Difference between revisions of "Template:Nhsc-v1-195"

Latest revision as of 16:33, 9 April 2006

established as their own area of influence and control led to uneasiness and greater militancy and radicalism among the English speakers. It is significant that acts, such as the Bayonet Constitution of 1887 and the overthrow of the monarchy, came at times when the goals of an independent nation based on a Western model, as espoused by the original missionaries, were seriously being pursued by Hawaiians and deliberately being defrayed by the missionary community.

The Hawaiian movement to expand the people's economic and political control through skills in English and other foreign languages never saw fruition because whenever there was a threat of success, violence was used to prevent it. The establishment of English medium schools actually backfired on the Hawaiian people during the Republic when the English speakers legislated their personal biases that English should completely replace Hawaiian, and it became official policy to do away with the Hawaiian language completely. The few Hawaiian medium schools remaining at the time of the overthrow were abolished by law, and English became even more pervasive as its official status formed a means for English speakers to move into occupations, such as lower-civil service, that formerly required skill in Hawaiian rather than English. Long after annexation and well into the territorial period, increased erosion of the Hawaiian language and growth of an English-speaking population led not to an increase in the political, social, and economic position of Hawaiians, but to a decrease in these areas proportionate to the loss of skill in Hawaiian.

The government continued to use the language in all business that dealt with the general population, and Hawaiian was secure in the churches, in its role as the lingua franca of the country even between non-Hawaiian residents of different language backgrounds. In 1888, when 84 percent of the nation's 8,770 school children were instructed through the medium of English, and only 15 percent received their education in Hawaiian, the vast majority of the children had Hawaiian as their dominant tongue. Over 75 percent of these children were of Hawaiian ancestry and certainly native speakers of Hawaiian. Queen Kapi'olani in that year is described by a personal servant as always speaking Hawaiian and requesting a translator when English was used. Another 20 percent of the school enrollment consisted of children of plantation workers of various non-English-speaking groups who were certainly familiar with some Hawaiian. Children of pure English and American ethnic parentage made up less than 5 percent of the entire school enrollment at the time and even in this group it is certain that some of them spoke Hawaiian. There are in fact haole plantation families with a history of children growing up speaking Hawaiian before English during the monarchical period. Hawaiian remained the normal vernacular of Hawai'i and the language of the street in Hawai'i until between 1910 and 1920, when it was replaced by pidgin English.

Hawaiian was still the dominant language in terms of numbers of speakers at the time of American annexation in 1898, despite official legislative policy replacing Hawaiian with English. Since Hawaiian was the language understood by the majority of the electorate and citizens of the new territory, it was the language used by politicians, including non-Hawaiians. The language was also used in the legislature, and a provision of the Organic Act (Section