Example: “I’m gonna stay hale tonight.”.Example: “Halala, I’m in huge trouble.”.(Expression): A Filipino phrase that’s the equivalent of saying “uh-oh.” You say this when someone else has or you have an issue.

Example: “My favorite snack is candied ginger crack seed.”.It’s made from preserved fruits that are split open with the seed still inside. Example: “So I heard through da coconut wireless that you’re single again…”.(Expression): This is the Hawaiian equivalent to the old saying, “hearing something through the grapevine.” In other words, this is when you hear something through gossip.Example: “Don’t cockroach stuff from friends.”.Example: “You have choke money – no need to be chang.”.(Verb): Hawaiian pidgin that means a large amount of something.Example: “The water was so cold, I got all chicken skin.”.(Expression): You can say this to show that you’re excited or happy about something.Example: “Stop being chang and pay your employees more, brah.”.(Adjective): A word that means someone is really stingy and cheap.

Voices in the broadcast piece include Domingo Los Banos, Espy Garcia, Lee Tonouchi, Kent Sakoda and Jeffrey Siegel. 'When I was in college, after I discovered guys writing in pidgin, I said 'Heck yeah, I can do this pidgin creative writing.' Eventually I did my 30-page research papers in pidgin. 'The perception is the pidgin talker is going to be perceived as less intelligent than the standard English talker,' he says. Lee Tonouchi, a pidgin scholar and author of books on the island chain's unique language, believes pidgin has its own intellectual foundation: Producer Dmae Roberts shares an audio postcard of some Hawaiians who are proud to speak pidgin - a home-grown version of English with words and phrases borrowed from Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Portuguese, Hawaiian and other languages brought to the islands over the centuries. Pidgin scholar Lee Tonouchi reads from one of his books on the subject, Living Pidgin: Contemplations on Pidgin Culture

Hawaiian pidgin phrases