And with the stroke of a pen, some anonymous census bureaucrat helped me (and my resume) achieve what seven years of after-school Japanese language classes and many embarrassing oral examinations in college Spanish could not. It may be coincidence that this happened during the watch of our first Hawaiian-Creole-speaking president, but, regardless, the move helps vindicate decades of struggle by local educators, activists, and artists to elevate Pidgin, as it’s commonly referred to in the Islands, from its status as a dialect of the uneducated, “country,” lower classes. This simple act gave the Creole, which researchers say emerged with remarkable speed and uniformity from the polyglot multiethnic sugar plantations of the early 1900s, the imprimatur of federal recognition. Census Bureau survey included “Hawaiian Pidgin Creole,” which some linguists cite as a prime example of the brain’s innate capacity for language creation, as one of the 350 languages spoken in U.S. I first learned this in grad school when, after reading a chapter on linguist Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar, I half-jokingly, half-defiantly updated my resume and declared myself a native speaker of Hawaiian Creole and thereby, retroactively, proudly bilingual. It turns out that, most of the time, I wasn’t speaking “bad” or “pidgin” English, but Hawaiian Creole, a language all its own.

As much as my schoolteacher mother tried to impress upon her children the importance of being able to speak “good English,” there I was, the son of two college graduates, the third generation of my family born in Hawai‘i, and, at the age of 11, unsure when I was speaking English and when I wasn’t. It’s a word so common in Hawai‘i that I’d never recognized it as a word, distinct from its meaning (“finished” or “done”), and I’d never seen it written anywhere in any of the English-centric classrooms designed to wash the lo‘i and plantation off of us and make us American. I stared hard at the word, written in Magic Marker on colored cardstock and tacked up on the bulletin board of my mom’s first-grade classroom, until it dawned on my 11-year-old brain that it wasn’t English.

Hawaiian speaking pidgin