University of Hawaii Press is now publishing Palapala, a new Hawaiian language journal. The journal includes a variety of academic essays, reviews and analyses related to the Hawaiian language.
“The journal will also include reviews of any significant technologies relating to research in Hawaiian language and literature as well as book reviews and reports on the state of Hawaiian literature publications, courses, personnel, projects and more,” states this UH Press announcement. “All articles and reviews, whatever the language of composition, will be preceded by a brief summary in Hawaiian and English. The journal will include reprints of important materials previously published in journals and Hawaiian language newspapers.”
The first issue includes essays like “Reading between the Lines: A Closer Look at the First Hawaiian Primer (1822),” “A Cairn of Stories: Establishing a Foundation of Hawaiian Literature” and “Language Contact in the Early Colonial Pacific: Maritime Polynesian Pidgin before Pidgin English. By Emanuel J. Drechsel.” The last of these is especially fascinating.
“Building on research by a small group of academics (on which, more below), Drechsel’s claim is that there was already a pidgin in widespread use across the Pacific in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” ‘Ōiwi Parker Jones writes in the essay. “This provides a deeper lineage than the plantations for HCE and other Polynesian creoles spoken today. The language of power for MPP was not English or any other European language, rather it was the Polynesian languages that held sway in the day, such as Tahitian, Marquesan, Māori, and Hawaiian. Drechsel paints a picture of 1835 Honolulu, for example, where, ‘as the language of the land, Hawaiian would inadvertently have remained the target language, however successful various groups would have been at learning it’ (Drechsel 2014:160).”
Click here to read the first issue Palapala.
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