Hawaiʻi is made up of a group of islands located in the central Pacific Ocean. The state capital and the largest city, Honolulu, is situated on O‘ahu. It is believed that the earliest inhabitants were Polynesian settlers from the Marquesas Islands. In 1778, British explorer Captain James Cook landed at Kauaʻi and named the archipelago “Sandwich Islands”. Soon many European and American traders and whalers arrived resulting in the spread of diseases which killed many native people. Cook was killed in a conflict between his ship crew and the native Hawaiians in 1779. King Kamehameha I united the many chiefdoms and established the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi in 1810. The first sugar plantation opened in Kauaʻi in 1835. The rapid expansion of plantation economy based on sugar cane and coffee required massive importation of laborers. The first wave of contract laborers was mainly Chinese; later Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino and other ethnicities also joined the labor force. The independent Kingdom ended in 1893 when a group of European and American businesspeople overthrew the monarchy. Consequently, the United States of America annexed the islands in 1898. The attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in 1941 led to America joining the World War II. Hawaiʻi became the 50th State of America on August 21, 1959.
Intercultural contact is evident in this postcard, which was posted in 1921. The verse contains a mixture of English and Hawaiian words.
This is Sweet Molly Ailau
Coming Home From a Pink Poi Luan
She Spilt “Mountain Dew”
On Her Best Holoku
May Your Pilikias Be Pau
And Your Pleasures Wela Ka Hao.
Poi is a traditional Polynesian food made from taro root. To prepare poi, taro root is cooked, pounded with water until it becomes a paste. A luan or a feast in Hawaiʻi often features poi, fish, pork and chicken. “Mountain Dew” refers to moonshine, i.e. illegally distilled whisky. The Hawaiian holoku is an outer garment for women. Pilikia means ‘trouble, problem, or difficulty’. pau has many meanings including ‘ended, finished, over, all done’. In the phrase wela ka hao, wela means ‘hot’; ka is a definite article, usually translated as ‘the’; hao means ‘iron’. So, the sentence literally means ‘the iron is hot’, but here it means ‘now is the time for fun, whoopee, hurray’.*
While the combination of English and Hawaiian words in the verse does not seem to follow any system, the contact between Hawaiian and people of different cultures did result in the development of a new language called Hawaiʻi Creole English, or locally known as Pidgin. Hawaiʻi Creole English emerged in plantations where Hawaiian, Chinese, European, Japanese, and other ethnicities worked. The word pau in the verse has a special function in the Pidgin. It functions as a marker to indicate the completion of an action as in the example from the Pidgin translation of the Bible Da Jesus Book 43 [Matthew 13: 53].
Jesus pau use all dis kine story to teach. (Sakoda and Siegel 2008: 748)
‘Jesus finished using this kind of story to teach with.’
Since verbs in the Pidgin typically do not have endings showing when and how events happen, different markers are used before the verbs to indicate this information. For example, wen/went indicates past tense; go or gon/goin future tense; ste /stay marks progressive events; and pau completed events.
* Hawaiian dictionaries: https://wehewehe.org/gsdl2.85/cgi-bin/hdict?l=en
Sakoda, Kent and Siegel, Jeff. 2008. “Hawai‘i Creole: morphology and syntax”. In Bernd Kortmann, Edgar W. Schneider and Kate Burridge (eds.), The Pacific and Australasia, pp. 514-545. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton.