pidgin bible

Wycliffe has finally translated the Bible into Hawaiian Pidgin!

"God wen get so plenny love an aloha fo da peopo inside da world, dat he wen send me, his one an ony Boy, so dat everybody dat trus me no get cut off from God, but get da kine life dat stay to da max foeva." (John Tell Bout Jesus 3:16)

I guess I'd have to say I'm in favor of it, but part of me has a negative reaction to it, as though the pidgin should be considered poor English rather than a language in its own right.
If the pidgin is regarded as its own language -- a shaky determination with pidgins, which usually don't have their own written literature, a codified lexicon, or even status as the sole or primary language to a group of people -- then it makes sense to treat pidgin speakers as a separate people group.

Otherwise, aren't we just elevating poor grammar and language skills to the level of the standard forms? Where then do we draw a line for what makes good or bad English?

The point one of the translators makes about the koine Greek scriptures is a good one. The gospel wasn't entrusted first to the well-educated and established members of Roman society, but to the cast-offs who spoke a pretty mangled form of Greek.

The difference I suppose is that koine was a universal second language throughout the ancient world, much like English is today, and pidgin languages usually are small subsets of a larger language family that pidgin speakers already are familiar with and deal with on a regular basis.

In Haiti, only the wealthy 10 percent speak French, and the 90 percent who speak only Kreyol aren't going to understand French properly if it bites them in the tucish, as it sometimes does. Kreyol is the language that defines their culture and their world.

Is that the case for the pidgin English they're talking about in Hawaii? Beats me, but I suppose it can't hurt to have the Bible in any language -- even a pidgin language -- if it opens doors to more people finding Christ. It's not likely to do that, though, if the language hasn't got a more or less codified and universally accepted lexicon, though.