Pidgin Hawaiian
Pidgin Hawaiian Pidgin Hawaiian: ‘Ōlelo pa‘i ‘ai was a pidgin spoken in Hawaii, which draws most of its vocabulary from the Hawaiian language and could have been influenced by other pidgins of the Pacific Ocean region, such as Maritime Polynesian Pidgin. Emerging in the mid-nineteenth century, it was spoken mainly by immigrants to Hawaii, and mostly died out in the early twentieth century, but is still spoken in some communities, especially on the Big Island. Like all pidgins, Pidgin Hawaiian was a fairly rudimentary language, used for immediate communicative purposes by people of diverse language backgrounds, but who were mainly from Southeast Asian countries such as the Philippines and Indonesia. As Hawaiian was the main language of the islands in the nineteenth century, most words came from this Polynesian language, though many others contributed to its formation. In the 1890s and afterwards, the increased spread of English favoured the use of an English-based pidgin instead, which, once nativized as the first language of children, developed into a creole which today is misleadingly called Hawaiian Pidgin. This variety has also been influenced by Pidgin Hawaiian; for example in its use of the grammatical marker pau.
Grammar
Word Order
63.6% of Pidgin Hawaiian studied was in Subject–verb–object [word order|Subject-Verb-Object] word order, 27.3% was in Verb-Subject Object word order, and 7.3% was in Subject-object-verb word order. VSO occurs most often with stative/ neuter statements and non-human subjects.Pidgin Hawaiian uses a possessor-possessum word order. No instance of this order could be found in surviving texts between two full nouns but it could be found in instances in which a proper nouns could be interpreted as the possesor.
| Pidgin Hawaiian | Akoi ma kela lumi Lam See |
| Interlinear Gloss | Akoi LOC DET room Lam see |
| English | Akoi was in Lam See's room |
In 90% of cases the modifying adjective follows the nouns such as in moa wahine eleele" literally meaning "chicken woman black" but translating to "black hen", though in 10% of cases the modifying adjective precedes the noun.