Applied Creolistics Revisited

Abstract

"Pidgin ranks right up there with ebonics. It's broken English. And when something is broken, you fix it." –-'Honolulu Star-Bulletin', 12/10/99. "For the benefit of Hawai'i children, pidgin should become a thing of the past... There are some things that deserve to die." –-'Honolulu Advertiser', 9/4/02. These quotations from letters to the editor reflect the common view that speaking a creole language – in this case, Hawai'i Creole, locally called "Pidgin" – is detrimental to students' progress in formal education. Such views have also been held by education department officials, as indicated by the following words spoken by Mitsugi Nakashima, Chairman of the Hawai'i State Board of Education: "If your thinking is not in standard English, it's hard for you to write in standard English. If you speak pidgin, you think pidgin, you write pidgin... We ought to have classrooms where standard English is the norm." -–'Honolulu Advertiser', 29/9/99. The statement was in reaction to the 1999 National Assessment of Educational Progress writing assessment, where only 15 percent of eighth graders from the state scored at or above proficient compared with 24 percent nationally. So, once again poor educational results were blamed not on misguided educational policies or underfunded public schools, but on the local creole language. And once again the solution was to ban the creole language from the classroom, and by implication, from the entire educational process.