Doctoral Dissertation Research: Doing Being Hawaiian: Identity, Ideology, and Hawaiian Language Education Programs

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Graduate student Alicia Snyder-Frey, under the direction of Dr. Kathryn A. Woolard, will undertake research on how efforts to revitalize the Hawaiian language have affected Native Hawaiian speech and identity. She will focus her research on the relationship between language revitalization, the pan-ethnic social category known as "Local," and the linguistic expression of Local identity through Hawaii Creole English. Hawaiian, viewed as a dying language for most of the past century, has experienced a resurgence in the past twenty years. However, it remains unclear what the consequences of Hawaiian language revitalization efforts have been for shared conceptions of what it means to be Hawaiian. The term, Local, refers to a social category that includes Native Hawaiians and those minority immigrant groups who have a long history on the islands, in contrast to the haole (Anglo-American) population, whose separation is indexed by speaking Standard English. Local and Native Hawaiian identities have long been linguistically indistinguishable, given that both are associated with Hawaii Creole English. This may be changed by the revitalization movement.The researcher will undertake twelve months of mixed methods, ethnographic field work in Oahu to assess the broader consequences of Hawaiian language revitalization. She will employ participant observation in and out of Hawaiian-language classrooms, semi-structured interviews, questionnaires, and matched guise language attitude tests. Data will be collected on the relationship between the overlapping social categories of Native and Local for participants and non-participants in the Hawaiian language programs, and on the ways in which community members link these identities to the two linguistic codes distinctive of Hawaii. Language endangerment is a worldwide problem to which the response is frequently language revitalization. This research project is significant because it will contribute significantly to scholarly understanding of both the linguistic and social consequencess of revitalization. In addition, the findings will be useful to to local community members, such as teachers and language preservationists. The research also will contribute to the education of a social scientist.