Article

Shifting language ideologies and the perceptions of Hawai'i Creole among educators at the university level in Hawai'i

Authors:
To read the full-text of this research, you can request a copy directly from the authors.

No full-text available

Request Full-text Paper PDF

To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.

... Some attitudes about Pidgin in education have become more positive (Higgins, 2021;Lockwood & Saft, 2016). Faculty at the University of Hawai'i-Hilo identified Pidgin as a language and were supportive of its use at the University and in society (Lockwood & Saft, 2016). ...
... Some attitudes about Pidgin in education have become more positive (Higgins, 2021;Lockwood & Saft, 2016). Faculty at the University of Hawai'i-Hilo identified Pidgin as a language and were supportive of its use at the University and in society (Lockwood & Saft, 2016). In 2017, a conference focused on Pidgin in education drew 200 attendees (Higgins, 2021). ...
... Individuals may mistakenly identify Pidgin as sloppy English because of shared vocabulary; however, Pidgin's grammar is distinct from that of English. The positioning of Pidgin as less valuable than English is similar to the lower status of other languages that share vocabulary and characteristics with English, such as Jamaican Creole and African American Vernacular English (Lockwood & Saft, 2016). ...
Article
Full-text available
Hawaiʻi Creole, known as “Pidgin,” developed when speakers of various languages came to the islands as plantation workers and their children grew up speaking Pidgin. Discrimination toward Pidgin influenced language policies that marginalized Pidgin and its speakers. This study focused on four teachers’ perspectives of Pidgin and its marginalization and use in classrooms. The educators were engaged in professional development on small group discussion. Data sources included transcripts of discussions about Pidgin and its use in the classroom, teachers’ written reflections, and comments on each other’s reflections. Results indicated that the teachers observed the perpetuation of negative views about Pidgin. One teacher recounted that she initially appropriated these negative ideas, but changed her views while in college. Although some were initially unsure about Pidgin’s role in their classrooms, by the end of the professional development they appeared to have positive views about promoting all of their students’ linguistic repertoires.
... This thesis views the withstanding usage of these non-native variants as an act of Local expression, and one of many conscious methods used by speakers to distinguish themselves from non-Locals. Furthermore, by recognizing the (non-)native status of these sounds, HC loanword phonology can be more accurately assessed when considering the sociolinguistic foreground in which their speakers must (or must not) accommodate to (for must, see Tamura 1996;Sato 1989Sato , 1991 for must not, see Romaine 1999;Furukawa 2017;Lockwood and Saft 2016). ...
... Cayetano referred to HC as a "tremendous handicap" (Wong 2013, March 2]) and questioned the belief that allowing [P]idgin in schools would be beneficial for the students (Dunford 1999, November 28) (Saft et al. 2018: 417-418). His comments confirm Wong's (1999b: 220) belief that Pidgin speakers are the ones who tend to be the most ruthless toward other Pidgin speakers (Lockwood and Saft 2016). Considering the background given above, it is clear that from the public sector to casual social situations, HC speakers face discrimination and social disadvantages due to the language's attribution to poor education, as well as the negative stigma which ties HC to ethnicity and social class. ...
... However, within informal domains of the Local community, the exact opposite can be said to be true (Sato 1991(Sato , 1989Furukawa 2017). In fact, attitudes regarding HC are currently shifting in a positive way even outside of domains where their speakers are expected to speak "good" English (see Saft et al. 2018;Lockwood and Saft 2016;Romaine 1994). This mirrors the shift in social perception regarding Hawaiian, whose usage in educational and government facilities was once banned for 80 years (Nordstrom 2015;Trask 1993;Lucas 2000;Romaine 1994: 531) and is currently the subject of renormalization and revitalization through the promotion of Hawaiian immersion schools (Warner 1999;2001, in Ohara 2018Ohara and Slevin 2019), and the Japanese language, which faced a sudden drop in speakership due to Japanese language school closures following the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor (Masuyama 2002). ...
Thesis
Full-text available
Hawai‘i Creole exhibits a wide range of loanwords whose pronunciations vary from speaker to speaker. While recent research pertaining to its phonology is limited, previous sociolinguistic studies on Hawai‘i Creole reveal that speakers’ preservation of linguistic features non-standard to English stems from their desire to uphold their Local identity. Through the auditory analyses of the data collected from four speakers of diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, as well as considering the sociolinguistic context of Hawai‘i, this study explores the phonological variation found in Japanese-derived and Hawaiian-derived loanwords. While informants demonstrated imported sound structure pronunciation derived from and associated with their respective substrates (e.g., /r/ in Japanese karaoke as ka[ɾ]aoke, /#ts/ in Japanese tsukemono as [ts]ukemono, and /ʔ/ in Hawaiian ali‘i as ali[ʔ]i), their adapted counterparts derived from and associated with the superstate were also considered acceptable (e.g., ka[ɹ]aoke, [s]ukemono, and ali[⌀]i). The pronunciation of [ʔ] in Hawaiian loanwords is viewed as the activation of “dormant” phoneme /ʔ/, as it has no phonetic equivalent in the lexifier of Hawai‘i Creole, English. In addition, this thesis describes two cases of variation not yet thoroughly explored in previous works: /fu/ found in Japanese loanwords (e.g., [ɸu]ton vs. [fu]ton) and /w/ found in Hawaiian loanwords (e.g., Ha[w]ai‘i vs. Ha[v]ai‘i). While certain Hawaiian loanwords containing /w/ appear to retain the feature of free variation from the source language (e.g., Ha[w~v]ai‘i, described in this thesis as /W/), others appear to have adapted, split, and become lexically bound to either /w/ [w] (e.g., [w]ahine) or /v/ [v] (e.g., [v]ana). Furthermore, it is argued in this thesis that even though their relatively high rates of pronunciation indicate speakers’ attention and reverence to the source languages, imported sound structures cannot be considered native to the phonological system of Hawai‘i Creole but rather a result of conscious sociolinguistic expression demonstrated by speakers.
... There is a general education requirement that students take one course in a category designated as "Hawai'i Pan-Pacific," and there are Hawaiian languages that count toward the satisfaction of this requirement. However, the majority of courses in this category are taught through English (see discussion in Lockwood & Saft, 2016). ...
... The latest statistics shows that 74 percent of the student body comes from Hawaiʻi, all of whom have certainly been exposed to Pidgin and many undoubtedly have grown up speaking the language. 4 Yet, Pidgin receives no mention in the educational 4 Statistics taken from http://www.hawaii.edu/campuses/hilo/. 7 Linguistics as a Resource for Social Justice curriculum and is, according to interview research conducted by Lockwood and Saft (2016), considered by some to be a controversial topic at the university. Lockwood and Saft (2016) conducted interviews with 18 faculty members representing 10 different majors and found that 8 of the interviewees asked to remain anonymous because of "the sensitive nature of the topic in Hawaiʻi" and because of "concerns that positive views toward HC [Hawaiʻi Creole] might be seen as going against university policy" (Lockwood & Saft, 2016: 5-6). ...
... 4 Yet, Pidgin receives no mention in the educational 4 Statistics taken from http://www.hawaii.edu/campuses/hilo/. 7 Linguistics as a Resource for Social Justice curriculum and is, according to interview research conducted by Lockwood and Saft (2016), considered by some to be a controversial topic at the university. Lockwood and Saft (2016) conducted interviews with 18 faculty members representing 10 different majors and found that 8 of the interviewees asked to remain anonymous because of "the sensitive nature of the topic in Hawaiʻi" and because of "concerns that positive views toward HC [Hawaiʻi Creole] might be seen as going against university policy" (Lockwood & Saft, 2016: 5-6). ...
Chapter
Following prior advocates of a linguistics for social justice, this chapter provides explanation of how an academic program in linguistics is attempting to work for linguistic justice in Hawaiʻi. More specifically, the chapter describes the Linguistics program at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo and its inclusion within the College of Hawaiian Language as a resource for supporting and promoting indigenous and minority languages. Discussion focuses on linguistics at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and also situates the work of the Linguistics program within the meso-level language policy of the College of Hawaiian Language and the greater English-focused language policy of the university.
... As with AAL, the use of Creole languages is often socially stigmatized across the global Black Diaspora ( Gibson, 2011 ;Nero, 2018 ;Perry, 2020 ) and in the lives of Black migrants to the U.S. ( Smith, 2020 ;Smith & Warrican, 2021 ). Insights into how U.S. faculty are systematically combatting the stigmatization of AAL may prove useful for educators in other national and linguistic contexts, as college educators can arguably play an important role in (re)shaping students' language attitudes and helping them unlearn societal stigmas ( Lockwood & Saft, 2016 ). Thus, we argue that systemic change can be accelerated by bringing together the diverse disciplinary communities that are doing the work of teaching college students about AAL. ...
... We used multivariate regression to examine how instructors' knowledge and confidence for teaching about African American Language and Culture, and their students' responses to such teaching, varied as a function of several demographic and contextual variables. These included disciplinary context (i.e., Linguistics, Education, English, other) because possible differences in AAL instruction across disciplines were of interest to us from a theoretical and practical standpoint; sources of support for AAL teaching (i.e., colleagues within one's own institution, colleagues from outside one's institution, professional organizations), because the relative influence of these supports were of interest to us from a theoretical and practical standpoint; tenure status, because we were interested in knowing whether early-career scholars or untenured faculty experience different supports or challenges compared with tenured faculty; gendered identities, because college students sometimes respond to instructors in gender-biased ways ( Aragón et al., 2023 ;Fan et al., 2019 ) and we wanted to explore whether such patterns are apparent in the specific case of student responses to AAL instruction; instructor racialized identities, because the racialized identities of speakers and listeners can inform conversations about race and racism ( Mizock & Harkins, 2012 ) and because Weldon (2012) found that students' reported responses to AAL instruction varied with instructors' racialized identities; and two dimensions of instructor language background (i.e., whether or not instructors have ever interacted regularly with AAL users and whether or not they considered themselves to be AAL users), because instructors' language backgrounds may inform the ways they think about, teach about, or even use stigmatized varieties in their classrooms ( Greene, 2021 ;Lockwood & Saft, 2016 ). ...
Article
Full-text available
College courses are an important forum for combating the stigmatization of African American Language (AAL). However, there is no comprehensive data regarding where, how, and by whom AAL content is taught. Understanding the landscape of college teaching about AAL could help identify challenges faced by instructors who teach this content, as well as policies or practices that could help support these instructors. We surveyed college instructors (N = 149) in multiple disciplines (primarily Linguistics, Education , English, and Communication Sciences) who teach courses with AAL content. We found patterns in the sources of support and levels of resistance instructors reported. Instructors also expressed varied levels of knowledge and confidence related to teaching about African American Language and Culture. Many of these patterns were correlated with instructors' racialized identities and language backgrounds. We discuss implications for professional organizations, university department leaders, and instructors who teach AAL content.
... The timing of the development of Pidgin corresponded with the increase of white Americans from the mainland who were not wealthy and thus were not able to afford to send their children to private schools "which had for eighty or ninety years been providing education in English for the children of missionaries and of aristocratic Hawaiians" (Aspinwall, 1960: 7; also see Higgins, 2010). The children from the mainland United States spoke English, and the fact that these children had to attend public schools with children who spoke Pidgin was immediately deemed a "problem" (Aspinwall, 1960;Higgins, 2010;Lockwood & Saft, 2016). As Tamura (1994: 199) reports, a 1920 federal survey indicated that "only 2 to 3 percent of all students entering Hawaiʻi public school at ages six and seven, about one-third to one-half of whom were Japanese, spoke Standard English." ...
Chapter
This chapter elucidates the sociolinguistic history of the Hawaiian Islands since the 1700s with a focus on two basic processes, colonialism and resistance. Treating both colonialism and resistance as complex, multilayered processes, the discussion considers phenomena such as American colonialism, Asian settler colonialism, Native Hawaiian resistance, and resistance by the immigrant groups and emphasizes how these different forces have resulted in a linguistic landscape that is simultaneously marked by an adherence to an English monolingual mindset and by increasing attempts to preserve and promote multilingualism.
... Generally speaking, Creolophones' attitudes toward Creole languages are diverse, and at times, contradictory. Lieberman (1975), Lockwood and Saft (2016) and Aulette (2009) have shown that Creolophones have positive attitudes toward their Creole languages; however, there is also some research indicating that Creolophones have ambivalent attitudes toward their native language (e. g. Jeannot-Fourcaud, 2013;Oakes, 2013;Owodally & Unjore, 2013) and that those attitudes may change over time (see e.g., Beckford-Wassink, 1999;DeGraff & Stump, 2018;Devonish & Carpenter, 2020;Rickford & Traugott, 1985). ...
Article
This targeted, qualitative study examines language attitudes, educational language policy, and literacy in an underrepresented segment of Haiti’s multilingual society. Drawing on decolonizing theory, we take a critical stance, arguing that colonial language ideologies that privilege French and disempower Kreyòl are reproduced in the marginalization of Kreyòl in Haitian schools, which results in low literacy levels and exacerbates postcolonial power dynamics and socioeconomic inequalities. Most Haitians are monolingual speakers of Kreyòl, but most schooling is conducted in French, a language spoken only by an elite minority. Previous studies on Creolophones’ language attitudes have not focused on beliefs about community language use and have excluded the voices of Haitians who are non-urban and who have basic literacy or are illiterate. This study is an important first step in addressing this gap. Thirteen participant interviews were analyzed using content analysis. Findings revealed a complex set of attitudes and orientations toward Kreyòl, French, and educational language policy, with participants at times resisting and at times aligning with colonial ideologies. Overall, the majority displayed positive language attitudes toward Kreyòl as a language of cultural identity, and believed Kreyòl should be used for literacy education. Preliminary implications for language policy and future research are discussed.
... Since the 1980s, Pidgin has been featured in local literature, plays, comedy, the linguistic landscape, radio shows, and in public speeches by politicians (Furukawa, 2018;Higgins, 2015;Saft, 2019). There is evidence that the public is increasingly aware that Pidgin is not simply 'broken English,' and that Pidgin speakers have rights to use their language in a number of sociolinguistic domains, including those governed by the nation-state, such as education (Higgins, Nettell, Furukawa, & Sakoda, 2012;Lockwood & Saft, 2016). While English remains dominant in these realms, the use of Pidgin is frequently used in advertising to connect to local audiences and customers through an authentic voice (Hiramoto, 2011). ...
Article
This study considers whether localized language training for call centers can fruitfully challenge the homogenizing principles of call center practices by examining a training program that aimed to familiarize offshore call center workers with Pidgin, the creole language that is widely spoken in Hawaiʻi. Call center agents in Dominica were familiarized with key aspects of Pidgin relevant to call center work, including the expression of empathy in response to customer complaints. The analysis focuses on how we drew awareness to the pragmatics of Pidgin empathy through Pidgin contextualization cues in scenarios we devised. We then examine how the call center agents displayed their awareness of these cues in role plays. The agents readily demonstrated their understandings in talk about pragmatic differences during our instruction, but the role play interactions revealed the limits of their ability to deploy similar locally appropriate pragmatics due to the homogenizing confines of call center business practices. Dis pepah try see local kine training for call centah can mek stuff bettah, cuz the way big company stay like make all da call centah same kine. We go look one training program we wen make for teach people no live Hawaiʻi about Pidgin. Call centah workah in Dominica wen learn abaut Pidgin stuff can use you work call centah, like how for show feeling wen customah call for make huhu. Da analysis tawk about how we wen get dem fo look how local people show feeling using small kine stuff. Den we stay tawk how da call center people wen show deir manaʻo of dis small kine stuff wen dey make pretend fo be customah and call centah workah. Da call centah people wen quick show they akamai abaut dis wen dey wen tawk abaut how people ack diffrent but wen dey waz make pretend dey no can make same like Hawaiʻi people cuz da way all da call centah like mek everbady all same.
... This practice is still utilized often today, when officials of the Department of Education are directly questioned about Pidgin in the classroom resulting in simple statements that Standard English is the language of the classroom. In contrast to this, recent research has shown that among university educators in Hawaiʻi, feelings towards Pidgin are more of a mixture of positive and negative (Lockwood and Saft, 2016). Despite this, a large segment of Hawaiʻi's population still insists that Pidgin is to blame for many of the failures of the educational system. ...
Article
Hawaiʻi Creole or Pidgin is a highly stigmatized language variety spoken by half a million people in the state of Hawaiʻi. The residents of Hawaiʻi and speakers of this language often view it with a complex mixture of both hate and love. Previous discursive approaches to this topic have often focused on the strategic, pragmatic uses of the language for constructing identities and ideologies however the complex and often contradictory nature of Pidgin speakers’ beliefs and attitudes towards their language is often missing from these analyses. In this article, the ideologies of Pidgin are examined through analyzing the comedic skits of Rap Reiplinger, a local comedian whose work still enjoys great popularity over 30 years after his death. By mapping out the indexical fields this article shows how multiple and sometimes opposing ideologies may be simultaneously produced and reproduced in Pidgin comedy routines by the formation of multiple semiotic centers. The analysis will also show how these ideologies are then re-appropriated by others through selective activation of these indexical fields and how the activation of multiple fields can lead to the reproduction of those contradicting beliefs that are at the core of Pidgin speakers attitudes towards their own language.
Article
Full-text available
This study uses a qualitative approach that focuses on analyzing greeting expressions used by the Pancana community. The location of this research is Watumobote Village, Kapontori District, Buton Regency. The research data obtained is spoken language, which is then transcribed. Data was collected using interview and observation methods. The results of the study show that the commonly used forms of addressing in the Pancana language consist of several forms that are adapted to kinships, such as a) Addressing in family relations, b) Addressing in society, c) Addressing in an official setting, and d) Addressing due to uniqueness or certain characteristics. The addressing system in the Pancana language is used according to several considerations, namely the position of the speaker and the interlocutor, the gender of the speaker and the interlocutor, the age of the speaker and the interlocutor, kinship, and the speaker’s situation. Addressing in the Pancana language can occur either directly or indirectly.
Article
Full-text available
Some 40 years ago, language transmission in Hawai‘i was interrupted among Hawaiians across all islands with the sole exception of language maintenance among a small community on the tiny, isolated Ni‘ihau Island. Today, Hawaiian has returned as spoken and written medium with some 5000–7000 new speakers. The present paper provides an up-to-date account of the sociolinguistic situation in Hawai‘i, and depicts the language ecological environment which allows for language revival in order to analyze how language revitalization differs from language revival. While language revitalization may happen in very different language ecologies, the revival of a no longer spoken language occurs only in late modern societies. The regaining of domains in language revival, i.e. once all domains had been lost, requires very different approaches than revitalization efforts. In Hawai'i, language revival is realized through networks and members of the language revival network use Hawaiian in all domains. The main objective of this network is to establish and maintain a Hawaiian-speaking environment and to produce new native speakers of Hawaiian.
Article
Full-text available
Although linguists have traditionally viewed code-switching as the simultaneous use of two language varieties in a single context, scholars and teachers of English have appropriated the term to argue for teaching minority students to monitor their languages and dialects according to context. For advocates of code-switching, teaching students to distinguish between “home language” and “school language” offers a solution to the tug-of-war between standard and nonstandard Englishes. This paper argues that this kind of code-switching may actually facilitate the illiteracy and academic failure that educators seek to eliminate and can promote resistance to Standard English rather than encouraging its use
Article
Full-text available
The article proposes a framework for the analysis of identity as produced in linguistic interaction, based on the following principles: (1) identity is the product rather than the source of linguistic and other semiotic practices and therefore is a social and cultural rather than primarily internal psychological phenomenon; (2) identities encompass macro-level demographic categories, temporary and interactionally specific stances and participant roles, and local, ethnographically emergent cultural positions; (3) identities may be linguistically indexed through labels, implicatures, stances, styles, or linguistic structures and systems; (4) identities are relationally constructed through several, often overlapping, aspects of the relationship between self and other, including similarity/difference, genuineness/artifice and authority/ delegitimacy; and (5) identity may be in part intentional, in part habitual and less than fully conscious, in part an outcome of interactional negotiation, in part a construct of others’ perceptions and representations, and in part an outcome of larger ideological processes and structures. The principles are illustrated through examination of a variety of linguistic interactions.
Article
Full-text available
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
Article
Full-text available
Ample research has explored language attitudes and speaker evaluations, yet it has not attended to direct incidences of language criticism. This article presents evidence demonstrating that a majority of those surveyed in Hawai'i have experienced language criticism. Coded data suggest that criticism takes place during employment, educational, familial, social and community interactions. People manage such episodes through a variety of communicative responses, ranging from avoidant to aggressive. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for future research on language criticism in other multilingual settings.
Article
Full-text available
Title VII of the U.S. Civil Rights Act clearly forbids an employer to discriminate against persons of color for reasons of personal or customer preference. Similarly, a qualified job applicant may not be rejected on the basis of linguistic traits linked to national origin. In contrast to racial discrimination, however, an employer has considerable latitude in matters of language, provided in part by a judicial system which recognizes in theory the link between language and social identity, but in practice is often confounded by blind adherence to a standard language ideology. The nature and repercussions of this type of linguistic discrimination are here explored. (Language and law, accent, discrimination, standard language ideology, critical language studies)
Article
Full-text available
This article explores the production of naturalized temporality and its ideological effects by focusing on the semiotic process of indexical order. Linguistic practice is linked with the exercise of power not only by constructing intersubjective social reality in an ongoing communicative process, but also, and perhaps more powerfully, by constructing an historical narrative that logically unfolds from the (naturalized) indexical order. Drawing on the case of the historical development of “women's language” in Japanese, the article discusses how an indexical order produces a tacit natural history of Japanese women, which surreptitiously turns gender inequality into nature.
Article
This volume offers a first survey of projects from around the world that seek to implement Creole languages in education. In contrast to previous works, this volume takes a holistic approach. Chapters discuss the sociolinguistic, educational and ideological context of projects, policy developments and project implementation, development and evaluation. It compares different kinds of educational activities focusing on Creoles and discusses a list of procedures that are necessary for successfully developing, evaluating and reforming educational activities that aim to integrate Creole languages in a viable and sustainable manner into formal education. The chapters are written by practitioners and academics involved in educational projects. They serve as a resource for practitioners, academics and persons wishing to devise or adapt educational initiatives. It is suitable for use in upper level undergraduate and post-graduate modules dealing with language and education with a focus on lesser used languages.
Article
Written not only for linguists and anthropologists, this book serves as a general reference guide to language revitalization for language activists and community members who believe they should ensure the future use of their languages, despite their predicted loss. Drawing extensively on case studies, it highlights the necessary background and central issues such as literacy, policy decisions, and allocation of resources. The volume’s primary goal is to provide the essential tools for a successful language revitalization program, setting and achieving realistic goals, and anticipating and resolving common obstacles.
Article
This chapter examines language ideologies and political discourse of the bilingual, indigenous Polynesian community of Easter Island, Chile, where the local Rapa Nui language has in the past been considerably marginalized by Spanish. It details how Rapa Nui speakers came to challenge this situation, first by pushing syncretic Rapa Nui-Spanish speech styles into public and political domains, and more recently, by constructing purist Rapa Nui speech styles. The chapter argues that the Rapa Nui deploy syncretic and purist speech styles as linguistic registers in political discourse to perform stances, and are voicing different but complimentary sets of values- those of democratic participation, and those of primordialism and ethnic boundary construction. The case study illustrates the ways in which the users of an endangered ethnolinguistic minority language have contributed to revalorizing and maintaining their language by establishing new linguistic registers, increasing the linguistic heterogeneity of their language.
Article
This book explores challenges to linguistic vitality confronting many minority languages in the highly diverse and geographically far-flung Austronesian language family. The contributions bring together Indigenous language activists and academic researchers with a long-standing commitment to language documentation in Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei, East Timor, and Vanuatu. Working in partnership with Indigenous communities, the research in this book is the forefront of the development of innovative capacity building strategies and is part of cutting edge, practical solutions for language revitalization. © Editorial matter and organization: Margaret Florey 2010. All rights reserved.
Chapter
This volume contains a selection of fifteen papers presented at three consecutive meetings of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, held in Washington, D.C. (January 2001); Coimbra, Portugal (June 2001); and San Francisco (January 2002). The fifteen articles offer a balanced sampling of creolists’ current research interests. All of the contributions address questions directly relevant to pidgin/creole studies and other contact languages. The majority of papers address issues of morphology or syntax. Some of the contributions make use of phonological analysis while others study language development from the point of view of acquisition. A few papers examine discourse strategies and style, or broader issues of social and ethnic identity. While this array of topics and perspectives is reflective of the diversity of the field, there is also much common ground in that all of the papers adduce solid data corpora to support their analyses. The range of languages analyzed spans the planet, as approximately twenty contact varieties are studied in this volume.
Article
Though courts recognize that accent discrimination can function as the equivalent of prohibited national origin discrimination, in practice, plaintiffs in accent discrimination cases almost never win. In this Article, Mari Matsuda explores recent Title VII litigation and the literature of sociolinguists to demonstrate that accent discrimination often hides other prejudices, since status assumptions rooted in racial, ethnic, and class subordination affect our evaluations of speech. Given this sociolinguistic reality, the author calls for an application of Title VII law that examines critically employer claims that accent impedes job performance. The author recommends that courts separately consider four issues in evaluating claims of accent discrimination: the level of communication required for the jobn; the fairness of the employer's evaluation of the candidate's speech; the candidate's intelligibility to the pool of relevant, nonprejudiced listeners; and reasonable accommodations, given the job and any limitations in intelligibility. The author argues that accepting this doctrinal reconstruction will promote linguistic tolerance, and that both liberalism and emerging progressive theories of law favor such tolerance. Accent tolerance promotes such liberal values as full participation in the democratic process and protection of individual identity. Finally, the author argues from the perspective of progressive, critical theories that accent discrimination plays an important part in the culture of domination, enforcing uniformity of accent in order to maintain boundaries. Linguistic tolerance promotes the dual critical goals of antisubordination and radical pluralism.
Article
Through the analysis of the various language ideologies that have shaped the sociolinguistic history of Pijin, the lingua franca of Solomon Islands, this article attempts to shed light on the peculiar complexity of the postcolonial linguistic situations where more prestigious and less prestigious languages coexist in the same sociological niche. These ideologies are: reciprocal multilingualism, hierarchical multilingualism, linguistic pragmatism, and linguistic nationalism. Specifically, the article focuses on the development and coalescence of linguistic ideologies that lead Pijin speakers to shift perceptions of Pijin—in a context of urban identity construction that acts as a force of its own. In the case of Pijin, linguistic legitimacy seems to be lagging behind social legitimacy. We show that the development of new ideologies can lead to the re-evaluation of the meaning of symbolic domination of one language (in this case English) over another one (Pijin), without necessarily challenging this symbolic domination. (Language ideology, youth, urbanization, pidgins and creoles, Solomon Islands)*
Article
Article
This article discusses a documentary film project3 produced by high school students in Hawai‘i that investigated the value of Pidgin (Hawai‘i Creole) in schools and society, and which ultimately aimed to address the problem of linguicism (Skutnabb-Kangas, 1990). The project was carried out within a critical language awareness framework that treated students as knowledge producers and which provided them with the opportunity to use their own communities and languages as repositories of knowledge and as sites for learning about the relationship between language and society. Through exploring the meanings and values of their language, the students produced a documentary that ended up challenging many of their own assumptions about Pidgin, and which revealed the importance of translingual practices (Pennycook, 2007). This article draws on material from the documentary and interviews with the students to illustrate how the students’ views towards Pidgin changed during the course of the project, with a particular focus on the language's legitimacy. The results suggest that a students-as-knowledge-producers approach may offer more potential to challenge linguicism than many contrastive analysis approaches currently being used. By treating non-mainstream languages as subject matter in their own right, without reference or comparison to the dominant language, we argue that these languages earn more respect and acknowledgment in school settings and beyond.
Article
This book collects a selection of fifteen papers presented at three meetings of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics in 1996 and 1997. The focus is on papers which approach issues in creole studies with novel perspectives, address understudied pidgin and creole varieties, or compellingly argue for controversial positions. The papers demonstrate how pidgins and creoles shed light on issues such as verb movement, contact-induced language change and its gradations, discourse management via tense-aspect particles, language genesis, substratal transfer, and Universal Grammar, and cover a wide range of contact languages, ranging from English- and French-based creoles through Portuguese creoles of Africa and Asia, Sango, Popular Brazilian Portuguese, West African Pidgin Englishes, and Hawaiian Creole English.
Article
This paper renews the call for greater interest in applied work to deal with the obstacles faced in formal education by speakers of creoles (such as Hawai‘i Creole and Jamaican Creole) and minority dialects (such as African American English). It starts off with an update on developments in the use of these vernacular languages in educational contexts since 1998, focusing on educational programmes, publications and research by linguists and educators. It goes on to discuss some of the research and public awareness efforts needed to help the speakers of these vernacular varieties, with examples given from Hawai‘i.
Article
Though many linguists have shown a strong concern for social issues, there is an apparent contradiction between the principles of objectivity needed for scientific work and commitment to social action. The Black English trial in Ann Arbor showed one way in which this contradiction could be resolved. The first decade of research on Black English was marked by violent differences between creolists and dialectologists on the structure and origin of the dialect. The possibility of a joint point of view first appeared in the general reaction of linguists against the view that blacks were linguistically and genetically inferior. The entrance of black linguists into the field was a critical factor in the further development of the creole hypothesis and the recognition of the distinctive features of the tense and aspect system. At the trial, linguists were able to present effective testimony in the form of a unified view on the origins and structural characteristics of the Black English Vernacular and argue for its alidity as an alternate to standard English. (Black English, language and the law.)
Book
One of the first accounts of social variation in language, this groundbreaking study founded the discipline of sociolinguistics, providing the model on which thousands of studies have been based. In this second edition, Labov looks back on forty years of sociolinguistic research, bringing the reader up to date on its methods, findings and achievements. In over thirty pages of new material, he explores the unforeseen implications of his earlier work, addresses the political issues involved, and evaluates the success of newer approaches to sociolinguistic investigation. In doing so, he reveals the outstanding accomplishments of sociolinguistics since his original study, which laid the foundations for studying language variation, introduced the crucial concept of the linguistic variable, and showed how variation across age groups is an indicator of language change. Bringing Labov's pioneering study into the 21st century, this classic volume will remain the benchmark in the field for years to come.
Article
Ninety-eight children whose first language is Hawaii Creole English (HCE) were examined over a period of time for their proficiency in both HCE and English, the medium of instruction in the Hawaii public school system. The hypothesis that the children could acquire English without a formal language program, and that they would maintain their first language was confirmed. For these kindergarten and first-grade children, learning the dominant variety of the language in a bicultural/bidialectal environment did not appear to affect adversely performance in their first language.
Article
Recent work in linguistic anthropology highlights the role of linguistic ideologies, or cultural conceptions of language, in transforming social relations and linguistic structure and use. This article examines the links between language attitudes and uses in their institutional and interactional contexts on Rapa Nui, a Polynesian island community that is part of the Chilean nation-state. By the 1970s, a sociolinguistic hierarchy and functional compartmentalization of languages between Spanish and Rapa Nui—what I will describe as “colonial diglossia”—had become established in the community, which was rapidly becoming bilingual. Language shift toward Spanish has continued to advance since then. However, rising Rapa Nui syncretic language practice and consciousness, combined with the political successes of a local indigenous movement and changes in the local economy, are now contributing to the breakdown of colonial diglossia, generating better conditions for the maintenance of the Rapa Nui language.