Hawaiian Pidgin
English-based creole spoken in Hawai'i
Hawaiian Pidgin (known formally in linguistics as Hawaiʻi Creole English or HCE and known locally as Pidgin) is an English-based creole language spoken in Hawaii. An estimated 600,000 residents of Hawaii speak Hawaiian Pidgin natively and 400,000 speak it as a second language. Although English and Hawaiian are the two official languages of the state of Hawaii, Hawaiian Pidgin is spoken by many residents of Hawaii in everyday conversation and is often used in advertising targeted toward locals in Hawaii. In the Hawaiian language, it is called ʻōlelo paʻi ʻai lit. 'hard-taro language'.
Hawaiian Pidgin was first recognized as a language by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2015. However, Hawaiian Pidgin is still thought of as lower status than the Hawaiian and English languages.
Despite its name, Hawaiian Pidgin is not a pidgin, but rather a full-fledged, nativized and demographically stable creole language. It did, however, evolve from various real pidgins spoken as common languages between ethnic groups in Hawaii.
Although not completely mutually intelligible with Standard American English, Hawaiian Pidgin retains a high degree of mutual intelligibility with it compared to some other English-based creoles, such as Jamaican Patois, in part due to its relatively recent emergence. Some speakers of Hawaiian Pidgin tend to code switch between or mix the language with Standard American English.
The public source identifies “Hawaiian Pidgin” as english-based creole spoken in Hawai'i. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Hawaiian, Pidgin and English-based.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q35602. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hawaiian Pidgin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.