Pidgin (known to linguists as Hawai’i Creole) is an English-lexified creole spoken by some 700,000 speakers. While recent work has identified a number of changes in progress in vowels (Grama 2015) and discourse-pragmatic like (Stabile 2019), little is known about how traditionally “stable” variables behave. In English (the main lexifier of Pidgin), (dh)-stopping is a classic stable variable, contingent on speaker SEC, age and gender (see Labov 2001). This study is the first to investigate this variable in a creole.

Analysis of variation in (dh) by local Pidgin speakers from Hawai’i is conducted by drawing on two corpora: one recorded in the 1970s, and one recorded in the 2000s. Speakers are evenly balanced across age (old v. young) and gender (men v. women). Therefore, these corpora allow for the investigation of (dh) over real- and apparent time.

Preliminary results suggest gendered patterns over apparent time. Older men produce high rates of vernacular [d] (65%), while younger men show lowered rates (42%). Older women, by comparison, conserve low rates of [d] (20%) which rise in younger women (40%), creating a situation where old speakers exhibit strong gender differences which are attenuated in younger speakers. Moreover, these patterns are replicated in both corpora, suggesting that this variable is stable over time. These findings suggest both that pressures operative in the social hierarchies of lexifiers can manifest in creoles, and contribute to the understanding of how creoles can and do exhibit principled variation.