Studying the lexical borrowing of the Japanese community living in Hawaii inspires several hypotheses in the field of sociolinguistics. The use of borrowed words is a linguistic device to create a new Japanese dialect--Hawaiian Japanese. The borrowed words reflect the process and degree of social and psychological adjustment to the new cultural environment. Words of conjunctive and disjunctive concepts are individually borrowed to meet various lexical needs; words of relational concepts are borrowed as conceptual systems. From the sociolinguistic point of view, the most important words in a language are those related to kinship relations, social relations, time, and quantity. Further investigation of lexical borrowings in other geographical areas would prove interesting. The study of lexical borrowing is worthwhile for the field of foreign language teaching. (VM)