![]() ![]() Census Bureau survey included “Hawaiian Pidgin Creole,” which some linguists cite as a prime example of the brain’s innate capacity for language creation, as one of the 350 languages spoken in U.S. I first learned this in grad school when, after reading a chapter on linguist Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar, I half-jokingly, half-defiantly updated my resume and declared myself a native speaker of Hawaiian Creole and thereby, retroactively, proudly bilingual. ![]() It turns out that, most of the time, I wasn’t speaking “bad” or “pidgin” English, but Hawaiian Creole, a language all its own. As much as my schoolteacher mother tried to impress upon her children the importance of being able to speak “good English,” there I was, the son of two college graduates, the third generation of my family born in Hawai‘i, and, at the age of 11, unsure when I was speaking English and when I wasn’t. It’s a word so common in Hawai‘i that I’d never recognized it as a word, distinct from its meaning (“finished” or “done”), and I’d never seen it written anywhere in any of the English-centric classrooms designed to wash the lo‘i and plantation off of us and make us American. I stared hard at the word, written in Magic Marker on colored cardstock and tacked up on the bulletin board of my mom’s first-grade classroom, until it dawned on my 11-year-old brain that it wasn’t English.
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