Pidgin and Hawai‘i English: An overview

Today, most people from Hawai‘i speak Pidgin, Hawai‘i English, or both. This paper presents a brief discussion of the history of both the creole (called Pidgin or Hawaii Creole) and the variety of English spoken in Hawai‘i referred to as Hawai‘i English. The creation of Pidgin and the prevalence of English in Hawai‘i have a complex history closely tied with various sociohistorical events in the islands, and the social hegemony established during the plantation days still persists today. While Pidgin is stigmatized and is deemed inappropriate for use in formal domains, it has important social functions, and the infl uence from diff erent languages is viewed as representative of the ethnic diversity found in the islands. This paper treats Pidgin and Hawaii English as independent from one another while commenting on some of the linguistic forms that are found in both. Lexical items, phonological forms,and syntactic structures of Pidgin and Hawai‘i English are presented alongside a discussion of language attitudes and ideologies. Recent work that attempts to address the negative attitudes toward Pidgin is also discussed

Pidgin and Hawai‘i English: An overview

Today, most people from Hawai‘i speak Pidgin, Hawai‘i English, or both. This paper presents a brief discussion of the history of both the creole (called Pidgin or Hawaii Creole) and the variety of English spoken in Hawai‘i referred to as Hawai‘i English. The creation of Pidgin and the prevalence of English in Hawai‘i have a complex history closely tied with various sociohistorical events in the islands, and the social hegemony established during the plantation days still persists today. While Pidgin is stigmatized and is deemed inappropriate for use in formal domains, it has important social functions, and the infl uence from diff erent languages is viewed as representative of the ethnic diversity found in the islands. This paper treats Pidgin and Hawaii English as independent from one another while commenting on some of the linguistic forms that are found in both. Lexical items, phonological forms,and syntactic structures of Pidgin and Hawai‘i English are presented alongside a discussion of language attitudes and ideologies. Recent work that attempts to address the negative attitudes toward Pidgin is also discussed

Linguistic variation, identity construction and cognition

Speakers use a variety of different linguistic resources in the construction of their identities, and they are able to do so because their mental representations of linguistic and social information are linked. While the exact nature of these representations remains unclear, there is growing evidence that they encode a great deal more phonetic detail than traditionally assumed and that the phonetic detail is linked with word-based information. This book investigates the ways in which a lemma’s phonetic realisation depends on a combination of its grammatical function and the speaker’s social group. This question is investigated within the context of the word like as it is produced and perceived by students at an all girls’ high school in New Zealand. The results are used to inform an exemplar-based model of speech production and perception in which the quality and frequency of linguistic and non-linguistic variants contribute to a speaker’s style

Linguistic variation, identity construction and cognition

Speakers use a variety of different linguistic resources in the construction of their identities, and they are able to do so because their mental representations of linguistic and social information are linked. While the exact nature of these representations remains unclear, there is growing evidence that they encode a great deal more phonetic detail than traditionally assumed and that the phonetic detail is linked with word-based information. This book investigates the ways in which a lemma’s phonetic realisation depends on a combination of its grammatical function and the speaker’s social group. This question is investigated within the context of the word like as it is produced and perceived by students at an all girls’ high school in New Zealand. The results are used to inform an exemplar-based model of speech production and perception in which the quality and frequency of linguistic and non-linguistic variants contribute to a speaker’s style

Linguistic variation, identity construction and cognition

Speakers use a variety of different linguistic resources in the construction of their identities, and they are able to do so because their mental representations of linguistic and social information are linked. While the exact nature of these representations remains unclear, there is growing evidence that they encode a great deal more phonetic detail than traditionally assumed and that the phonetic detail is linked with word-based information. This book investigates the ways in which a lemma’s phonetic realisation depends on a combination of its grammatical function and the speaker’s social group. This question is investigated within the context of the word like as it is produced and perceived by students at an all girls’ high school in New Zealand. The results are used to inform an exemplar-based model of speech production and perception in which the quality and frequency of linguistic and non-linguistic variants contribute to a speaker’s style

Linguistic variation, identity construction and cognition

Speakers use a variety of different linguistic resources in the construction of their identities, and they are able to do so because their mental representations of linguistic and social information are linked. While the exact nature of these representations remains unclear, there is growing evidence that they encode a great deal more phonetic detail than traditionally assumed and that the phonetic detail is linked with word-based information. This book investigates the ways in which a lemma’s phonetic realisation depends on a combination of its grammatical function and the speaker’s social group. This question is investigated within the context of the word like as it is produced and perceived by students at an all girls’ high school in New Zealand. The results are used to inform an exemplar-based model of speech production and perception in which the quality and frequency of linguistic and non-linguistic variants contribute to a speaker’s style

Linguistic variation, identity construction and cognition

Speakers use a variety of different linguistic resources in the construction of their identities, and they are able to do so because their mental representations of linguistic and social information are linked. While the exact nature of these representations remains unclear, there is growing evidence that they encode a great deal more phonetic detail than traditionally assumed and that the phonetic detail is linked with word-based information. This book investigates the ways in which a lemma’s phonetic realisation depends on a combination of its grammatical function and the speaker’s social group. This question is investigated within the context of the word like as it is produced and perceived by students at an all girls’ high school in New Zealand. The results are used to inform an exemplar-based model of speech production and perception in which the quality and frequency of linguistic and non-linguistic variants contribute to a speaker’s style

Linguistic variation, identity construction and cognition

Speakers use a variety of different linguistic resources in the construction of their identities, and they are able to do so because their mental representations of linguistic and social information are linked. While the exact nature of these representations remains unclear, there is growing evidence that they encode a great deal more phonetic detail than traditionally assumed and that the phonetic detail is linked with word-based information. This book investigates the ways in which a lemma’s phonetic realisation depends on a combination of its grammatical function and the speaker’s social group. This question is investigated within the context of the word like as it is produced and perceived by students at an all girls’ high school in New Zealand. The results are used to inform an exemplar-based model of speech production and perception in which the quality and frequency of linguistic and non-linguistic variants contribute to a speaker’s style

Linguistic variation, identity construction and cognition

Speakers use a variety of different linguistic resources in the construction of their identities, and they are able to do so because their mental representations of linguistic and social information are linked. While the exact nature of these representations remains unclear, there is growing evidence that they encode a great deal more phonetic detail than traditionally assumed and that the phonetic detail is linked with word-based information. This book investigates the ways in which a lemma’s phonetic realisation depends on a combination of its grammatical function and the speaker’s social group. This question is investigated within the context of the word like as it is produced and perceived by students at an all girls’ high school in New Zealand. The results are used to inform an exemplar-based model of speech production and perception in which the quality and frequency of linguistic and non-linguistic variants contribute to a speaker’s style

The influence of social characteristics on speech perception.

Recent research has uncovered an intriguing relationship between vowel perception and social characteristics, so that the gender of a speaker appears to influence vowel perception (Johnson, Strand, and D'Imperio 1999). This thesis helps to shed light on the extent to which social characteristics inferred from a voice or a face can influence vowel perception. Due to a chain shift in New Zealand English, speakers of different ages produce different variants of the vowels in the words head and had. This thesis examines speech perception within the context of the chain shift in progress by analysing results from a series of perception experiments which were implemented using resynthesised vowel continua. In Experiment 2, the apparent age of each resynthesised voice was manipulated with the help of photographs in order to investigate whether the perceived age of a speaker can affect speech perception. The results provide evidence that people perceive vowel boundaries in different places, and that this difference can be predicted to some degree by the social characteristics of the perceivers. Additionally, the results suggest that social characteristics inferred from both a voice and a photograph can influence perception, as participants appear to have perceived the vowels differently depending on the perceived age and social class of the stimuli. These findings pose a problem for many current models of speech perception which fail to straight-forwardly account for variation in speech perception, let alone how this variation may be related to the social characteristics of the perceived social characteristics of the speaker. Taken together, the results support an ~xemplar-based model of speech perception as well as uncover some challenges for the application and predictions of current exemplar-based models