a language variety spoken on the Hawai’ian Islands. Though spoken, often as a home language, by a large number of Hawai’ian residents of several different ethnic heritages, the acceptability of Pidgin use in formal settings is a point of heated contention. Opinions and tolerances vary greatly even within the community of native Pidgin speakers. As a highly visible member of the Hawai’ian literary landscape, Lee Tonouchi trumpets the battle cry for the Pidgin cause – both figuratively and literally – in da word (2001). The compilation of short stories resists standard language ideology quite literally on a formal level, being written almost entirely in Pidgin instead of the hegemonic, standard variety of General American English (StE). “Pijin wawrz” [Pidgin Wars], the final story of the collection, also resists standard language ideology figuratively on a contextual level by taking the reader to a dystopic future in which Pidgin has been banned and targeted for complete eradication while an underground resistance simultaneously fights to restore linguistic freedom to the islands of Hawai’i. The quote above originates from the resistance leader of this story, the Pidgin Guerilla, through whom Tonouchi is able to articulate the core of his own pro-Pidgin/anti-standardization language ideology. Though Tonouchi takes the notion of exclusion for Pidgin speakers to a hypothetical extreme, he does so to highlight the presence of language trait-focused discrimination , as Lippi-Green terms the phenomenon, which is very much a reality on the Hawai’ian Islands just as it is elsewhere in the postcolonial world, including the continental United States (with varieties and accents associated with African American Vernacular English, Spanglish, Gullah, etc.), Jamaica (Patois), Haiti (Kreyòl), the Philippines (Bislish, Taglish), Singapore (Singlish), and many others (Lippi-Green 166).
