And then there is pidgin, the local patois originated by Chinese immigrants to do business with an easy-to-understand lingo.
You probably can get by with a now-and-then "aloha" and a mumbled "mahalo," but to understand what's really going on in Hawaii, you need to know a few basic words like da kine, howzit, and mo bettah.īanned by New England missionaries, who crudely translated into English what they thought they heard, the native tongue survived underground to carry a nation's culture down through generations in warrior chants, hula lyrics, and talk story.
Welcome to Hawaii, the linguistically rich and confusing Islands with not one but two official languages - Hawaiian and English - where the 12-letter alphabet has 7 consonants and 5 vowels, and everybody speaks a little pidgin.
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