Exploring Multilingual Hawai'i - by Scott Saft (Paperback)

About the Book

Through an approach informed by language ecology and linguistic ethnography, this book examines Hawaiʻi as a complex multilingual society. Focusing on situated language usage as well as underlying ideological beliefs, the book offers analyses of Hawaiian, Pidgin, Japanese, the...

Book Synopsis

Employing an approach informed by language ecology and linguistic ethnography, Exploring Multilingual Hawai?i examines situated language usage and underlying ideological beliefs to explore and understand Hawai?i's multilingualism. This book 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, and the languages of Micronesia, and also the occurrence of language mixing in Hawaiian society. Scott Saft's discussion and analysis underscore how continued exploration of language usage in Hawai?i can contribute to our general understanding of multilingualism as a dynamic phenomenon.

Review Quotes

"Saft's Exploring Multilingual Hawai'i is a new landmark in Hawai'i Studies and has two clear strengths that set it apart from previous studies. . . because the book focuses on various ethnic groups and demonstrates the breadth and depth of approaches to sociolinguistics, it will be beneficial not only for scholars of Hawai'i Studies but also for those specializing in studies of language in society and multilingualism. . . . Saft's volume will be influential for discourse analytic studies of multilingualism and beyond, especially because of its methodological eclecticism. Personally, I have already drawn inspiration from the book and started designing a new research project to explore multilingual Tokyo (which is another linguistically diverse society)." --Pragmatics and Society

"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 Hawai?i. 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

About the Author

Scott Saft is professor of linguistics at the University of Hawai?i at Hilo.