Documenting an Endangered Language: The Inclusive First‐Person Plural Pronoun Kākou as a Resource for Claiming Ownership in Hawaiian

Abstract

This study employs tape-recorded data from interviews with elder speakers of Hawaiian conducted in the year 1970 to describe how a specific feature of the Hawaiian language, the first-person inclusive plural pronoun k akou, may be used in discourse as a resource for making claims of ownership on behalf of Hawaiians. To do so, the analysis first invokes Hanks's (2005) notions of deixis and deictic field to show how k akou can create a sense of community among speakers of Hawaiian. Insights from membership category analysis (Sacks 1992;Sacks and Schegloff 1979;Schegloff 2007) are then drawn on to demonstrate how k akou can be interpreted in interaction as a reference to the category of "Native Hawaiian" and how that category can be used to construe specific natural resources, activities, and forms of language as part of a Hawaiian identity. Discussion of the analysis centers on the status of Hawaiian as an endangered language in the midst of a revitalization movement where language and culture have been points of contestation. Usage of k akou to claim ownership is seen as a resource that can allow speakers of Hawaiian to work through the language itself to negotiate what it means to be "Native Hawaiian." [Documentary linguistics, Endangered languages, Deixis, Membership categorization analysis, Hawaiian]

Linguistic Anthropology in 2017: It Could Be Otherwise

“…Such perspectives can support the important social functions of what might be considered token uses of endangered languages (a practice attested to in several other publications focusing on Indigenous‐language revitalization this year, e.g., Newmark et al. ; Saft ).…”

“…A significant number of publications this year describe Indigenous approaches to sustaining and revitalizing language practices endangered by legacies of settler colonialism, many with attention to how the epistemological and ontological logics for so doing differed from those made dominant by those same legacies (e.g., Ahlers ; Berk ; Dlaske ; Feliciano‐Santos ; Graber ; Newmark, Walker, and Stanford ; Saft ; the “Collaborative Linguistic Anthropology Matters: To Native American Communities” [3‐1190] panel at the 2017 AAA meeting). For example, Ahlers (, 49) notes how linguists’ assessments of a speaker's competence in an endangered language often focus on the speaker's ability to produce morphological paradigms closely mapped to a “prototypical paradigm” characterized by “few if any irregularities.” However, in a discussion of morphological irregularities in a corpus elicited from Kawaiisu elders, Ahlers notes that though linguists interpreted this variance as resulting from “disruption of intergenerational transmission of linguistic knowledge” that had “hindered the acquisition of this paradigm,” the elders themselves “conceptualize[d] the selection among alternative forms” as a “critical ground for the expression of individual identity and style” (50).…”