Pidgin Hawaiian

Not to be confused with Hawaiian 'Pidgin', a creole language.

Pidgin Hawaiian was a language spoken in Hawaii, which drew most of its vocabulary from the Hawaiian language. It was spoken mainly by immigrants to Hawaii, and died out in the early twentieth century. 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 East and South-East Asia. 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 favored 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'.