Language and Social Justice in Context: Hawai?i as a Case Study

This book builds on recent research exploring the intersection between language and social justice, using the multilingual context of Hawai'i as a case study. The author offers a discourse-centered approach, providing analyses of actual instances of language use, and argues that the wide range of languages in Hawai'i - Hawaiian, Pidgin, Japanese, Chinese, Tagalog, Ilocano, Marshallese, and Chuukese, as well as the phenomenon of language mixing - all have a significant contribution to make to society. The book also draws on language acquisition research demonstrating positive long-term effects of exposure to multiple languages, and makes the case for educational approaches that foster multilingual abilities among the young members of society. This book will be relevant for academics interested in the intersection of language and social justice and languages in Hawaiʻi, but it should also be of interest to undergraduate and especially graduate students in sociolinguistics, language revitalization and language documentation, discourse analysis, applied linguistics, and pragmatics. 

Scott Saft is Professor of Linguistics in the College of Hawaiian Language at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, USA.