Languages Of Polynesia

From Our Own Correspondent

Papeete, July 2.

WE learn from the revealer of secrets, the Honolulu Civic Forum, that the standard language of the Hawaiian Islands, at the present time, is Pidgtn-English. To be sure, we were aware that Hawaiian had, long ago, be come as obsolete as Sanskrit; but, inas much as the language taught in the schools is the Ohio dialect of the Eng lish tongue, we believed that patois to be the universal speech of the islands.

True Pidgin-English has never been spoken in the Tahitian islands. The first Europeans to settle ,on Tahiti and the adjacent islands were missionaries of the London Missionary Society. Consequently, those native Tahitians who acquired a knowledge of the strangers’ language, were instructed in the King’s English.

The coming of the Chinese has done some weird things to the Tahitian langu age. Strange enough, no Chinese words have been introduced. The Tahitian language has, however, been torn apart, deprived of every trace of grammatical structure, and again put together “with out form and void,”

This primitive patter—long the langu age of commerce in the Tahitian islands —is falling into disuse, as the younger generation of both Tahitians and Chinese are instructed in French.

The present-day language of conversa tion, about Papeete, is a blend of Tahitian and French. French and Tahitian words and phrases are tossed into the conversation in bewildering confusion. A listener has need to be learned in both Tahitian and French in order to com prehend what it is all about.