Introduction

Sociolinguistic research that acknowledges the importance of viewing language as a human problem attempts to reconcile the facts of linguistic variation with those of social identity and inequality (Hymes 1973). In this paper I present a case study of Hawaii which examines this relationship in a Pacific English creole continuum and, more specifically, calls attention to its dynamic nature.

A history of cultural diversity

Hawaii, with a population of about one million, is the only American state in which no single ethnic group is a numerical majority, and where most of the people are of Asian and Pacific rather than European or African origin (Nordyke 1977). The population of the seven inhabited islands is roughly a quarter Japanese and a quarter Caucasian. Still another quarter is racially mixed (about 16 per cent part-Hawaiian), and the remaining quarter is comprised of a number of groups, including Filipinos, Chinese, Blacks, Koreans, Hawaiians, Samoans, and other Pacific Islanders (Schmitt 1982).

Hawaii's cultural diversity is largely the result of massive labour importation, triggered by the development of sugar plantations by north Americans during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The islands were transformed from a Hawaiian kingdom with a subsistence agricultural economy into a plantation economy in which sugar became ‘king’ (Fuchs 1961; Kent 1974, 1983). Political incorporation into the US began with the overthrow of the native Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 and annexation by the US in 1898, and was completed with statehood in 1959.