Vocabulary
“Da Kine”: Hawaii’s All-Purpose Word
In Hawaiian Pidgin and local Hawaiian English, “da kine” stands in for a thing, person or quality you have not named — a filler with more social work than “whatchamacallit”. It is one of the fastest ways to tell local Hawaii speech from California English.
The question, as everyone in the survey sees it
Can “da kine” stand in for a thing you have not named?
Hawaiian Pidgin uses “da kine” the way some people use “whatchamacallit”.
- Yes — I use “da kine”
- No — that is not a word I use
- Something else
Who says what
Each accent profile in the survey has an expected answer to this question. Where a profile allows more than one answer, the region genuinely varies.
No — that is not a word I use
Expected in 58 of the survey's accent profiles.
- Modern RP
- Bristol
- West Country
- London
- Multicultural London
- Birmingham
- Scouse
- Mancunian
- South Yorkshire
- West Yorkshire
- Geordie
- Central Scottish
- Highland Scottish
- South Wales
- Northern Irish
- Cork
- East Irish
- Southern Appalachian
- New York City
- California
- Texas
- Boston
- Chicago
- Newfoundland
- Jamaican
- Bajan
- Australian
- New Zealand
- Canadian
- South African
- Indian
- Nigerian
- Kenyan
- Pakistani
- Filipino
- Singaporean
- Hong Kong
- Melbourne
- Ghanaian
- Trinidadian
- Malaysian
- Midland
- African American
- Philadelphia
- New Orleans
- Vancouver
- Perth
- South Indian
- Liberian
- Sri Lankan
- Spanish-accented English
- French-accented English
- German-accented English
- Italian-accented English
- Russian-accented English
- Brazilian Portuguese-accented English
- Japanese-accented English
- Mandarin-accented English
Why this question is in the survey
Vocabulary questions like this one are the fastest way to place a speaker, because the answer is a single conscious word choice rather than a sound people cannot hear in themselves. They also travel: a word that splits England into five regions often splits North America into three quite different ones. Every answer is stored with a coarse map cell for the town you grew up in, and a region is coloured in once at least five people there have answered.
See the full question bank, the accent profiles these answers feed, or how the scoring works.