For many people in the world being bilingual, or even multilingual, is the norm. There’s nothing unusual about such an arrangement. But many English speakers may want to retain their native dialects and to use them with their family and friends, keeping Standard English for writing and for those occasions where a more formal spoken language is required. For that reason those who want to make their way in an English-speaking world need to learn it. It may to that extent be a minority dialect, but it’s an extremely important one politically, economically and socially. It’s not surprising that few people grow up speaking Standard English, because it is predominantly a written form of the language. The dialect we learn first will usually be the one we feel most comfortable with and Standard English may seem like a foreign language, although its differences from non-standard varieties are not that great. In your case it happens to have been a pidgin, which is a little special, but I don’t suppose your case is really much different from those who grow up speaking southern US English, Caribbean English or the English of the north-east of England known as Geordie. Most native speakers of English grow up speaking some variety of the language other than Standard English. Kids come from the mainland all the time and fail miserably attempting to speak Pidgin.Īre there any linguists here that would have a "real" explanation why it is easier to speak Pidgin even though I have been speaking English on the mainland now longer than I lived in Hawaii? And, yes, Hawaiian Pidgin has a wrong way to speak it! You can't just throw out the rules and say words in a random order throwing in a few Polynesian words for flavor. But, then again, English was a pidgin that became a creole and standardized into a language so you would think that because it followed the same process, it too would be just as easy to speak. I have decided it is one of 2 options: Either it is because we grew up speaking it (but we also spoke English), or because pidgins and creoles are just designed to be closer to how we think just by the nature of their origins. Something I have wondered for a while is why Pidgin is so much easier to speak for us. When my brothers and our families are together we can "Code Switch" effortlessly between ourselves and the rest of our family without any problems, but will always go back to Pidgin with our siblings. When I am speaking Pidgin, I feel like it just comes out of me without any effort, like that is the way I think in my head. I have been out of practice with my Pidgin so I can't just jump in and sound local at any moment, but if I talk to my siblings on the phone or go back to Hawaii to visit, it only takes a few minutes before I slide back into partial Pidgin and a couple days before I am back to my old self. It feels like a second language that I have learned to speak natively. I can speak it with very little effort, but there is still some effort, I catch myself analyzing my words milliseconds before I say them. I moved to the mainland when I was 18, in 1996, and have come to speak English with almost no detection of my Pidgin roots (except when I say words like "Hawai`i", "Samoan", "ukulele"). My parents are from Washington and California so at home I spoke Standard English. I was born and raised in Hawaii and grew up speaking Pidgin.
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