28 and pragmatic strategies in daily life. Analyzing a bestselling joke book i
n Hawai‗i, Romaine 1999 and Inoue 2007 discuss contrastive translation humor between Hawai‗i
Creole and English and highlight two competing voices —Local and Haole—that these
languages represent respectively.
11
Fontanilla 1998 analyzes the discursive practice of the super-
Local character Bu La‗ia, and Furukawa 2007, 2009, 2010 examines multilingual humor in interaction in stand-up comedy shows, thereby dealing with
interactive intertextuality in this highly performative genre. In the next section, I c
ontextualize Hawai‗i Creole and Hawai‗i comedy to illustrate how this dissertation on comedic performance contributes to our understanding of sociolinguistic phenomena.
1.4 How does Hawai‘i complexify what we know?
The study of multivocal performance in H awai‗i comedy calls for a historical account of
Hawai‗i Creole because it serves as one of the most salient semiotic resources on stage. In this section, I also describe a recent controversy about Hawai‗i comedy to further
contextualize the dissertation. B ased on these accounts, I discuss how Hawai‗i
complicates our understanding of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis and necessitates the use of ethnographic and historical information about language in performance-in-
interaction.
1.4.1 A history of Haw ai‘i Creole
Following contact with Europeans in 1778, Hawai‗i became a stopover for whaling and trading between China and the West Coast of North America. At this time no pidgin
11
For research on the notion of haole, see Rohrer 2010.
29 language had developed, but features of other English pidgins were used in
communication Sakoda Siegel, 2003, p. 4. The establishment of the first sugarcane plantation in 1835 and the expansion of
the sugar industry in the last quarter of the century brought many laborers from various countries and areas, which included: China, Pacific islands e.g., Samoa, Portugal,
Norway, Germany, Japan, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Korea, Russia, and Spain Sakoda Siegel, 2003. It was Hawaiian and Pidgin Hawaiian that were initially used as
common languages among these immigrants Da Pidgin Coup, 1999, Section 3. By the turn of the century, Hawai‗i Pidgin English began to emerge, becoming the primary
language of many, including children acquiring it as their first language Da Pidgin Coup, 1999
. This marked the beginning of Hawai‗i Creole, which is locally referred to as Pidgin.
According to Sakoda and Siegel 2003, p. 20, ―there is no general agreement
about what really constitutes Pidgin [i.e., Hawai‗i Creole] in Hawai‗i‖ because it means
for some people the basilectal variety with its grammar distinct from that of English, while for others it refers to English with the local accent and vocabulary. This variation,
therefore, seems to form a continuum ranging from basilectal through mesolectal to acrolectal varieties. The population of speakers is assumed to be approximately 600,000,
half the population of Hawai‗i State Gordon, 2005. Generally speaking, Hawai‗i Creole is used among families and friends in
informal settings. It is often considered as a marker of Local identity. Reinecke 1969, p. 194 states that as
―a local dialect and to a great extent a class dialect, it has a two-fold emotional basis.‖ In other words, Hawai‗i Creole has covert prestige among Local people,
30 and it has been mostly used in social domains such as at home, on the playground, and so
forth.
12
However, who is ‗Local‘ is a highly controversial issue. Some people may regard both Native Hawaiians and descendants of plantation laborers as Local, excluding other
ethnic groups and newer arrivals from the category. Others may not want to include Native Hawaiians within the same category as descendants of plantation laborers.
Many people still look down on Hawai‗i Creole, as seen in some recent public
disputes e.g., Kua, 1999; Marlow Giles, 2008; however, advocacy for this stigmatized variety has also emerged. In 1978, Bamboo Ridge Press launched literary
activism in Hawai‗i, encouraging Hawai‗i authors to create work related to Hawai‗i themes and at the same time encouraging them to write in Hawai‗i Creole. Since 1998,
Da Pidgin Coup, a group of people mainly from the University of Hawai‗i at M noa, has been discussing linguistic, social, and educational issues regarding Hawai‗i Creole in
order to raise public awareness. Due to considerations of space, it is impossible to offer a thorough
sociolinguistic history of Hawai‗i Creole here. Detailed accounts can be found in the following sources: Da Pidgin Coup 1999, Reinecke 1969, Romaine 1994,
1999, Sakoda and Siegel 2003, and Sato 1989, 1991. Because English
and Hawai‗i Creole are closely connected, switching between them is not the same as switching from one code to another. Switching or shifting
between English and Hawai‗i Creole in performance-in-interaction can be either very subtle or mockingly exaggerated, oftentimes introducing diachronically and
synchronically relevant texts and talk about these varieties and indexing familiarity and solidarity; that is, Hawai‗i Creole is a historically stigmatized language that is associated
12
In contrast to this view on the domains of Hawai‗i Creole, Marlow and Giles 2008 report that it is indeed used in work contexts.
31 with covert prestige in contrast to English, which is associated with overt prestige in
Hawai‗i society. In many contexts, however, Hawai‗i Creole is the unmarked language.
1.4.2 Local comedy
