Code switching in hawaiian creole

The speech community of the Hawaiian Islands is of theoretical interest to both the sociologist and the linguist. The reasons for this are clear. In the first place, it has a linguistic repetoire which is characteristic of multilingual societies. This is a direct consequence of the influx of immigrant labor from China, Korea, the Philippines, Okinawa, Japan, and Portugal and their social and linguistic contacts with the native Hawaiians and the English speaking colonial ists. Hence, Hawaii is a veritable laboratory for socio linguistic research. Secondly the varieties of speech range extensively and in accordance with the social demands of solidarity and status. This is particularly evident in the phenomenon of code switching where a native speaker of Hawaiian Creole can either shift towards a dialect of English, or towards a variety of immigrant speech when the social context of the situation demands it. Finally, the study of Creole languages such as the one to which this paper is directed has some very interesting implications for the "sociology of knowledge" because a Creole speaker attributes a different cognitive saliency to the lexical relations "push/pull," "bring/take," and "come/go" when he speaks Hawaiian Creole, than when he switches to standard English. These sundry concepts and their relevance to the field of sociolinguistics are the central topics of this paper.