Hawaiʼi Creole

Hawaii Creole is a creole language lexified predominantly by English but also by other languages such as Hawaiian and Japanese. Hawaii Creole is spoken by an estimated 600,000 people in the US state of Hawaiʼi. In the linguistics literature, it is usually called Hawaiʼi (or Hawaiian) Creole English, but its speakers call it "Pidgin". While Hawaii Creole uses many words from Hawaiian and other languages, the majority of its vocabulary comes from English. The phonology and semantics, however are quite different from English. The morphology and syntax of Hawaii Creole, too, are quite distinct from English. In general, like other Creole languages, the amount of bound morphology is less than that of the lexifier language and there are quite different morphosyntactic rules for expressing tense, aspect, modality and negation, as well as for relativisation, complementation and focusing. The situation is complicated by the fact that the majority of speakers of Hawaii Creole also know English, and there is a continuum from heavy varieties furthest from Standard English (the basilect) to light varieties closest to Standard English (the acrolect), with a great deal of variation in between (the mesolects).

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