Spam musubi, anybody?

But Japan’s impact on Hawaii doesn’t stop there! The Japanese language has literally changed the way people in Hawaii talk.

Aside from the two official languages of Hawaii, English and Hawaiian, there’s another language that’s incredibly popular: Hawaiian Creole. It’s a bit like English, but with a little Japanese, Chinese, and Spanish thrown in.

Confused? Let me explain.

Hawaiian Creole

Hawaiian Creole is a strange, cool amalgamation of a bunch of different languages that was born only a couple hundred years ago.

(Hawaiian Creole is usually called “Hawaiian Pidgin” or just “Pidgin”, but that’s not quite accurate for reasons I’ll talk about later.)

Back in the day, workers were brought to Hawaii from all over the world to work on sugar plantations. These workers were mostly from Asian countries like China, the Philippines, and – you guessed it – Japan.

When these immigrant workers got to Hawaii, they didn’t quite know the language of the plantation owners (which was usually English), nor did they really understand each other.

So they worked with what they had. They tried to speak to each other in English, and threw in parts of their native tongue where they could. Over time, this combination of English and native tongues grew into a common tongue. Once Hawaiian Creole found its footing, it spread all over Hawaii.

Hawaiian Creole sounds most like English, but borrows a lot of vocabulary from other languages. It borrows heavily from Japanese, as you can tell from its numerous phrases and loanwords. Here are some common ones:

What’s really cool is that Hawaiian Creole is only one of many languages that started out as a mashup of Japanese; there have been a handful of other Japanese-influenced pidgin languages (like Japanese Pidgin English and Japanese Bamboo English).

But this phenomenon of language mashups isn’t confined to Japanese by any means.

Creole Around The World

Creole languages are forming all over the world all the time. The American South in particular has lots of interesting creole languages, where American, European, and African immigrants all came together to work. Some people even say that African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is a type of creole, developed when slaves from all over Africa were forced to work together in the US.

You can see a creole language develop any place in the world where there are a lot of immigrants from different places together. It all starts pretty much the same way – people start trying to communicate in a common tongue.

At this stage, the language is what’s known as a pidgin. Pidgins don’t usually have consistent grammar, and aren’t really considered a “complete” language.

But when children learn a pidgin as their first language, it gets transformed into a more complete, comprehensive language called a creole. Linguists like Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker argue that humans have a built in instinct for language, that humans know how to speak the same way birds know how to fly.

When children learn a pidgin, their language instinct kicks into gear. They take the bits and pieces that their parents gave them and fill in the gaps. These children give the pidgin more consistent grammar, structure, and vocabulary basically creating a whole, complete language.

It’s a really fascinating process, and completely shuts down the argument that Hawaiian Creole, AAVE, or any other creole is some kind of lesser, broken language. But by the time a pidgin becomes a creole, it’s grown into a language in its own right.

Something really interesting to think about is if Japanese itself is a creole language. Nobody really knows where the Japanese languages came from, and some really fringe theories wonder if they started out as creoles. It’s doubtful that it’s true, but it’s cool to imagine Japanese as a creole.

Do you speak a creole language, or know somebody who does? Tell me all about it in the comments!

Read more: The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker

In high school, all of us younguns had to do a Senior Report, of sorts. Now, whenever I do essays / reports / etc, and I have the opportunity to write about whatever I want (bad idea, teachers), I like to choose a topic that almost nobody else has studied, so the professor can’t check my facts. I’m not saying that I go around making stuff up, but I feel a little better when I’m not writing on something within the teacher’s field of expertise. It, how should I say, often results in a higher, how should I call it, grade.

Of course, as you can tell by the title, I decided to study Japanese internment. More specifically, how it affected Hawaii.

If you don’t know already, Hawaii’s population includes tons of Japanese. I’m not just talking tourists in khaki shorts with cameras around their necks. Back during the war, Hawaii’s population was 1/3 Japanese. That’s huge. 157,000 Japanese made their home on the islands. In contrast, the United States mainland only had around 126,000 Japanese. 100,000 of those 126,000 were put in internment camps. That’s a lot of people being put away for no reason.

Now, as you probably learned in history class (if you’re an American, at least), “All Japanese were put in internment camps.” That is, at least, what we are led to believe. The history books tend to gloss over Hawaii, though. What happened to people over there?

Well, not that much.

Of the 157,000 Japanese living in Hawaii, only under 2000 of them were put in internment camps. These were people of supposed power, who could “possibly pose a threat to America.” The ironic thing is, though, Japanese-Americans on the mainland posed a much smaller risk compared to their Hawaii counterparts. Over half of the Japanese-Americans on the mainland were born in America and had American citizenship, yet they were the ones to get interned. They were forced to sell their land on the cheap (Japanese owned a lot of California grape growing land, all of which they lost. Sad, yeah?), and lost pretty much everything (My family’s sword was taken. Bastards!).

In Hawaii, however, almost everyone got off scott free. I’m not saying that anyone should have been interned – I think it was a terrible thing – but they should have at least been consistent about it. Really, the Japanese in Hawaii had much closer ties to Japan than those in the mainland. Still, in the end, it was all economy-based. If you suddenly lose 1/3 of your population, then the economy will implode on itself. According to my grandpa, a lot of Japanese ran banks and worked on farms at the time, so suddenly cutting them out of the economic equation would have been disastrous.

That is why Japanese didn’t get interned in Hawaii, even though more Japanese lived in Hawaii than any other part of the US.

Jokes on America, though. I hear stories about my Great Grandma during the war. She would walk around the streets of Nu’uanu, picking up cigarette packaging and pulling out the aluminum linings, then send it back to Japan so they could make weapons and bombs. On top of that, she went around to all her neighbors and friends (who apparently were pro Japanese, as well) and got them to put stitches into hachimaki, which were sent to Japan for kamikaze bombers to wear for good luck. Great job, America! Way to intern the right people.

Though, I would be sad if my Great Grandma was interned, she was just a sweet old lady picking up trash for those dirty cigarette smoking sailors. How nice!