Code shifting Hawaiian style: children's accommodation along a decreolizing continuum.

The article examines the range of sociolinguistic variation exhibited by children residing in Hawaii along a decreolizing speech continuum. The immediate setting is a multiethnic, socially mixed suburban neighborhood in the city of Hilo in Hawaii. The larger setting is the island chain of Hawaii. All the children are local. They are participating in the later stages of decreolization. Overlapping in ranks occurred for all variants, and it became clear that codes of speakers were distinctive only when viewed as complexes of variants and when compared with codes of other speakers. When all speakers were considered, ranking correlation for most pairs of variables was at the .001 level or better. Results were similar when the criterions ranking for the other ten variants was the rank for deletion be before a progressive. However, when only the eight consistently midscale speakers were considered, ranking correlation was of much lower statistical significance. In another study, the term code shifting has been chosen to denote the often very limited changes which occur as the subjects move toward one or another of the dialectal poles by increasing the number of target-code variants and the frequencies of such variants, sometimes over the course of a whole conversation and sometimes for brief turns of talk.