Attitudes to gender and creoles: a case study on mokes and titas

Abstract

Attitudes to use of creole languages are explored, particularly with regard to how these attitudes intersect with attitudes about gender. The focus is principally on attitudes to Pidgin in Hawai‘i but parallels are drawn with another Pacific creole,
Bislama. Attitudes to Pidgin use are viewed through respondents’ evaluations of the terms moke and tita — social categories that prototypically denote Pidgin-speaking, Locals of Polynesian descent (moke for males; tita for females). Evaluations of tita provide indirect and covert evidence that, as in many speech communities, female speakers of the (creole) vernacular are evaluated more negatively than male speakers are and often in normative sexual terms. The notion of ‘non-standardness’ is discussed in relation to the process of constructing normative ideologies about gender and language in a creole speech community.