Exploring Multilingual Hawai'i: Language Use and Language Ideologies in a Diverse Society

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Description

Employing an approached informed by language ecology and linguistic ethnography, Exploring Multilingual Hawaii examines situated language usage and underlying ideological beliefs to explore and understand Hawaiis multilingualism. The books begins with a description of the ideologies that developed as a result of contact with the west and then offers analyses that concentrate specifically on the roles of Hawaiian, Pidgin, Japanese, the languages of Micronesia, and also the occurrence of language mixing in Hawaiian society. Finally, discussion of the analyses underscores how continued exploration of language usage in Hawaii can contribute to our general understanding of multilingualism as a dynamic phenomenon.

Reviews

Scott Saft's monograph comprehensively explores multilingualism in Hawai'i. After a historical survey of the developments that led to a unique form of multilingualism on the islands (which almost resulted in the death of the Hawaiian language), the book provides among many other things a detailed and learned discussion of the renaissance of Hawaiian, the place of Pidgin on the islands, the heteroglossic uses of Hawaiian, Pidgin, and English in the speech community, the role of Japanese as an immigrant language and the usages of Filipino and Micronesian languages in Hawaii. Based on excellently selected spoken and written data from various sources, the author minutely and convincingly analyses situated usages of the many voices in Hawai'i from various scientific perspectives including Conversation Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis, metaphor theory, ethnopoetics and indexicality within the overall framework of linguistic ethnography. He manages to unveil the attitudes and ideologies that have developed within the heteroglossic and multilingual Hawaiian society and he carves out the speech community's diverse possibilities of interacting with its social world. This book promotes our understanding of Hawai'i as a multilingual society and sheds an important light on the organization of multilingualism and forms of heteroglossia in other societies, too. This book is a must for everybody who is interested in Hawai'i and its languages! -- Gunter Senft, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Heretofore, linguistic superdiversity has been seen as a feature of urban European contexts, where the ideologies of the nation-state interact with layers of migration to produce new forms of sociolinguistic complexity. This book offers a very compelling birds-eye view of heteroglossic multilingualism in superdiverse Hawaii. Saft's comprehensive examination draws attention to the highly dynamic ways that Hawaiians, Locals, newcomers, and visitors learn, maintain, revitalize, and use their languages in everyday life. The book's strengths lie in Saft's deep, personal understanding of the context and the empirical grounding of his arguments in rich data drawn from naturally occurring interactions and media data. The book offers a clear argument for the non-compartmentalization of languages and the dynamism of language ideologies in spite of the historical forces that work to tie languages to perceived boundaries and values. -- Christina Higgins, University of Hawaii at Manoa

Author Bio

Scott Saft is professor of linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Hilo.