Linguistic Atlas Project

The Linguistic Atlas of Hawaii (LAH) is a collection of interviews conducted by students of Claude M. Wise of Louisiana State University during his year as a visiting professor of speech at the University of Hawaii, 1949-1950. The collection comprises eight field notebooks, each containing a biography of the informant and responses written in phonetic transcription, using worksheets adopted from the South Atlantic worksheets of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada. LAH has at least two characteristics that make it unique among components of the Linguistic Atlas Project (LAP): it is a survey of an American territory, having been conducted nearly 10 years before Hawaii attained statehood in 1959, and, in addition to Atlas data, the notebooks each contain about 40 pages of transcriptions of informants using Hawaiian pidgin and creole expressions. To elicit these expressions, the fieldworkers used a list of Hawaiian colloquial expressions and words referenced in English in the Hawaiian Islands, based on Reinecke's (1935) University of Hawaii thesis, and a list of expressions from a report written by the Agricultural Department Experiment Station of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association (1930). Thus, the collection provides a window into the development of both English and Hawaiian Creole in America's 50th state.

Bibliography:

•Agricultural Department Experiment Station, Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association. 1930. Terms Used on Hawaiian Plantations. Report.

•McDavid, Raven I., Jr. 1974. New directions in American dialectology. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 5: 9-25.

•Reinecke, John E. 1935. Language and Dialect in Hawaii. University of Hawaii M.A. thesis.

•Reinecke, John E., and Stanley M. Tsuzaki. 1969. Language and Dialect in Hawaii: A Sociolinguistic History to 1935. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.