He definitely believed that there was a real problem with significant numbers of native Hawaiians from lower-income background who had trouble because they were not fully proficient in standard American English. He really wowed us with his amazing skills on the ukulele, but he had a very negative attitude toward pidgin-analogous to the negative attitude toward AAVE seen among a fair number of educated black Americans. However, in fifth grade, we had a native Hawaiian student teacher (in both the regular music classes and the instrumental music classes with teachers who visited twice a week). Playing “Little Grass Shack” and the like for a few weeks, I picked up a little bit of pidgin, which the regular music teacher certainly encouraged. (The music teacher had bought thirty-some ukulele’s, and she was going to put them to use.) This entailed singing, and strumming along to, a lot of Hawaiian folk songs. Thanks, David!Įvery year, from third to sixth grade, we had an ukulele unit in music class every spring. I was particularly struck by Buggah ‘person’ and Howzit ‘hello,’ both of which have straightforward etymologies ( bugger, how’s it) but which I am somehow surprised to find a basic part of Hawaiian pidgin. pau, “Finished, ended, through, terminated, completed, over, all done final, finishing entirely, completely, very much after all, to have all to be completely possessed, consumed, destroyed.” (It says “PNP pau,” where PNP is apparently Proto-Nuclear-Polynesian.) Some of the entries are well-known outside of Hawaii (Da kine ‘whatchamacallit,’ Lanai ‘patio,’ Wahine ‘woman’), others not so much (Ono ‘delicious,’ Pilikia ‘trouble’). Pau means ‘done’ - or, to give the more thorough list of equivalents in the online Hawaiian Dictionary s.v. If you have time to only learn one expression, learn “pau.”

In this list, expressions in bold type are those for which we NEVA WEN use the corresponding English equivalent, so you will want to learn these first. We used all of these expressions while growing up, but some we used more than others.

I lived in Kailua until I left for Biola in 1971. If you ever move to the Islands, you will need a guide to Hawaiian Pidgin expressions.

Hawaiian speaking pidgin