Hawaiian Creole speaking people, locally known as Pidgin speakers, are an indigenous Polynesian people of the Hawaiian Islands. Although English and Hawaiian are the co-official languages of the state of Hawaii, Hawaiian Creole is used by many Hawaii residents in everyday casual conversation. A “pidgin” is “a language that,” according to Merriam Webster, “is formed from a mixture of several languages when speakers of different languages need to talk to each other.”

Hawaiian Creole developed during the 1800s and early 1900s, when immigrant laborers from China, Portugal, and the Philippines arrived to work in the plantations; American missionaries also came around that time. The immigrants used pidgins—first one that was based in Hawaiian and then one based in English—to communicate.

That linguistic system eventually evolved into a creole, which in general develops when the children of pidgin-speakers use the pidgin as a first language.

Sources for the population of Hawaiian Creole speakers vary ranging from the 5 year ACS (American Community Survey) of 1,600 to some alleging that as many as half of the state’s population of 1.4 million does.