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Languages in Hawaii

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Dorothy Brown Aspinwall
Dorothy Brown Aspinwall*
Affiliation:
University of Hawaii, Honolulu 14
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Extract

In Hawaii six languages are spoken by sizable groups of people in addition to the official language, English, and the lingua franca, Pidgin. They are: Japanese, Hawaiian, Cantonese, Korean, Portuguese, and Ilocano. No exact figures exist for the numbers of speakers in each group. Some indication, however, can be gained by consulting the 1950 census distribution by “race” of the Islands' population: Japanese 39%, Caucasian 23%, Hawaiian 17%, Filipino 12%, Chinese 6.4%, Korean 1.4%, other 1.2%. Allowance must also be made for the facts that some Hawaiians cannot speak Hawaiian, that some of our Chinese speak Mandarin, and that about ten percent of the local Filipinos speak Visayan or Tagalog rather than Ilocano. Obviously, in a government report, the Portuguese are included as Caucasians; locally they are considered a group apart.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 75 , Issue 4-Part2 , September 1960 , pp. 7 - 13
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1960

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References

1 Some useful articles on the subject are the following: Bernard L. Hormann and Laurence M. Kasdon, “Integration in Hawaii's Schools,” Educational Leadership, April 1959; Richard S. Gima, “Japanese Language Schools,” The Sunday Star-Bulletin, 22 Nov. 1959; “The Dialect of Hawaii,” address made 18 Jan. 1960 at the State Hospital at Kaneohe by Dr. Elizabeth Carr; Andrew Lind, Hawaii's People (Univ. of Hawaii Press: Honolulu, 1955); Ralph S. Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom, 1778–1854 (Univ. of Hawaii Press: Honolulu, 1938); Steve Bartlett, “Foreign Language Study in Hawaii,” The Sunday Star-Bulletin, 13 Dec. 1959; Jack Teehan, “Island Kids Lay Cornerstone for Vital Multilingual East, West Bridge,” The Sunday Advertiser, 20 March 1960.

2 The instruction here is not uniform, since it is given by the classroom teacher who may be a French Sister or a lay teacher who knows little or no French.