Hawai'i Creole is a creole language lexified predominantly by English but also by other languages such as Hawaiian and Japanese. It is spoken by approximately 600,000 people in the American state of Hawai'i. For details on its lexicon and origins (including an account of the influence of other languages on its morphosyntax), see section I of the chapter on the phonology of Hawai'i Creole (Sakoda and Siegel, this volume). Although the lexicon of Hawai'i Creole is closely related to English, its morphology and syntax are quite distinct. In general, like other creole languages, the amount of bound morphology is less than that of the lexifier language and there are quite different morphosyntactic rules for expressing tense, aspect, modality and negation, as well as for relativization, complementation and focusing.

Hawai'i Creole is a creole language lexified predominantly by English but also by other languages such as Hawaiian and Japanese. It is spoken by approximately 600,000 people in the American state of Hawai'i . For details on its lexicon and origins (including an account of the influence of other languages on its morphosyntax), see section 1 of the chapter on the phonology of Hawaii Creole (Sakoda and Siegel, other volume).

Hawai'i Creole is spoken by an estimated 600,000 people in the US state of Hawai'i. In the linguistics literature, it is usually called Hawai'i (or Hawaiian) Creole English, but its speakers call it "Pidgin". While Hawai'i Creole uses many words from Hawaiian and other languages, the majority of its vocabulary comes from English; however, the phonology and semantics are quite different from English. Before describing the phonology of Hawai'i Creole, this chapter presents some background information on its historical development, current use, and vocabulary.