From https://ethnomed.org/resource/chinese-language/ Northern prejudice at work? The second sentence, which really needs 唔 rather than the formal 不 for `not', is standard, colloquial Cantonese rather than slang although Cantonese speakers would not use it in formal writing.
Useful links
Archchinese.com provides a battery of resources for learners of Mandarin Chinese, including animated illustrations of stroke order for thousands of character and sound files for tone discrimination. Another useful site is Mandarin tools, which includes many links to other web resources. Chinesepod offers over 1000 MP3 pods with dialogues at different levels and PDF transcripts. Both sites charge learners, but Chinespod offer a free 7-day trial and continue to send those who take it electronic copies of `ChinesePod Weekly' whether they subscribe or not. There are some useful elementary exercises (using simplified characters) on abney.homestead.com There are free lessons available on the CCTV (Chinese television) site: these are situational dialogues with highlighting of particular phrases. Although they are well produced, only the more recent videos are available on the site. One or two cartoon clips teaching very basic phrases and emphasising the basic tones have recently (April 2011) been added on YouTube. An application which enables you to search a large number of dictionaries simultaneously and includes other features such as recognition of hand-written characters is Mike Love's Pleco. It has to be purchased but an extensive description and interview with the originator can be accessed here.
Typing in Chinese: Those who have not learned to use one of the standard input methods are still able to insert Chinese words and phrases into their documents. One method is to type into Google or another translation programme words in English which they know will generate the required Chinese characters. The resulting texts will often include superfluous characters that can then be edited out. For example, `ocean ghost prince' translates as 海洋鬼王子. This can then be cut down to 洋鬼子 (`foreign devil'). An alternative method is to use a site or programme which enables you to type in Roman script and then choose from the menu of Chinese characters that appears. For those more familiar with Cantonese than Putonghua, a useful site is http://www.cantoneseinput.com
On-line dictionary help: Google translate allows two-way translation between English and Chinese written in either traditional or simplified characters and the Putonghua pronunciation can be heard by clicking on the loud speaker icon. Chinese characters can similarly be typed or pasted into the Purpleculture site to give the Pinyin pronunciation, with audio again available. As with other languages, Chinese text can be read on the Wordchamp site with pop-up glosses giving the English for individual words.
Child language acquisition: A corpus of language produced by a Mandarin-speaking child growing up on Shenzhen and then exposed to Cantonese in a Hong Kong kindergarten is available via the website of the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre at the Chinese University of Hong Kong..
Cantonese: For vocabulary lists and other aids to learning Cantonese, see Adam Sheik's site , which now includes a Cantonese dictionary searchable both in characters and roman script. Unfortunately, the dictionary does not yet include audio but some basic phrases can be heard on About.com. Julie Groves's 2008 Baptist University thesis is an interesting investigation into the attitudes of Hong Kong Cantonese, mainland Cantonese and Putonghua speakers towards the status of Cantonese in relation to Putongua. There is an interesting account in Wikipedia of the 2010 protests which led to the shelving of a proposal to switch from Cantonese to Putonghua as the main language for Guangdong TV programming and in December 2011 there was a government denial of a report that restrictions on Cantonese would be imposed in March. A searchable corpus of mid-20th century Hong Kong Cantonese, much of it drawn from the film industry, is available on the website of the Research Centre on Linguistics and Language Information Services of the Hong Kong Institute of Education. Samples of Cantonese from the 19th century, together with information on Cantonese society at that time, are available in Benjamin Hobson's 廣東對話, written in 1850 as a guide for missionaries intending to work in southern China. This can be searched for individual characters on-line but only four sample pages of the bilingual dialogues themselves can be viewed on the site.
Latin sources for Chinese history: For writing in Latin on Chinese topics, see the web page SINA LATINA.
My 1998 dissertation, `The Other Side of the Hill: Learning Cantonese as a Second Language in Hong Kong', discusses the difficulties I encountered myself:
A talk I gave to a school assembly in 2004 on my experience as a student of the language at Chinese university can be heard on the BLMCSS website. Two essays I wrote at the end of the 90s:`The Future of Cantonese: Current Trends' and `Cantonese, English and Putonghua in a Hong Kong secondary school', can be downloaded below. Dor extensive material on other,more recent learners' experience, see the LEARNING CANTONESE page on this site.
Here is one of the most popular Cantonese singers from the last generation, 徐小鳳 (Paula Tsui) singing one of her best-known songs, 風的季節 (`Winds of the Seasons'):
Though few foreigners achieve really good pronunciation, some do become quite proficient. Here is British (NOT Australian!) singer Barry Cox performing in Cantonese in Macao:
Taiwanese artist Teresa Tang, perhaps the best-known Chinese singer of the 2oth century, performed romantic ballads in very clear Putonghua/Mandarin. Here is her most famous number, 月亮代表我的心 (Yue Liang Dai Biao Wo Di Xin - `The moon represents my heart'):
Chinese is a member of the language group known as Sino-Tibetan, which also includes the Tibeto-Burman languages and probably originated somewhere in South-West China. Most scholars believe that first split in this family was between Chinese and Tibeto-Burman, though there is a minority view that Chinese, rather than forming a major branch on its own, is in fact part of the Bodic sub-group that includes Tibetan and closely related languages and that, therefore, `Tibeto-Burman' would be a more appropriate name for the whole family rather than just for the non-Chinese languages in it.
The download below gives a brief description of links between Chinese and other languages which are generally accepted together with some questions to which answers are given in the second document:
Because of the difficulty of learning to read in Chinese characters, a number of Chinese reformers in the earlier part of the 20th century envisaged an eventual jettisoning of the old system in favour of Romanisation. Given the status of the characters as a symbol of Chinese cultural identity, it is unlikely such a radical scheme will ever be totally carried out. Students do, though, learn the Pinyin Romanisation of Putonghua at school. American scholar John DeFrancis (1911-2009), though perhaps best known for his readers aimed at helping foreigners learn the characters, remained a firm advocate of their eventual replacement and argued in a 2006 paper (down-loadable below) that, even without government promotion of such an outcome, the growing popularity of texting etc. would gradually lead to their abandonment.
`A China of Many tongues' (reproduced from ChinesePod Weekly, 22 & 29 June 2011)
Many a cocksure Chinese learner has arrived in China feeling ready to face the world of Chinese only to step off the plane and find that they don't understand a single thing that people around them are saying (also known as "I can't believe I paid that much for two semesters of Chinese for nothing" -itis). This is particularly acute in southern China, but even in parts of China where "standard Mandarin" is purported to be spoken it can be hard to find very many people speaking anything closely resembling the standard.
This doesn't mean that your Mandarin learning is useless! Far from it, in fact -- somewhere around a billion people speak it in one form or another. What's important to remember is that for a large number of these people Mandarin is a second or third language, and so, depending on where you are, you may well hear a language (or, technically, a dialect — more on that in a moment) that sounds very little like Mandarin.
Language or dialect?
Technically, Mandarin Chinese is a "language," and the other flavors of Chinese are "dialects." The difference is, as linguist Max Weinreich put it, that "a language is a dialect with an army and navy." By that same logic German, French and Norwegian are dialects of "European." However, this discussion tends to devolve into politics rather quickly, and so it suffices to say that when below we talk about Chinese dialects they may well be as mutually incomprehensible as Irish and Italian.
10 little dialect families sitting in a tree
Chinese, as a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, is broken up into 10 dialect families -- Mandarin (官話, guānhuà), Jin (晉語, Jìnyǔ), Wu (吳語, Wúyǔ), Hui (徽語, Huīyǔ), Gan (贛語, Gànyǔ), Xiang (湘語, Xiāngyǔ), Min (閩語, Mǐnyǔ), Hakka (客家話, Kèjiāhuà), Yue (粵語, Yuèyǔ), and Ping (平話, pínghuà). However, three of these — Jin, Hui, and Ping — are commonly considered to be sub-dialects of Mandarin, Wu, and Yue, respectively, so we'll focus on the remaining seven. This week we'll look at Mandarin, Wu, Gan, and Xiang, and explore Min, Hakka, and Yue next week.
Mandarin (官話, guānhuà) - 1.3 billion+ speakers
Without a doubt, Mandarin Chinese is the language of China. From north to south, east to west, if you speak Mandarin, you'll almost certainly be able to find someone who can speak it back to you. This is true (though the percentages are lower) even in areas with large populations of ethnic minorities who speak totally different languages (e.g., Tibet and Xinjiang), thanks to nationwide Mandarin education in schools beginning after 1949.
Technically its name in Chinese is 官話 (guānhuà) — literally, the speech of officials (the Mandarins). Various monikers for Chinese in Chinese include — 國語 (guóyǔ), 漢語 (hànyǔ), 普通話 (pǔtōnghuà), etc. — also all refer to Mandarin Chinese, and it's generally what we mean when we say "Chinese" in English. It's not a single monolithic language, either, having eight distinct dialects itself, but these dialects are more or less mutually intelligible, with "newscaster Mandarin" probably being the closest to truly standard Mandarin that exists. To get an idea of the breadth of the various Mandarin dialects, see this趙本山 (Zhào Běnshān) skit (小品, xiǎopǐn) for a taste of northeastern Mandarin and this Deng Xiaoping speech for a little southwestern Mandarin. Just in case you haven't gotten enough standard Mandarin from us to fill your plate, CCTV's evening news is always a bastion of official pronunciation.
Wu (吳語, Wúyǔ) - 71 million speakers
The Wu family of dialects centers around eastern China, including Shanghai, most of Zhejiang province, southern Jiangsu province, and parts of Anhui, Jiangxi, and Fujian provinces. Like most Chinese dialects it descends from Middle Chinese, but because it broke off earlier than many other dialects, it retains several ancient features. Like Mandarin, Wu is not a single homogenous language, but unlike Mandarin, many Wu subdialects are mutually unintelligible. Historically, the Suzhou dialect was the predominant Wu dialect, as the city was a major cultural and commercial center in pre-modern China. However, in recent years the rise of Shanghai as one of the world's great commercial centers has eclipsed Suzhou's prominence, and now Shanghainese is often considered Wu's most representative form.
The various Wu dialects differ greatly, so we've tried to pick a few samples that are representative of various Wu dialect branches. Here's a variety show skit with the actress speaking Suzhou dialect, a bit from Shanghai TV featuring a foreigner speaking extremely good Shanghainese, and a comedy skit in Wenzhou dialect (often considered the most distinct of the Wu dialects, and totally unintelligible even to native speakers of other Wu dialects).
Xiang is better known as Hunanese (湖南話, húnánhuà) as it's mostly spoken in Hunan province, though it is also spoken in adjoining regions of Sichuan and Guangxi provinces. It is split into two branches, Old Xiang and New Xiang, with Old Xiang spoken in the south and New Xiang spoken in the north. Xiang has been heavily influenced by Mandarin, as Hunan is surrounded on three sides by Mandarin-speaking regions, and New Xiang has lost many of the Middle Chinese elements which Old Xiang has managed to retain. Given the number of Hunanese people working outside of Hunan, it seems that one encounters Hunanese all across the country. Mao Zedong is a particularly famous Xiang speaker (this is the famous video of him declaring the founding of the People's Republic of China). For a more modern example, here's a particularly amusing China Mobile advertisement done in Hunanese (the Changsha (長沙, Chángshā) dialect specifically).
Gan (贛語, Gànyǔ) - 31 million speakers
The last of the dialects we'll look at today is Gan, spoken by the Gan ethnic group in Jiangxi province, as well in as parts of the surrounding Hunan, Hubei, Anhui, and Fujian provinces. It's also commonly known as Jiangxinese (江西話,jiāngxīhuà). The dialect spoken in Nanchang (南昌, Nánchāng) is considered the dialect's standard, though like the other dialects we've looked at, there are significant differences between various subdialects, even to the point of unintelligibility. Phonologically Gan and Hakka (which we'll look at next week) are similar, though Mandarin has also clearly exerted significant influence. There aren't too many examples of Gan online, though we found a series of crosstalk skits in a combination of Mandarin and Gan (here's one example), and also this (rather odd) iPhone app introduction that claims to be in Nanchang dialect.
Despair?
We know that some people look at the sheer variety of languages spoken in China and despair that they'll never really be able to communicate, but this shouldn't be the case. As we mentioned earlier, Mandarin is an almost universal language in China, so learning Mandarin to fluency will solve 99% of your communication issues. You can look at the other dialects like spices to put on your linguistic dish — they might not be the main course, but they certainly make things more interesting.
A China of Many Tongues (Part 2)
In today's newsletter we'll continue the taste test of Chinese dialects we began in the last newsletter, this time looking at pétillant Yue, tart Min, and woody Hakka.
Yue (粤話, Yuèyǔ) - 71 million speakers
Though you may not have heard it referred to as 'Yue' before, you've almost certainly heard the predominant Yue dialect — Cantonese. The native tongue of much of Guangdong province, not to mention Hong Kong, Macau, and much of the Chinese diaspora, Cantonese is often the language that people think of when they think of "Chinese" (though the increasing prevalence of Mandarin overseas is beginning to change this perception). However, thanks to Hong Kong's thriving entertainment industry, Cantonese continues to reach ears worldwide in the form of music and movies, while many of mainland China's biggest stars hail from the SAR.
Like all of the dialects we've discussed thus far, Yue is far from monolithic, containing several sub-dialects with varying levels of mutual intelligibility. One of the largest is Taishanese (台山話, Táishān huà, often rendered as Toishan on Hoisan in English), which was the de facto dialect of Chinatowns across the United States until the 1970's. Despite Guangzhou and Taishan being only sixty miles apart, the multitude of rivers and mountains standing between them means that Cantonese speakers have difficulty understanding Taishanese, and vice versa.
For your listening pleasure, here's a short clip from a Taishan TV show and a pretty catchy song in Taishanese, as well as a five-minute clip from 無間道 ('Infernal Affairs'), one of the most successful films to come out of Hong Kong in the last decade, in Cantonese (it's the climax of the first movie, and somewhat intense).
Min (閩語, Mǐnyǔ) - 60 million speakers
Min is probably the most diverse dialect of any we've looked at, and is actually split into five major subgroups — Northern Min, Eastern Min, Central Min, Pu-Xian Min, and Southern Min. All of these dialects originate in Fujian province, but are also spoken in Taiwan, Hainan, and small parts of Zhejiang and Jiangsu. Central Min (閩中語, Mǐnzhōng huà) centers around Fuzhou, the capital city of Fujian, while Southern Min (閩南話, Mǐnnán huà) contains a number of widely-spoken subdialects including Hokkien (福建語, Fújiàn huà) and Teochew (潮州語, Cháozhōu huà) that are spoken in China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, and elsewhere worldwide.
Talking about the differences in these subdialects would take far more space than we have available, so instead we'll provide extra examples of the various dialects so that you can get a feel for their differences.
Rounding out our journey through Chinese dialects is Hakka, a language spoken in scattered areas across Guangdong, Fujian, Taiwan, and parts of Hainan, as well as in diaspora communities worldwide. Because it is spoken in such scattered areas, Hakka has developed a large number of sub-dialects, not all of which are mutually intelligible. The Hakka spoken in Mei County (梅县, méixiàn), northern Guangdong province, is generally considered to be standard Hakka, but both Guangdong and Taiwan have large Hakka-speaking populations that tend to dominate the dialect's usage.
We sincerely hope you've enjoyed our brief journey through the amazing world of Chinese dialects. There's so much more that we could cover, but hopefully we've given you enough of a taste that you'll be able to explore more on your own.
The most complicated Chinese character?
Pronounced biáng in Mandarin, this character, used in the name of a Shaanxi noodles dish (see below), is allegedly the most complicated one in Chinese with a total of 57 strokes. for a mnemonic (in simplified characters) to assist in remembering how to write it, see here.
Separated at Birth: the Story of Cantonese (reproduced from Chinese Pod Weekly, 2 November 2011)
Here at ChinesePod, we focus almost exclusively on Mandarin Chinese; don't blame us, it is the world's most widely-spoken language! And, while we've addressed China's dizzying myriad of dialects in our newsletter before, we haven't talked much about what we like to call "the big split": the division between predominantly Mandarin-speaking areas and predominantly Cantonese-speaking regions, which essentially breaks down to a split between Southeastern China and the rest of the country. When first learning about China and Chinese language, many students are surprised to learn that "hold on a minute, there are two Chinese languages?!", so in this week's ChinesePod Weekly, we're going to take a quick look (it's a very complex subject) at what that means and how it happened.
How Did It Start?
To give a bit of background information, Mandarin (nowadays usually referred to as 普通話 (Pǔtōnghuà) literally "common language", or 官話 (Guānhuà)) is the predominant language in most of Mainland China, and is the medium of instruction is most schools. Just about everywhere in China, you'll be able to find someone who speaks Mandarin, but it's easier in some places than others: much as in the United States, Southeastern China strongly maintains a culture, identity and linguistic profile quite distinct from the rest of the country. One of the more interesting facets of this is the Cantonese language (usually called 廣東話 (Guǎngdōnghuà) today, though we'll get to its other names later), which is the primary or prestige dialect of Yue Chinese (粵語, Yuèyǔ). Many Westerners are astonished to find that Mandarin and Cantonese are not mutually intelligible; indeed, this map showing Shanghainese perspectives on the rest of China describes Guangdong Province (廣東省, Guǎngdōng Shěng), the center of the Canto-sphere, as 危險 + 奇怪 的語言 (wēixiǎn + qíguài de yǔyán) or "dangerous and strange language", illustrating how foreign Cantonese can sound to a Mandarin speaker. So how did this division happen? How could one country have such a huge linguistic gulf?
Then What Happened?
廣東 is far from the traditional centers of Chinese language and culture, and in fact didn't really become part of the modern conception of "China" until sometime during the reign of the Qin Dynasty (秦朝, Qín Cháo), around 210 BCE, when troops moved in from the north to conquer what is now Guangdong Province and its environs. Before this, the region was dominated by Yue (粵) language and culture, which had evolved somewhat separately from its northern counterparts and in fact shared more with its Southeast Asian neighbors than with Central or Northern Chinese culture. The collapse of the 秦朝 led to the formation of the Nanyue (南越), a kingdom mostly independent from the ruling Chinese dynasties. The 南越 period was critical because it cemented a mix of the nearby Chinese culture and traditional Southern culture that remains, in some form, today. The 南越 rulers were mostly of Central Chinese origin, so the cultural and linguistic intermingling they promoted helped set the foundations of modern Cantonese culture and language.
Really? No Way!
As Northern China devolved into conflict, many Han Chinese fled to the more peaceful South, bringing with them their own mix of languages. This boost in population solidified the language being spoken in the Guangdong area, because now the population was substantial enough to make Cantonese a useful and popular language. Later, when the Tang Dynasty (唐朝, Táng Cháo) was in power, its official language bore a strong resemblence to Cantonese. According to Prof. Roxana Fung of Hong Kong Polytechnic University, “Every dynasty had its official language to help the emperors rule. The official language of the Tang dynasty has left plenty of its traits in Cantonese,” and the relative geographical isolation of the Southeast meant that the language remained largely unchanged over time.
This same isolation, however, meant that the Cantonese language did not become especially widespread until the 19th century, when the foreign presence in Guangzhou (廣州), Guangdong's largest city, grew due to the rise in foreign trade. 廣州 was one of the few cities in the area that was open to foreign trade, and as such businessmen, foreign traders, and other immigrants learned Cantonese, ensuring that the 廣州 dialect of Yue[ZH] would become the region's dominant language from then on. It is, in fact, from廣州's English name "Canton" (adapted from the Portuguese "Cantão") that Cantonese gets its English name.
How Did It End?
Some Chinese scholars argue that Cantonese is closer to Classical Chinese or Old Chinese in many ways, and in that sense is more culturally representative of Chinese history, so even though Mandarin is more widely-spoken, Cantonese still holds an important place in the linguistic world. Indeed, it's often said that Cantonese has more "historical roots" than Mandarin, and Cantonese is, in fact, still the most common language among Overseas Chinese, particularly in the United States and Canada. The city of Taishan (台山, pronounced as "Hoisan" in Taishanese), for instance, is the ancestral home of an astonishing number of Overseas Chinese. Much of what North Americans initially viewed as Chinese customs and culture were in fact uniquely Taishanese, and there was even some linguistic intermingling.
Cantonese is a unique and interesting language, with deep cultural connections and a history all its own. If you'd like to learn more, this dictionary is a great place to get started. We hope you enjoyed this little trip into the history of Cantonese, thanks!
_Schools may be killing dialect
Simon Parry, South China Morning Post 27/5/12
Linguists warn that using Putonghua to teach Chinese language is shifting the balance against Cantonese, which could die within generations.
Education officials have been urged to review their policy of using Putonghua to teach Chinese language and literacy in Hong Kong, amid fears that Cantonese is becoming marginalised and is at risk of dying out within generations. More than 160 of the city's 1,025 government primary and secondary schools are using Putonghua in Chinese language lessons after a government policy encouraging a switch was introduced in 2003. Before that Cantonese had been used. However, linguists say studies indicate the policy is accelerating the decline in the use of Cantonese in Hong Kong and could contribute to the ultimate disappearance of the language as Putonghua becomes more widely used. Stephen Matthews, associate professor in linguistics at the University of Hong Kong, said a study conducted by one of his Masters students indicated that children taught Chinese language in Putonghua were beginning to use it in the playground as well. "She [the student] also did a survey of languages at home and found there was more Putonghua used in the children's home," he said. "Again, that is shifting the balance. There is less Cantonese in the children's life and more Putonghua." Matthews argues that Cantonese is at threat from current policies and trends. "[Cantonese] might survive for 50 years or so, but after it may well be on its way out," he said. "It is difficult to calculate the timing but in the medium to long term, Cantonese is an endangered language." The effect of the language dying would be that children could not talk to their grandparents and traditions such as Cantonese opera would disappear as fewer young people spoke the language, he said. "We have seen that happen in other language-shift situations," said Matthews, who has studied the decline of the Hakka and Chiu Chow dialects. "It generally happens over three generations. It is sad when that happens." Matthews has co-authored several books on Cantonese language and grammar with his wife and colleague Virginia Yip Choy-yin, professor of linguistics and modern languages at Chinese University. He called on schools to pursue a policy of two written languages and three spoken languages. "Personally I would like to see Cantonese saved," he said. "It [the government] should let not Cantonese fade away from the school." Thomas Lee Hun-tak, a linguistics professor at Chinese University, said he would prefer to see a mix of Putonghua and Cantonese used for Chinese language learning, with Putonghua used at higher levels only. "The core foundation training in Chinese should be taught in Cantonese. That doesn't conflict with developing a high proficiency in Mandarin," he said. Lee said he was worried the Hong Kong government would follow the "underlying assumption of central government policy" that Putonghua should be promoted over minority dialects, in the mistaken belief it is socially and economically beneficial. An Education Bureau spokeswoman said: "Under the existing policy, schools may choose to teach the Chinese language subject in either Cantonese or Putonghua. We encourage those schools that believe they have the preconditions for success in place to try teaching Chinese language in Putonghua. "In the last decade, many studies on teaching Chinese language in Putonghua have been conducted. In light of the inconclusive findings of the local studies conducted so far, we recommend that schools should consider their own circumstances, including the students' ability to learn in Putonghua, and the availability of support measures to facilitate a smooth transition, in deciding whether to use Putonghua as the medium of instruction for the Chinese language subject."
Stephen Matthews and Lee Hun-tak
South China Morning Post Education Bureau rapped over Cantonese 'not an official language' gaffe Claim Cantonese 'not an official language' leaves public lost for words Johnny Tam and Stuart Lau Sunday, 02 February, 2014
An article on the Education Bureau's website claiming "Cantonese is not an official language" has been removed after criticism. The article was posted on the website's Language Learning Support section on January 24. It aimed to promote the importance of bilingualism and trilingualism as the city "develops alongside the rapidly growing China" and "the daily usage of Mandarin [in Hong Kong] becomes common". It said: "Although the Basic Law stipulates that Chinese and English are the two official languages in Hong Kong, nearly 97 per cent of the local population learn Cantonese (a Chinese dialect that is not an official language) as their commonly used daily language." The article was removed yesterday. The webpage is now "being updated". Education sector lawmaker Ip Kin-yuen said the bureau had "done wrong" because it was not its business to define what language was official. But he commended it for quickly removing the article and apologising. People took to various online forums to express their anger. "Another issue after the national education saga?" wrote one user. Horace Chin Wan-kan, assistant Chinese professor at Lingnan University, said the bureau had fuelled mainland-Hong Kong tensions. "The bureau's move is to promote teaching Chinese in classrooms using Mandarin, which violates the bilingualism and trilingualism policy," Chin said. "Defining Cantonese as not official doesn't make sense. We never say if British English is official, although many prefer the British accent and spelling." A Facebook group "Hong Kong language learning" has appealed to people to e-mail the bureau to urge the government to admit "a blunder" and "apologise to the public". Another bureau article posted yesterday said it had made "an inaccurate interpretation of Cantonese" in the feature and apologised for any misunderstanding. The Basic Law says that as well as written Chinese, English may be used by the executive, legislature and judiciary. But there is no rule about verbal language, such as Cantonese. Eric Cheung Tat-ming, principal law lecturer at the University of Hong Kong, said the law related only to the written word in terms of "official languages". "There have never been attempts to define what official languages mean in the oral context," Cheung said. "And in Hong Kong courts, as well as other official circumstances, the choice of the spoken language has been one based on commonality, so Cantonese is preferred." To say Cantonese was not an official language therefore had "no legal justification". It would have been safer to call Cantonese "a non-official language in the People's Republic of China", Cheung added.------ This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as `Bureau acts after language gaffe'
SCMP Column My Take Alex Lo Tuesday, 04 February, 2014, 5:23am Why Cantonese is a real language in Hong Kong
When it comes to Cantonese, I am a diehard regional southerner and
proud of it. By Cantonese, I mean the language spoken in Hong Kong and
Guangdong. I say language, not dialect. Yes, there are minor differences
in expressions on
both sides of the border but it's nothing like it has with Putonghua.
Despite
an apology from the Education Bureau, I don't think it was a gaffe when
it said in its website's section on language learning support that
"Cantonese is not an official language". And lawmaker Regina Ip Lau
Suk-yee, what did you write in my newspaper the other day - Cantonese is
"a mere dialect"? Go back to school, Ip. The ancient canonical Chinese
texts predated Putonghua, but not necessarily Cantonese.
Strictly
speaking, the bureau is not wrong. Chinese is one of the two official
languages of Hong Kong, but there is no mention of Cantonese or
Putonghua as an official language in the Basic Law. But local officials
increasingly operate under the assumption of the central government,
which gives official status to Putonghua, with other Chinese languages
relegated to being dialects. The denigration of Cantonese in Hong Kong
began with the
colonial Brits.
The usual argument is that a
dialect has no written script. Well, our current written Chinese script
called "baihua" or vernacular system emerged from the May 4th Movement's
modernisation of the language. The script is neither
Putonghua, a northern spoken language, nor Cantonese, a southern one.
This written script works equally well for Putonghua, Cantonese or other
Chinese speakers. Cantonese has a much longer and venerable lineage
than Putonghua, a mix of the Han Chinese, Mongolian andManchu
languages from the Qing dynasty. Cantonese could possibly date back to
the Warring States period, though there was then no unified China and
the south was considered "barbarian". ButCantonese emerged
as a recognisable language from the time of the An Lushan Revolt during
the Tang dynasty, when an exodus of refugees flooded the south.
As
the scholar Nan Huai-Chin
wrote: "Hakka and Cantonese were the Tang dynasty's national languages;
Hokkien was the Song dynasty's. Putonghua is a [recent] national
language." -------------- This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as Why Cantonese is a real language
English has been the dominant global language
for a century, but is it the language of the future? If Mandarin Chinese is to
challenge English globally, then it first has to conquer its own backyard, South East Asia. In Malaysia's
southernmost city of Johor Bahru,
the desire to speak good English has driven some children to make a remarkable
two-hour journey to school every day. Nine-year-old Aw Yee Han hops on a yellow
mini van at 04:30. His passport is tucked inside a small pouch hung around his
neck. This makes it easier for him to show it to
immigration officials when he reaches the Malaysian border. His school is located on the other side, in
Singapore, where unlike in Malaysia,
English is the main language. It's not your typical school run, but his
mother, Shirley Chua thinks it's worth it.
"Science and maths are all written in
English so it's essential for my son to be fluent in the language," she
says.
An estimated 15,000
students from southern Johor state make the same bus journey across the border
every day. It may seem like a drastic measure, but some parents don't trust the
education system in Malaysia
- they worry that the value of English is declining in the country. Since independence from
the British in 1957, the country has phased out schools that teach in English.
By the early 1980s, most students were learning in the national language of
Malay. As a result, analysts
say Malaysian graduates became less employable in the IT sector.
"We've seen a
drastic reduction in the standard of English in our country, not just among the
students but I think among the teachers as well," says political
commentator Ong Kian Ming.
Those who believe that
English is important for their children's future either send their kids to
expensive private schools or to Singapore,
where the government has been credited as being far-sighted for adopting the
language of its former colonial master.
Nearly three-quarters of
the population in Singapore
are ethnic Chinese but English is the national language.
Many believe that this
has helped the city state earn the title of being the easiest place to do
business, by the World Bank.
However, the dominance of English is now being
challenged by the rise of China
in Singapore.
The Singapore Chinese Chamber Institute of Business
has added Chinese classes for business use in recent years.
Students are being taught in Mandarin rather than the
Hokkien dialect spoken by the older Chinese immigrants.
These courses have proved popular, ever since the
government began providing subsidies for Singaporeans to learn Chinese in 2009
during the global financial crisis.
"The government pushed to provide them with an
opportunity to upgrade themselves so as to prepare themselves for the economic
upturn," says chamber spokesperson Alwyn Chia.
Some businesses are already desperate for Chinese
speakers.
Lee Han Shih, who runs a multimedia company, says
English is becoming less important to him financially because he is taking
western clients to do business in China.
"So obviously you need to learn English but you
also need to know Chinese," says Mr Lee.
As China's
economic power grows, Mr Lee believes that Mandarin will overtake English. In
fact, he has already been seeing hints of this.
"The decline of the English language probably
follows the decline of the US dollar. If the renminbi is becoming the next reserve
currency then you have to learn Chinese."
More and more, he says, places like Brazil and China are doing business in the
renminbi, not the US dollar, so there is less of a need to use English.
Bilingualism
Indeed, China's
clout is growing in South East Asia, becoming
the region's top trading partner.
But to say that Mandarin will rival English is a
"bit of a stretch", says Manoj Vohra, Asia
director at the Economist Intelligence Unit.
Even companies in China, who
prefer to operate in Chinese, are looking for managers who speak both Mandarin
and English if they want to expand abroad, he says.
"They tend to act as their
bridges."
So the future of English is not a question
of whether it will be overtaken by Mandarin, but whether it will co-exist with
Chinese, says Vohra.
He believes bilingualism will triumph in South East Asia.
It is a sound economic argument, but in Vietnam's case,
there is resistance to learning Mandarin.
The country may share a border with China, but the
Vietnamese government's choice to not emphasise Mandarin is an emotional one,
says leading economist Le Dang Doanh.
"All the streets in
Vietnam
are named according to generals and emperors that have been fighting against
the Chinese invasion for 2000 years," he says.
Tensions flared up again
last May over the disputed waters of the South China Sea.
Anti-Chinese sentiment
means that young Vietnamese are choosing to embrace English - the language of a
defeated enemy. Many families still bear the psychological scars from the
Vietnam War with the United
States.
Yet there is no
animosity towards English because the founding father of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, made a clear distinction
between the so-called American imperialists who were bombarding Vietnam and the
American people, says Le Dang Doanh.
Many Vietnamese who have
lost family members during the war are now studying in America, he
says.
"We never forget
any victim in the past but in order to industrialise and normalise a country, Vietnam needs
to speak English."
The Vietnamese
government has an ambitious goal to ensure all young people leaving school by
2020 will have a good grasp of the English language.
But it's not hard for
young Vietnamese to accept English. For some, the language offers a sense of
freedom in Vietnam,
where the one-party communist state retains a tight grip on all media.
In a public square in
central Hanoi,
a group of young men are break-dancing to the pulsing beats of western hip hop.
Ngoc Tu, 20, says he only listens to English music.
"The Ministry of
Culture has banned a lot of [Vietnamese] songs and any cultural publications
that refer to freedom or rebellion but... English songs are not censored."
It is debatable whether
English or Mandarin will dominate in South East Asia
in the future. There are arguments for both on the economic front.
But culturally, there is
no dispute.
Even Mandarin language
enthusiasts like Singaporean businessman Mr Lee, says that English will remain
popular so long as Hollywood
exists. The success of movies
such as Kung Fu Panda, an American production about a Chinese animal, has
caused a lot of anxiety in China,
he says. There have been many
cartoons in China
about pandas before, but none had reached commercial success, says Mr Lee.
"The moment Kung Fu
Panda hit the cinemas everybody watched it. They bought the merchandise and
they learned English." Robert
Lane Greene Author of You Are
What You Speak
The assumption that Mandarin will grow with China's
economic rise may be flawed. Consider Japan which, after spectacular
post-war economic growth, became the world's second-biggest economy. The
Japanese language saw no comparable rise in power and prestige.
The same may prove true of Mandarin. The
character-based writing system requires years of hard work for even native
speakers to learn, and poses a formidable obstacle to foreigners. In Asia,
where China's
influence is thousands of years old, this may pose less of a problem. But in
the West, even dedicated students labour for years before they can confidently
read a text of normal difficulty on a random topic.
Finally, many languages in Asia, Africa
and the Amazon use "tones" (rising, falling, flat or dipping pitch
contours) to distinguish different words. For speakers of tonal languages (like
Vietnamese) learning the tones of Mandarin poses no particular difficulty. But
speakers of non-tonal languages struggle to learn tones in adulthood - just ask
any adult Mandarin-learner for their funniest story about using a word with the
wrong tone.
Lau Chaak-ming, founder of online Cantonese dictionary words.hk
Cantonese or Putonghua in schools? Hongkongers fear culture and identity 'waning' As debate rages over which language of instruction is best for learning, many Hongkongers feel they are struggling to hold onto their dialect and culture
When Lau Chaak-ming was casting around for a kindergarten for his daughter, he had trouble finding one that used Cantonese. It was a strange, if not ridiculous, situation for a city made up primarily of Cantonese speakers, he thought.
"Most nursery schools have adopted Putonghua and English as their medium of instruction. Parents see playgroups as a way to learn a new language ... But I want to send my daughter to playschool for fun and interaction with other children, not for learning a new language," Lau says.
The increasing emphasis on Putonghua at the expense of Cantonese among local schools is causing concern - and some resentment - among Hongkongers. While educators are split about the efficacy of adopting Putonghua as the medium of instruction, some residents fear that Hong Kong's identity may be lost as the special administrative region is integrated into mainland systems.
It is particularly galling for Lau, a lexicographer with a professional interest in analysing language development.
As a cognitive science student at the University of Hong Kong, he studied how the brain processes languages, spent three years compiling a glossary of spoken Cantonese and a Cantonese-English dictionary, and went on to earn a masters in linguistics.
Now lecturing part time at the university, Lau has taken on an even more ambitious project - compiling an exhaustive online dictionary of Cantonese words in common use.
With help from 30 volunteers, he has already posted more than 30,000 entries on the site, words.hk, which features explanations written in Cantonese, Cantonese pinyin and English, and examples of usage. They hope to compile 100,000 words within two years, and are also working on an English language interface.
Although Lau concedes it could take decades to complete the Cantonese dictionary, he says: "I want to do what I can to preserve this vibrant language."
There are an estimated 120 million Cantonese speakers across the world. But if the trend of local schools switching to Putonghua continues, Lau says, "the importance of our mother tongue will be eclipsed by Putonghua and our sense of local identity and culture will keep waning".
According to two concern groups (Putonghua as Medium of Instruction Student Concern Group and Societas Linguistica Hongkongensis), about 70 per cent of the city's 569 local primary schools and 40 per cent of its 514 secondary schools use Putonghua for Chinese-language lessons, although the Education Bureau says it lacks such statistics.
At the Po Leung Kuk Choi Kai Yau School, Putonghua has been adopted for instruction from Primary Two through to Form Six since the through-train facility opened in Kowloon in 2002.
School principal Lau Siu-ling says her doctoral research showed that teaching in Putonghua can bolster students' Chinese proficiency.
For her PhD at Beijing Normal University, Lau Siu-ling tracked the progress of 360 students over five years. Half were taught in Cantonese and the rest in Putonghua, and for fair comparison every participating teacher would teach one class in each dialect.
"The students were divided into three groups according to their ability. I found out that the top students did well, no matter which language was used for instruction. But middle and weaker students performed better if they learned Chinese in Putonghua. It's because Putonghua is spoken nearly the same way as it is written in Chinese [characters]. So students just read and write what they speak," Lau says.
"But [spoken] Cantonese is different from the written [form]. So students who use Cantonese for learning Chinese tend to do worse," she says.
However, educators and linguistics experts are divided on the most effective ways of teaching the Chinese language.
Tse Shek-kam, a professor at the University of Hong Kong specialising in Chinese language learning, argues: "Reading is what boosts language proficiency."
He says students' grasp of a language is not related to the medium of instruction, although he believes they learn best in their mother tongue.
Tse points to a global study conducted every five years by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement on the reading achievement of fourth graders. In 2011, Hong Kong ranked first among the 46 participating countries and regions, rising through the years from 14th place in 2001 to 2nd in 2006.
By contrast, Taiwan was ranked 7th in 2011, rising from 22nd place when it joined the study in 2006.
"If you argue students learn better when they can read and write [the way that] they speak, Taiwan should perform better than us ... Using this logic, students from northeastern China should perform the best at Chinese language as they come from Putonghua-speaking areas. But that's far from the case. The best [performers] are from Zhejiang, Hangzhou and surrounding areas where Shanghainese is spoken," he says.
"Hong Kong students are learning three [spoken] languages - Putonghua, Cantonese and English. They are learning them in three written forms, simplified Chinese, classical Chinese and English. They also need to be conversant in two forms of writing - the English alphabet and complex Chinese characters.
"In Taiwan, students under eight years old have to study Chinese-language romanisation. But Hong Kong students don't have to learn Cantonese pinyin. When Taiwanese students are studying pinyin, our students are already reading. That's why our Chinese proficiency is better than theirs."
Cheung Yung-pong, the principal of S.K.H. St James' Primary School and chairman of the Subsidised Primary Schools Council, believes Cantonese is a more effective medium to teach Chinese to Hong Kong students. Cheung adds that the city lacks a mature environment to use Putonghua to teach Chinese language.
"We have a good environment for English immersion as signposts are bilingual in the city. But we do not have such resources for Putonghua. There's also a lack of large-scale tracking studies to see which language is better for learning the Chinese language," Cheung says.
"Having young pupils learn Chinese language in Putonghua is no different from forcing them to use English to learn non-language subjects."
With infrastructure and services strained by mainland visitors flooding into the city, the issue of replacing Cantonese with Putonghua as the medium of instruction at schools adds to friction over policies seen to be relegating Hong Kong's interests and identity in favour of mainland priorities.
The Education Bureau's statement on its website early this year that Cantonese was not an official language, and that schools would receive greater subsidies if they adopted Putonghua as the medium of instruction, prompted activists to form the Putonghua as Medium of Instruction Student Concern Group in February.
"I don't understand why we can't use the language we are most familiar with to learn Chinese. And it's ridiculous that we cannot use our mother tongue to learn in our own place," says group spokesman Kwok Fung-hau.
"My school adopted Putonghua as medium of instruction for a while but they suspended it as the response was very bad. Students stopped asking questions and kept quiet in discussions, and some were nodding off in class."
Hong Kong isn't the only region where efforts to impose language policies have stirred anger over cultural hegemony. Residents in nearby Guangdong have staged several large-scale rallies in recent years in support of Cantonese, which is seen as being increasingly under threat. Similar protests were reported in August after provincial television station Guangdong TV announced plans to broadcast the bulk of original programmes on its news channel in Putonghua instead of Cantonese from this month.
Cantonese is regarded as a modern variant of the ancient Han language. Compared to Putonghua, it has a much older lineage, with pronunciation, vocabulary and usage similar to the official language of the Tang dynasty (618-907). In fact, many Cantonese expressions and words are based on the elegant and refined sounds of classical Chinese, Tse says. The Cantonese expression wat dat (disgusting), which some believe to be a modern phrase, was actually used in 18th century Chinese masterpiece, Dream of the Red Chamber.
Kwok says the issue goes beyond a debate over education or linguistics.
"Some schools employ more mainland teachers than local now. At those schools, not only is Chinese taught in Putonghua, but also subjects like maths and general studies," he says.
At Choi Kai Yau School, half of its 40 Chinese-language teachers are from the mainland, but principal Lau insists the school does not receive additional funding from the Education Bureau for using Putonghua for instruction.
"Our aim is to train students to be trilingual [speaking English, Cantonese and Putonghua] and biliterate [reading and writing English and Chinese]. Our students are fluent in Putonghua by the time they graduate," she says.
However, students such as Kwok see an insidious influence in the education system.
"The situation is getting out of control. If the trend continues, our local teachers, culture and identity will be pushed to the fringe."
The rise of mainland China's English proficiency and decline of Hong Kong's should come as no surprise. It's a matter of simple maths - two is fewer than three. Children on the mainland have two languages to master - Putonghua and English - while most Hong Kong kids have to know three different tongues - Putonghua, Cantonese and English.
Stroll through any local school and what do you hear? Cantonese. As Hong Kong people, we are fiercely proud of our vibrant dialect and do not want to give it up. Many say Cantonese is our last hope of keeping our city unique. Without it, we are at greater risk of becoming just another Chinese city.
Thus, for important cultural and deeply emotional reasons, our city clings to trilingualism. But this comes at a cost. It's rare to meet someone who can speak three languages perfectly.
What's much more common is for a person to have one dominant language and two secondary ones. For most local schoolchildren, the dominant language is Cantonese. That's because it's the lingua franca of the environment for most, whether it's in the playground, at home, or on the streets.
Mainland Chinese children, on the other hand, have Putonghua as their dominant language. And with the rest of their time and energy, they focus on learning English. As the number of after-school English learning centres rises, along with household spending on education, it should come as little surprise that their English proficiency has overtaken that of Hong Kong students.
If Hong Kong's top priority is to get children to be able to speak both Cantonese and Putonghua, then there's no problem. Nearly all our children can speak both dialects of Chinese, whereas most mainland children can speak only one. Hong Kong children can speak perfect Cantonese and their Putonghua is improving year after year.
However, if the priority is English, then we have a problem. We need to rethink the main language of instruction in local schools and, more importantly, how local schools teach English. The only way to beef up English is to have more English. English-medium instruction should be used for all subjects, aside from Chinese. Currently, only select local schools, many of them Direct Subsidy Scheme schools, do so; the rest still teach mostly in Cantonese.
More importantly, the way local schools teach English needs to change. Right now, students as young as six spend hours cramming for exams and then routinely disregard their new vocabulary as soon as the exam is over. The emphasis needs to shift to discussion- and project-based learning.
If these two thing happen, expatriate families will start to send their children to local schools rather than put up with the exorbitant international school fees. This, in turn, will cause the language environment in the playgrounds of local schools to switch from Cantonese to English, thereby changing the dominant language. But that's if we want it to. Whatever path we take, there are trade-offs. Ultimately, it's up to us as a city to decide.
Kelly Yang teaches writing at The Kelly Yang Project, an after-school centre for writing and debate in Hong Kong. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley and Harvard Law School. www.kellyyang.edu.hk
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as Tongue twister
South China Morning Post
Meet the Hong Kong academics fighting to safeguard the Cantonese language Scholars at Chinese University and the University of California are promoting the study and use of Cantonese at a time when many in Hong Kong may feel resigned to the dominance of Putonghua
PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 11 May, 2016, 6:30am
It’s an indication of Ben Au Yeung Wai-hoo’s mastery of Cantonese and creativity that he manages to explain how to swear in the dialect without resorting to any foul language. A senior lecturer in Chinese at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Au Yeung was filming his language lesson for a recent segment of EatLaMen, a dining and leisure programme produced by Television Broadcasts (TVB).
The academic has been appearing on Hong Kong television for the past 10 years to promote the learning of Cantonese, and he’s happy to ham it up if that helps get the material across to his audience. For Sidewalk Scientist, another TVB show, he plays different characters, from wing chun grandmaster Ip Man to Manabu Yukawa, the fictional sleuth in the Japanese TV series Detective Galileo, to teach Cantonese.
Au Yeung, who writes his own scripts and appears on TVB unpaid, says he enjoys providing such edutainment. Cantonese or Putonghua in schools? Hongkongers fear culture and identity ‘waning’“I want to bridge the gap between academia and the public. Cantonese is a huge [cultural] treasure.” There are many elements in Cantonese that make it suitable for humour, says Au Yeung. A self-professed fan of actor-director Stephen Chow Sing-chi’s comedies and Dayo Wong Tze-wah’s stand-up shows, he says: “Both of them know a lot about Cantonese and use it to make people laugh.” At a time when many Hongkongers fear that the city’s culture and identity is gradually being lost as it is further integrated into Chinese systems, the role of Cantonese often becomes a sensitive issue. An Education Bureau proposal in February to emphasise the learning of Putonghua and adopt simplified Chinese characters in Hong Kong schools raised hackles across the community, with TVB’s decision to use simplified characters in subtitling its Putonghua newscasts adding fuel to the fire.
enty of road signs, restaurant menus and public notices display simplified Chinese characters to cater to Chinese residents and tourists. More significantly, about 70 per cent of 600 primary schools in Hong Kong and 40 per cent of its 500-plus secondary schools already use Putonghua for their Chinese-language lessons. Some Hongkongers have tried to protect their mother tongue by developing web-based resources such as words.hk, an online Cantonese dictionary, and a pictorial representation of common Cantonese idioms. Is Cantonese in danger? Hongkongers take steps to protect their heritageSome may get the sinking feeling that defenders of the Cantonese language are simply fighting a rearguard action. But that has not deterred academics such as Tang Sze-wing, vice-chairman of the department of Chinese language and literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The department organised a month-long Cantonese festival in April, which featured seminars, book exhibitions and other activities celebrating the richness of the language. Rather than hold consultations on whether Putonghua should be adopted as the medium of instruction for Chinese, “the government should boost frontline teachers’ knowledge of Cantonese instead”, Tang says.
“The current curriculum does not teach students about Cantonese as a language.”
While all Hongkongers can speak Cantonese, their pronunciation isn’t alway correct, and their knowledge about it is lacking, Tang says.
“Cantonese as an academic discipline is rich. There are more than 40 functional words with no meaning in Cantonese, much more than Putonghua. Their combinations with other words reveal nuances in meanings. There’s also grammar in Cantonese which is worth exploring. Putonghua learners start by learning pinyin, [just as English learners by starting with phonetics for pronunciation]. But no one ever learns about Cantonese pinyin at school. So most locals do not know Cantonese [pronunciation], some locals use ‘lazy’ sounds’.”
Samuel Cheung Hung-nin, professor emeritus in the department of East Asian languages and cultures at the University of California, Berkeley, agrees.
“In the past, we didn’t feel the need to put emphasis on Cantonese teaching because there’s never a crisis. But there is now, as the language is under threat of being replaced,” says Cheung, who was invited to give talks during the Chinese University festival. Hong Kong isn’t the only region where efforts to impose language policies have stirred anger over cultural hegemony, of course. In neighbouring Guangdong province, residents have staged several large-scale rallies in recent years in support of Cantonese, which is seen as being increasingly under threat. Similar protests were staged in 2014 after provincial television station Guangdong TV announced plans to broadcast the bulk of original programmes on its news channel in Putonghua instead of Cantonese.
Between 63 and 80 million people worldwide are estimated to speak Cantonese. Mandarin, or Putonghua as it is called in China, is the official language of China, but Cantonese has a much older lineage. Its pronunciation, vocabulary and usage is similar to the official language of the Tang dynasty (618-907). In fact, many Cantonese expressions and words are based on the elegant and refined sounds of classical Chinese, Au Yeung says. “We use duplicated characters to describe colours in Cantonese like hung bok-bok for red. Such words originate from Shijing [or The Book of Songs], which is the oldest collection of Chinese poetry]. “Cantonese also includes lots of spot-on and funny descriptions. There are many expressions just to describe fat. This shows how rich our culture is.”
Although born in Jiangsu, Cheung is also a great admirer of Cantonese, having grown up in Hong Kong himself. “In English, [the younger generation call older relatives] uncle or auntie. But in Cantonese, there are minute classifications for your parents’ siblings. It’s fun,” Cheung says. “Cantonese is a tonal language. The tonal differences reveal [nuances in] meaning. Among the many Chinese dialects, only Cantonese enjoys the same status as Putonghua. “Hokkien [or Fujianese] is widely spoken in Taiwan. But on formal occasions such as academic conferences, the people always switch to Putonghua. Hokkien is used only in casual conversation. “The same is true for Shanghainese. Many children in Shanghai don’t even know how to speak Shanghainese now. Do we want to see Hong Kong go the same way as Shanghai?”
More parents are speaking to their children in English or Putonghua at home, the better to prepare them for school, but Tang argues Hongkongers should do their best to use Cantonese for everyday communication. “The passing of a language to future generations requires the efforts of all. If there are fewer and fewer people who speak Cantonese, it will lose vitality and die.”
Thanks to the effort of educators like Au Yeung, young Hongkongers are showing greater interest in their mother tongue. His Cantonese course at Chinese University is very popular, with more than 100 students signing up each semester. “It’s a general knowledge course open to all students in the university. I teach grammar, pronunciation but also hip expressions used by youngsters now. I also teach them to use Cantonese to write lyrics. It’s quite a challenge, as Cantonese has nine tones and matching the melody with the word with the right tone can be difficult.”
Emily Tsang The number of schools teaching classes in Putonghua has dropped slightly – which indicates a trend for more educators to scrap the practice, a cultural group said yesterday. The drop was mainly recorded in secondary schools,where there are still around 30 per cent using the official mainland language to teach Chinese lessons. But Putonghua remains the norm in primary schools, which remained unchanged at 73 per cent last year when compared with the previous year. The third annual report by Cantonese support group, Societas Linguistica Hongkongensis, polled all 964 primary and secondary schools in the city. “We believe the number of schools using Putonghua will go down in the long run,” said Andrew Chan Lok-hang, convener of the group. Ip Kin-yuen, lawmaker for the education sector, said it was hard to conclude a decreasing trend for the practice if the drop was only 1 per cent. But he criticised the government for pushing the language policy in a rigid way. “Using Putonghua depends on issues, such as the ability of students and teachers. If the students cannot manage, it will affect their performance in class and discourage them from speaking,” Ip said. An Education Bureau spokesman said many studies show the effectiveness of the policy but add that since there are different views on the policy, schools are free to decide whether it is suitable for them to implement Putonghua teaching to Chinese classes.
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Fewer schools teaching in Putonghua
Hong Kong’s mother tongue is under threat. Cantonese may be centuries old but how much longer can it sustain the pressure from China to pick up Putonghua? By Arthur Tam and Anna Cummins. Additional reporting by Emily Cheng and Allen Jim __ Our tongue. Our voice. Language is the tongue that gives a nation its voice. And Hong Kong’s voice has never been as intrinsically linked to its identity as it is right now. Cantonese isn’t just the city’s language; it’s one of the many yardsticks by which Hongkongers measure their cultural and political differences from the rest of the Mainland. We all know the abrasive political situation between the Central People’s Government and the SAR is complex, contentious and set to continue into the foreseeable future.This is particularly magnified in the light of the 18th anniversary of the handover, as well as the recent rejection of the pro-Beijing electoral reform package. But it was four years ago, in 2011, that Hong Kong’s voice took its first major, measurable shift in tone. According to the government’s census, Putonghua overtook English as the second most spoken language in the territory for the first time in 2011, with 48 percent of people claiming to speak the official language of mainland China, and 46 percent claiming to speak English. In the 2001 census, only a third of respondents could speak Putonghua. Could Putonghua really eclipse Cantonese as the Chinese language of choice in our city within a few generations, or is this all conjecture? It’s certainly true that a healthy 96 percent of ethnically Chinese Hongkongers speak Cantonese currently. You’ll hear the unmistakable nine tones of Cantonese rising and falling on every street corner here, as well as in Chinatowns around the world. Close to 60 million people the world over speak the language natively. But it’s also true there has been an uproar in recent years every time the suggestion is made that Putonghua should be a lingua franca in Hong Kong. There was heavy support in Hong Kong for the 2010 protests sparked in Guangzhou by the Chinese authorities requesting that Guangzhou Television network put out more content in Putonghua. (Despite the strength of feeling, most of the network's programmes were quietly switched to Putonghua in 2014). Indignation also flared in Hong Kong in 2012 when a new Agnès B café printed its signage and menu in simplified Chinese and English only (a swift change and an apology quickly ensued). “People in Hong Kong are using the language as a symbol to distinguish themselves from China,” says Robert Bauer, a Cantonese expert who teaches Chinese linguistics at Polytechnic University and the University of Hong Kong. “When they played the [Chinese] national anthem at a football match in Mong Kok stadium last month, local supporters jeered the national anthem. Lots of people in Hong Kong are resisting the pressure China is trying to put on it. There are people who are very unhappy about promoting Putonghua as the primary method of instruction (PMI) [the language that schools teach the majority of their subjects in].”
Educating the masses National education– a compulsory curriculum proposed by the Education Bureau last decade – should have been rolled out back in 2012. The introduction of the course, deemed by many parents, teachers and students to be pro-China and anti-democracy, sparked the dramatic protests that led to the birth of Scholarism and propelled a 15-year-old Joshua Wong into the political limelight. The curriculum was formally shelved for three years. Many parents and teachers came out to voice fears this was a transition into pro-Beijing ‘brainwashing’ of our youth. “It is impossible for students to be brainwashed by an excerpt taken from support materials,” proclaimed a highly defensive 2012 article by state mouthpiece China Daily, in response to the huge opposition to the curriculum from the Hong Kong Professional Teachers’ Union. The Hong Kong government’s official stance on language in the SAR is that they are ‘committed to promoting trilinguism’ across English, Cantonese and Putonghua. But a LegCo Panel on Education report from April states that having the subject of Chinese language taught in Putonghua ‘is a long-term and developmental target’. In 2008 the Standing Committee on Language Education and Research (SCOLAR) – a government advisory committee – launched a pilot scheme for ‘all [local] schools to adopt Putonghua to teach Chinese language’. The succinctly named ‘Scheme to Support Schools in Using Putonghua to Teach the Chinese Language Subject’ ran until 2014 and gave support for 160 schools to receive additional funding and guidance from ‘Mainland teaching experts’ as well as local consultants in order to help them to teach Chinese in Putonghua instead of Cantonese. “I think it’s very important that my son learns Putonghua,” says Mr Chan about his eight-year-old son’s education. “The trend in Hong Kong is shifting towards working in the Mainland due to its economic growth. If you don’t know Putonghua, it’s difficult for you to grow your business in China. If my son is able to become fluent in [Putonghua], this would be an advantage.” Although the Education Bureau tells us it ‘does not possess exact figures’ about the number of schools in Hong Kong (both local and international) that are currently using Putonghua to teach Chinese language and/or other subjects, many experts we speak to estimate it’s at least two in three. “Around 70 percent of the city’s [571] primary schools now use Putonghua as the language of instruction for Chinese class, on top of teaching Putonghua as a separate language subject,” Woody Lee, convener of PMI (Putonghua as Medium of Instruction) Students Concern Group tells us. “Yes, 70 percent is about right,” agrees Fiona Lee, local translator and expert in Chinese linguistics. It’s not clear, yet, how this might affect students’ learning. Scholars have long disagreed over whether it is easier to understand the subject of Chinese itself through the medium of Cantonese or Putonghua. In 2011, Hong Kong ranked first for Chinese language proficiency, according to a global study carried out every five years by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. So whatever we’re doing, we’re doing it right – for now.
Illustration by Carmen Ng
A tone apart In January 2014, the Education Bureau released an article about the importance of tri and bilingualism. The article stated that ‘nearly 97 percent of the local population learn Cantonese (a Chinese dialect that is not an official language)’. The use of the word dialect, rather than language, was met with outrage. “It caused an online uproar,” recalls Woody Lee. “Cantonese and Putonghua are two languages. Definitely. They are mutually unintelligible,” says Bauer without hesitation. “Cantonese and Putonghua have travelled [apart] completely.” Chinese is one of two official languages in Hong Kong (the other being English). Cantonese is acknowledged as the spoken vernacular, although government institutions do also accept the use of Putonghua, which has been used on the MTR since 2003. In Hong Kong, however, Cantonese is generally celebrated as being a richer and more colloquially expressive spoken language than Putonghua. It has nine tones, as opposed to Putonghua’s four. Chinese is written in traditional characters in Hong Kong, but these have been simplified on the Mainland to make the language easier to read and write. The upshot of that is, sometimes, the historic or poetic meaning of the character is lost – the quintessential example being that to simplify the traditional character for ‘love’ 愛 (ai4) you need to remove one radical – 心 (xin1), meaning heart, and add the radical for friend 友(you3), for it to become 爱(ai4), the simplified character for love. "Even a lot of the colloquial words we say every day like 佢 (keoi5, meaning ‘he’ or ‘she’) date back to the Qin Dynasty,” explains Fiona Lee. “There are poems written with that character. I guess the idea that Cantonese is colloquial is so deeply rooted that people don’t realise some words can be traced back to texts written around 200 BC or even earlier.” Ng Kap-chuen is a local illustrator who shot into the public consciousness last year with his intricate cartoon Great Canton and Hong Kong Proverbs, which depicts 81 proverbs used only in Cantonese. One of the famous proverbs he drew is ‘ghost (gwai2) hitting (paak3) the back of your neck (hau6-mei5-jam3)’ (鬼拍後尾枕), which is equivalent to ‘spilling the beans’ or ‘letting the cat out of the bag’. The illustrations became widely popular and went viral on social media. “We have to make people proud of speaking Cantonese again,” Ng tells us of his inspiration. Yet expressions from the Mainland are working their way into the Hong Kong vernacular more and more. We speak to Amy Au [name changed upon request] a former translator for TVB. “I used to translate the scripts for shows bought from the Mainland for Cantonese dubbing”, she says. “A separate department is responsible for subtitles after the recorded voiceovers since Cantonese conjunctions don’t appear in written format. Even though it’s all written in traditional Chinese, I’ve noticed a lot of text using Mainland adjectives and nouns now,” she tells us. Examples she notes include 白富美, white (bai2), rich (fu4) and pretty (mei3), meaning an attractive woman and 小鮮肉, little (xiao3) fresh (xian1) meat (rou4), meaning an attractive young man. “These aren’t phrases used in Cantonese.”
One language, one nation Putonghua (literally meaning ‘common speech’) has had a meteoric rise since the Central People’s Government selected this variety of a northern Han dialect as the national language in 1955. At the turn of the century there were myriad dialects spoken all over China, but only 60 years later the vast majority of the country (around 70 percent of 1.3 billion people) have a common tongue. “The national language has been a tremendous unifying force in China and it’s why they promoted Putonghua as much as they have,” explains Bauer. “Young people don’t bother learning their parents’ dialects any more. When I was teaching linguistics in China the students told me that their local dialects are useless – in terms of feeling good about your culture and home it’s important [to speak your dialect], but in terms of getting ahead you need English and Putonghua.” The potential for the erosion of Cantonese is not without precedent. Shanghainese was once the dialect for the entire Yangtze region and, despite the fact it still has around 14 million speakers, the Central Government has actively been discouraging its use in schools since 1992. A 2012 survey by Shanghai’s Academy of Social Sciences found four in 10 school students in the city couldn’t speak Shanghainese at all. British journalist Dr Martin Jacques is the author of When China Rules the World: the Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World. “China has had a very weak conception of cultural difference and is very disrespectful to those that do not belong to the Han identity, which they believe is the cement that holds the country together,” Jacques said during his 2012 TED talkThe Rise of China. “The biggest political value in China is unity. How power is constructed in China is much different than the West. They view state power as the patriarch of the family. And this rule has not been challenged in the past 1,000 years.” Economically, the policy is clearly working. The International Monetary Fund announced that China had claimed the spot of the world’s number one GDP (in terms of purchasing power parity, at least) in October last year.
Can’t we just all get along? The arguments and protests about which of Putonghua or Cantonese we should be using in various situations implies that the two are somehow competing. “There are people here in the government who hate Cantonese because it’s a symbol of Hong Kong’s difference from the Mainland,” admits Bauer. But, as previously mentioned, the government states its policy is to encourage trilinguism in Hong Kong. “We support learning Putonghua,” says Woody Lee. “It’s a way of upgrading ourselves. But at the same time, we should maintain Cantonese culture. What we are seeing are those in the younger generation forgetting their mother tongue and using only Putonghua. What we don’t understand is that since students already have a Putonghua course, why do they still have to use Putonghua to teach Chinese Language itself?” On the other hand, Andrew Chan, spokesperson for local language concern group Societas Linguistica Hongkongensis, doesn’t think the government is trying to promote a trilingual city at all. “They just want to get rid of Cantonese,” he says. “You can see this by the way resources are distributed in language education. There is a real lack of formal Cantonese education in school, both in writing and pronunciation. Replacing the primary language is lowering the quality of education, as it is not our mother tongue.”
The art of language “Our soft power, in terms of movies, music and art is based on our Cantonese culture,” says Chan, referring to Hong Kong’s relatively prodigious artistic output over the decades. “[As] our popular art becomes closer and closer to the Mainland, we are losing our unique competitive edge.” “There are countless scholars and artists that speak Cantonese as a mother tongue,” agrees award-winning Cantopop lyricist Chan Wing-him, who has written for artists including Fiona Sit and Pakho Chau. “Abandoning this language equals to cutting out their tongues. How cruel would that be?” Cantopop has had a significant influence in China and the rest of Asia ever since its birth in 1974. Non-Cantonese speaking Chinese enjoyed Cantopop regardless of whether or not they could understand the lyrics. They were interested in learning about Hong Kong’s music scene and becoming fans of the city’s artists. Even Faye Wong, one of China’s most treasured artists came from Beijing to Hong Kong to develop her career. Almost all Hong Kong movies made in the 1980s were done in Cantonese. The Cantonese movie brand was one of quality, and kung fu movies were popularised in both the East and West. There was a wave of film tourism, with visitors coming to Hong Kong to visit the locations of their favourite movies. According to a recent research project done by HotelClub, 172 Hong Kong movies were filmed in Cantonese in 1992. By 1997, as the handover approached, this number had dropped to under 100 for the first time in two decades. “At one time, our culture was influencing all of Asia – especially in film, music and television,” points out Ng. “But now, creative artists are struggling and the film industry isn’t producing as many quality films. We need our soft power back. Take South Korea for example. People are wanting to learn Korean now because of its strong soft power, regardless of whether learning the language would be useful for career success.” SEE ALSO: The 100 Greatest Hong Kong Films
A very real danger “Right now, if you ask me about the current situation, I say that Cantonese is in great shape,” says Bauer. “About 90 percent of the 96 percent ethnically Chinese people who live here speak Cantonese as their usual daily language. In terms of the number of speakers, it’s doing well. But if children stop learning Cantonese because their parents only speak to them in English or their school teaches them in Putonghua, then there could be problems.” Bauer is currently working on a comprehensive Cantonese-English dictionary. “I’ve been working on it for 12 years,” he tells us. “It’s really sad that, given how important Cantonese is in Hong Kong, you’d think someone would have published a dictionary more recently. But the last comprehensive Cantonese-English dictionary was published in 1977! If you went out to the store today and tried to find a good one, you’d struggle. You’d find nothing about contemporary colloquial Cantonese, the vocabulary that’s actually used here.” If Cantonese really did die, the cultural impact would be devastating for this ancient language, the closest dialect of Chinese to that used in poetic classics like Dream of the Red Chamber (Singer-songwriter Denise Ho did a stage rendition of this story called Awakening). It’s not all doom and gloom though. There are many individuals like Ng and Bauer who are making efforts to preserve Cantonese in the face of the threat.
The most ideal situation in Hong Kong would be for citizens to become proficient in Cantonese, English and Putonghua. Visit Malaysia, Belgium or Switzerland and you’ll hear three languages (or more) being spoken. Why do we even have to pick? Unfortunately, the issue in Hong Kong seems to be one that is politically driven. It’s easy to get caught up arguing whether Cantonese or Putonghua is ‘better’ or ‘more useful’. But the wider picture is that a huge part of Hong Kong’s cultural identity is more than on the line – it’s hanging by its fingertips. “My mother tongue is Cantonese. My whole life and understanding of this world is through this language,” says Ng with anguish in his voice. “In just a few generations, if parents don’t emphasise Cantonese teachings and speak to their children in Cantonese, it will be gone.”
To find out more about the Education Bureau’s current language policy, visitbit.ly/languagepolicyhk.
Mother-tongue Squeezed Out of the Chinese Classroom in Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong
(An unsigned piece, apparently written by a local academic)
Several years ago, when I found out my daughter might not get into the primary school affiliated to her kindergarten, I panicked. I had only applied to one school and now, I had to look for alternatives.
I was not looking for a famous or prestigious school. Instead, I wanted to find a school that did not have a high-pressure test culture, one that instead stressed a more relaxed and joyful approach to learning. I was also looking for a school that used Chinese as a medium of instruction and taught Chinese in Cantonese.
This proved to be much harder than I imagined in a city where Cantonese is the main language spoken by around 90 per cent of the majority ethnic Chinese population.
According to a comprehensive survey of 512 primary schools and 454 secondary schools conducted in 2013, the Cantonese advocacy group Societas Linguistica Hongkongensis found that 71 per cent of primary schools and 25 percent of secondary schools were using Putonghua as the medium of instruction for Chinese language (PMI). This meant anything between one and all Chinese classes in those schools are taught in Putonghua.
Today, whenever officials are about the government’s position on PMI for Chinese, they repeat the line that this is a “long-term goal”. In 2008 the Standing Committee on Language Education and Research (SCOLAR), a group set up to advise the government on language education, announced plans to allocate $200 million to help schools switch to PMI. However, there is no timetable for full implementation of this long-term goal. This should make us wonder, where did the goal come from and what are the reasons for adopting it? To try and answer these questions, I had to dig through some history.
The mysterious origins of the “long-term goal” In 1982, the colonial government invited an international panel to conduct a review of Hong Kong’s education system. The panel recommended that Cantonese be the medium of instruction for the first nine years of schooling, so that teaching and learning would be conducted in “the language of the heart”. The recommendation was supported by the volumes of evidence that show mother-tongue teaching to be more effective.
Where it did refer to Putonghua, the panel recommended it be taught as a publicly-funded but extra-curricular subject at primary level and built into the timetable as a separate subject at secondary level.
In 1996, a report by the Education Commission said Puthonghua should be part of the core curriculum at primary and secondary levels and offered as an independent subject for the Hong Kong Certificate of Education Exams in 2000. It also called on SCOLAR to, “study further the relationship between Putonghua and the Chinese Language subject in the school syllabus to ascertain whether it would be more appropriate for Putonghua to be taught as a separate subject or as part of the Chinese Language curriculum in both short term and the long term.”
Note that at this stage there is no mention that Putonghua be a medium for teaching Chinese language (PMI), let alone the sole medium.
A year after the handover, in 1998, a study was commissioned to examine the effectiveness of teaching Chinese in Putonghua, to be completed by 2001. But before the studies were even finished, the first mention of the “long-term goal” appeared.
In its October 1999 review of proposed education reforms, the Curriculum Development Council said it was a goal in “the long term to adopt Putonghua as medium of instruction in the Chinese language education.” A SCOLAR document from 2003 goes on to “…fully endorse the Curriculum Development Council’s long-term vision to use Putonghua to teach Chinese Language.”
Yet the same document states “…there is as yet no conclusive evidence to support the argument that students’ general Chinese competence will be better if they learn Chinese Language in Putonghua.”
In fact, of three studies referred to in the report, two studies found students’ performed no better or worse when taught in Putonghua.
According to Sy Onna, a secondary school Chinese language teacher who has studied the topic extensively, the government has never given a satisfactory explanation of why PMI for Chinese was adopted as a long-term goal. Academic research shows mixed results for the effectiveness of PMI, and has found no overall improvement in Chinese language competence.
For Cantonese language advocates like Societas Linguistica Hongkongensis, the reasons for promoting this long-term goal are clearly political – to dilute Hongkongers’ attachment to their native language on the one hand and to promote greater cultural integration with the Mainland on the other.
However, publicly at least, most proponents of PMI are likelier to cite its economic advantages and, to an even greater extent, its educational advantages. “My hand writes my mouth” When I ask Professor Lam Kin-ping what the most compelling reasons are for PMI, he answers with the well-rehearsed assurance of someone who has answered the question many times before. Lam is Director of the Centre for Research and Development of Putonghua Education at the Faculty of Education at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, one of the organisations commissioned to carry out studies on the effectiveness of PMI in 1998.
He says he holds a fundamental “belief” that students learn better in PMI Chinese classes because they are listening, speaking, reading and writing in the same language code. Lam argues that in classrooms where Chinese teaching is conducted in Cantonese, students need to “switch codes”.
“The listening and speaking training is in Cantonese. Cantonese is at the end of the day a dialect, we can’t just write a dialect, so we have to adjust it internally, have to make it standard, switch some phrases and even sentences,” he says. Lam thinks it makes sense to teach in Putonghua because it is very similar to written modern standard Chinese. Whereas Cantonese is a vernacular, a dialect that cannot easily be written or accepted in formal written contexts, says Lam. For some people, this chimes with the idea of “my hand writes my [what my] mouth [utters]” – a slogan promoting the modernization of written Chinese, harking back to the May Fourth movement of 1919 when classical Chinese was still the written standard. This core idea has been used to justify the need for PMI by scholars, education professionals and schools who support it, and is accepted without question by many parents.
But this does not make it a universally accepted truth.
Professor Tse Shek-kam, Director of the Centre for Advancement of Chinese Language Education and Research at the University of Hong Kong’s Faculty of Education, rejects the idea that students learn better in PMI classrooms because they do not have to “code-switch”. Nor does he accept that the Cantonese used in Chinese lessons is so far removed from modern standard written Chinese as to necessitate mental gymnastics.
Tse points out text-books are written in standard Chinese, which can be read aloud in Cantonese. Besides, he says, Chinese teachers do not speak in slangy street Cantonese.
“Our Chinese teachers speak very good Cantonese, very good Chinese,” he says. If anything, formal Cantonese has preserved many aspects of what would be considered literary and “proper” Chinese, he adds. The proximity between spoken Chinese and written Chinese, “depends on the person’s education level, their reading experience and cultural cultivation.”
Tse says that if speaking good Putonghua really put students at an advantage in writing good Chinese, then students from Northeast China and Beijing, where the “purest” Putonghua is spoken would score highest in Chinese in public examinations. Yet, he says students from Shandong and Jiangsu/Zhejiang score higher.
“Both Jiangsu and Zhejiang are areas where distinct dialects are spoken, but they also have a strong tradition for literature and well-established publishing sectors,” Tse says.
For him, the advantages of teaching Chinese in Cantonese outweigh the advantages of teaching it in what is essentially a foreign spoken language to most Hong Kong students. Teachers and students are more comfortable communicating in their mother-tongue, making for livelier and more critical discussions that facilitate deeper learning.
Conflicting evidence In an interview with Ming Pao in April, one of the scholars tasked by the government to conduct longitudinal studies on the effectiveness of PMI, Professor Tang Shing-fung of the Hong Kong Institute of Education, said he had reservations about a wholesale switch to PMI, as evidence does not currently show PMI is a better way to teach Chinese language. But PMI supporter Lam Kin-ping says his own observations in the classroom and reports from frontline teachers show students in PMI classes do perform better.
“We have seen improvements, for instance students can write longer articles, they consciously refrain from writing Cantonese terms and phrases, it is very easy for them to adjust [to written Chinese],” says Lam. Lam acknowledges it is difficult to find quantitative proof of the above from research data, but he says his experiences and those of teachers convince him that it is real.
Sy Onna, who teaches separate Chinese Language and Putonghua classes at a local secondary school and is a member of the Progressive Teachers Alliance, dismisses Lam’s observations. She says being able to write longer articles with fewer Cantonese colloquialisms are not necessarily a sign of better writing.
“These are only superficial improvements,” Sy says. “As Tang Shing-fung points out, argument setting, structure and composition are just as if not more important, and these have nothing to do with Putonghua.” This may be one reason secondary schools that teach Chinese in Putonghua often switch back to Cantonese in senior classes, as students prepare for approaching public examinations (as shown in Societas Linguistica Hongkongensis’ survey). In a study published in 2011 of a school that switched to PMI in 2000, CUHK professor Angela Choi Fung Tam found school administrators were keen to push for PMI because they believed it would enhance the school’s reputation and help it to attract more academically able students.
This would support the view of both PMI advocate Lam Kin-ping and critic Tse Shek-kam that it is perhaps schools and parents, rather than the government who are taking the lead in pushing for the rapid switch to PMI. But Tam’s study also found teachers were far more ambivalent – while they believed PMI would improve students’ Putonghua, they did not think it would raise their overall Chinese competence. Some senior teachers who experienced the switch said they had noticed a general decline in students’ language proficiency and school reports showed a drop in pass rates in public exams in Chinese language from 100 before PMI was introduced to around 90 afterwards. “I think the government knows it doesn’t work, there is no evidence it works. To this day they haven’t set a timetable,” says Tse.
Making informed choices I began this article outlining the predicament I found myself in while searching for a suitable primary school for my daughter. Eventually, she was accepted by the primary school affiliated to her kindergarten and we enrolled her in the sole class that teaches Chinese in Cantonese in her year. The other four classes all use PMI for Chinese. Most of my daughter’s classmates’ parents told me they consciously chose Cantonese because they thought it would be better for their children to learn in the language spoken at home. A few of them said Cantonese was an important part of Hong Kong culture and identity.
However one parent said she was advised to place her child in the Cantonese class by education professionals, and another said it was because the PMI classes were already full. Both said they would switch to a PMI class if they could. As I was also curious about whether my daughter’s former kindergarten classmates had ended up learning Chinese in Cantonese or Putonghua, I contacted some of their parents too. Of the eleven who replied, six had children who were in PMI classes. In most of these cases, parents said they had chosen a PMI school or class because they wanted their child to speak “native” level Putonghua. They also believed it would help their child to write better Chinese and be good for their future careers.
Three parents said they had yet to notice any changes in their children’s Chinese abilities and two said it had a positive impact. But two parents reported a negative impact. One, who I’ll call T, said her son would sometimes mix up the characters 的, 地 and 得, which are pronounced differently in Cantonese, but the same in Putonghua. T told me, “I wish I had known then, what I know now, that writing good Chinese does not depend on Putonghua but on a person’s cultural and educational level and on how much they read.”
In terms of reading, it seems Hong Kong primary students are doing extremely well. In a study of reading literacy in primary school children in 49 countries and regions carried out in 2011, they ranked first – ahead of Taiwan which was seventh. So coming from a predominantly Cantonese speaking city does not seem to have affected Hong Kong school children’s reading abilities, a foundation for developing good writing skills.
The issue of PMI for Chinese has undoubtedly become a highly political and emotional one. But politics and emotions aside, the question we keep going back to is whether PMI is a better educational choice, and do we even have the information we need to make that judgment?
Any advantage gained through applying the principle of “my hand writes my mouth” needs to be balanced with the widely accepted principle that students learn better when taught in their mother tongue. Through reviewing the evidence and speaking to experts, what I have learned is that PMI may improve students’ fluency in “native” Putonghua, but this can also be achieved through teaching Putonghua as a separate subject. Students may use fewer Cantonese words, phrases and grammar in their writing, but PMI cannot be said to have raised their overall competence in Chinese.
For parents like me, the choices themselves appear to be shrinking. While not all the schools teaching Chinese in Putonghua do so exclusively, many of the parents I spoke to agree with me that increasingly, the classes that teach in Cantonese are being seen as somehow “inferior”. Academically stronger kids will gravitate towards or be placed in PMI schools or PMI streams. Parents who worry their children may be labeled as less able may avoid putting them in the Cantonese Chinese class.
The government has offered incentives in the form of cash and personnel to help schools switch successfully to PMI. But school governing bodies and administrators, parents and an industry of extra-curricular literature and classes profiting from a transition to PMI are providing the momentum to push a long-term educational goal that lacks clear evidence, seemed to appear out of nowhere, and carries huge political implications.
Use Cantonese as a tool to extend Hong Kong’s influence, academic urges Chinese University linguist says better teaching of the native language is the vital first step in raising the city’s profile in Beijing’s trade initiative
PUBLISHED : Thursday, 04 May, 2017, 8:30pm UPDATED : Thursday, 04 May, 2017, 10:39pm Naomi Ng [email protected] 12 May 2017 Cantonese needs to be properly taught at schools so the language can be harnessed as a soft power to extend Hong Kong’s world influence under the “One Belt, One Road” trade initiative, academics say. Although 88.9 per cent of Hong Kong’s population speak Cantonese as their native tongue, most do not know the basics of the language, according to Professor Tang Sze-wing, a linguist at Chinese University. “The government’s official language policy states that Hong Kong people should aim to be biliterate and trilingual, but the reality is that Cantonese [learning] is very much lagging behind English and Putonghua.” Prove Mandarin would work better to teach Chinese language, Hong Kong government told Tang said many Hongkongers at school were not taught the basics such as Cantonese romanisation and grammar, let alone the history and origins of the language. “Learning a language is not only about your ability to communicate with others. We’re talking about learning the most basic knowledge of a language itself,” he said. Cantonese, a phonetically complex Chinese language, is highly colloquial, making it difficult to learn as well as teach formally. There are no standardised Cantonese tests or certifications.
Tang said that such basic information should be incorporated into the Chinese curriculum from a young age, adding that it would be “too late” to learn it at university.
Tang, along with more than 100 scholars worldwide, recently took part in a symposium that looked at how Chinese languages could play a role in Beijing’s belt and road trading strategy along the modern maritime Silk Road. The development plan, which aims to revive the ancient trade routes spanning 65 countries from China to Africa, should not only focus on economics and politics, Tang said. “Even in doing business, what’s most important is learning how to communicate with each other. Hong Kong shares a lot of similarities in languages and culture with many places along the modern maritime Silk Road and Cantonese can be used as a tool to exert its global influence,” he said. Cantonese is spoken by 62 million people worldwide, according to Ethnologue, a language data research centre.
Aside from Hong Kong, it is spoken as a native language in Guangzhou, Macau and Zhuhai, and commonly spoken in ethnic Chinese communities in Singapore, the United States and Canada.
Grace Mak Yan-yan, an associate professor at the university, said Cantonese could be as popular as Korean if the city put more resources into producing better television dramas, as well as cultivating budding directors and stars. “The reason why Korean culture is so popular is due to the successes of their television dramas,” Mak said. Television dramas and films from the 1980s and 90s had propelled Hong Kong stars into the international spotlight, but that momentum has been lost as neighbouring Asian cultures have gained prominence. “If we try to think about popular and successful Hong Kong celebrities, we can only list Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Maggie Cheung Man-yuk. It’s hard to think of someone from a younger generation,” Mak said.
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: ‘Use Cantonese as a tool to extend city’s influence’
Cantonese v Mandarin: When Hong Kong languages get political
Juliana LU, BBC Hong Kong correspondent 28 June 2017
When Hong Kong was handed back from the UK to China in 1997, only a quarter of the population spoke any Mandarin. Now, two decades later, that figure has nearly doubled. But even as people get better at communicating in Mandarin, also known as Putonghua, some in Hong Kong are losing interest, or even downright refusing to speak it. Chan Shui-duen, a professor of Chinese and Bilingual Studies at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, said that among some of her students, speaking Putonghua can almost be taboo. "Especially among young people, the overall standard of Putonghua is rising," she said. "But some of them just reject it." This is because, for many, Putonghua has become an unwelcome reminder of the increasing "mainlandisation" of Hong Kong.
The social rejection of Putonghua has come as people question their Chinese identity, which has alarmed both the Hong Kong and mainland Chinese governments. Last June, an annual poll by the University of Hong Kong found that only 31% of people said they felt proud to be Chinese nationals, a significant drop from the year before, and a record low since the survey first began in 1997. Language of successven as resentment against Putonghua builds, there is grudging awareness that - with nearly one billion speakers in the world - fluency in the language may hold the key to wealth and success in Hong Kong. When my eldest child turned two, I started looking for a suitable kindergarten. It surprised me that the most sought-after schools in Hong Kong taught in English or Mandarin, rather than Cantonese, which is the default language for nearly the entire population. And I was shocked to hear from Ruth Benny, founder of the Hong Kong-based education consultancy Top Schools, that 99% of her clients, both local and expatriate, strongly preferred Mandarin. "I believe Cantonese is not valued in the context of formal education much at all," said Ruth Benny, the Hong Kong-based founder of Top Schools. She said Cantonese families are happy for their children to be "socially fluent," but preferred them to learn Chinese literacy in Mandarin, with a standard form of written Chinese. The rising educational preference for Mandarin at the expense of Cantonese is causing anger and anxiety among Hong Kong residents, 20 years after the city was handed back from the UK to China. They worry the city's distinctive culture and identity will eventually be subsumed by mainland China, with some questioning if the language - and the city so closely identified with it - is dying. Language battleBefore the 1997 handover, most local schools in Hong Kong officially used English as the medium of instruction, but in practice also taught in Cantonese.
Mandarin, also known as Putonghua, was introduced in schools in the 1980s and only became a core part of the curriculum in 1998. Cantonese and Mandarin: which came first?
Cantonese is believed to have originated after the fall of the Han Dynasty in 220AD, when long periods of war caused northern Chinese to flee south, taking their ancient language with them. Mandarin was documented much later in the Yuan Dynasty in 14th century China. It was later popularised across China by the Communist Party after taking power in 1949.
"As expected, after the handover, Putonghua became more privileged and popular," said Brian Tse, a professor of education at the University of Hong Kong. By 1999, the Education Bureau had started publicising its long-term goal of adopting Putonghua, not Cantonese, as the medium of instruction in Chinese classes, even though it offered no timetable on when this should be achieved. About a decade later, the Standing Committee on Language Education and Research (Scolar), a government advisory group, announced plans to give $26m to schools to switch to Putonghua for Chinese teaching. It said a maximum of 160 schools could join the scheme over four years. Cantonese concern groups estimate that 70% of all primary schools and 25% of secondary schools now use Putonghua to teach Chinese. Government bias?Officially, the city government encourages students to become bi-literate in Chinese and English and trilingual in English, Cantonese and Mandarin. But Robert Bauer, a Cantonese expert who teaches at several universities in Hong Kong, said Scolar and the Education Bureau were essentially "bribing" schools to make the switch from Cantonese to Mandarin as the medium of instruction in Chinese language classes. "They're taking orders from the people of Beijing," he said. "Cantonese sets Hong Kong apart from the mainland. The Chinese government hates that, and so does the Hong Kong government."
Those who support this view point to a gaffe made by the Education Bureau in 2014. On its site detailing Hong Kong's language policy, it stated that Cantonese was a "Chinese dialect that is not an official language". It caused an outcry, as Hong Kong residents certainly believe theirs is a proper form of Chinese, and not just a dialect. The bureau was forced to apologise and delete the phrase. Statistics on language use 1996 2016 English 38.1% 53.2% Cantonese 95.2% 94.6% Mandarin25.3%48.6%In 1997, there was hope and expectation that the city, unlike the rest of China, would soon enjoy universal suffrage. But the Chinese government's interpretation of reform angered the public. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in unprecedented protests in 2014. The reform proposal was vetoed by pro-democracy politicians in 2015, and today, Hong Kong seems stuck in a political stalemate.
Against this backdrop, Cantonese has not just survived but thrived in a totally unexpected way, according to linguistics expert Lau Chaak-ming. Starting about 10 years ago, writing in vernacular Cantonese, in addition to standard Chinese, began appearing in public in advertisements. Mr Lau said this trend has greatly accelerated in the past four years. "We can now use our language in the written form," he told me proudly. Previously, advertisements and newspapers used only standard written Chinese, which is easily comprehensible to all Chinese-literate readers, whereas non-Cantonese speakers might struggle to understand the written vernacular. Mr Lau dates the rise in written Cantonese to greater awareness of a local Cantonese identity, as opposed to a more general Chinese sense of self. Mr Lau and a number of volunteers are compiling an online Cantonese dictionary, documenting its evolution. Working in parallel, Mr Bauer, the Cantonese expert, will soon be publishing a Cantonese-English dictionary, which will be available online and in book form. Dying language?According to these experts, Cantonese isn't dying at all. For now. "From a linguistic point of view, it's not endangered at all. It's doing quite well compared to other languages in the China region," said Mr Lau. But he and others worry about the long-term consequences of the rise of Putonghua in Hong Kong, especially as more schools seem to be keen to teach in the medium. "Speaking, and writing, Cantonese has now become an political act," said Robert Bauer. "If present trends continue, children are not going to speak Cantonese down the road. It will become endangered." He cited the history of Cantonese in Guangdong province, where he believes efforts to spread Putonghua have been too successful, with children now not using their mother tongue. But Ms Chan of Hong Kong Polytechnic is less pessimistic. Contrary to what had been predicted, she says, Cantonese has maintained, and even extended, its dominant position after the handover in the areas of politics and law. It has been "transmuted", she maintains, from a low-status dialect to a high-status form that displays all the full functions of a standard language - which is something quite unique and unprecedented in the Chinese context. Cantonese may not entirely enjoy the "prestige" of a national language, but it is quite important - and indispensible for anyone living and working in Hong Kong.
Take politics out of the conversation on Cantonese and Mandarin, and use each language when needed
Mike Rowse says demographic changes and Hong Kong’s role as the gateway to China mean Mandarin will increasingly make its presence felt, but Cantonese can continue to thrive alongside
It may seem a strange thing to be saying in the current environment, but there was a time within living memory when most Hong Kong people paid little attention to politics. For most of us, the top priority was scraping together a living. For the tiny minority of movers and shakers, the prime objective was trying to build a business empire on this “barren rock with nary a house upon it”.
Politics was mainly the preserve of the colonial administration. The head of government was essentially appointed by the prime minister on the recommendation of the foreign secretary, so in a way we enjoyed one man, one vote – and the one man lived at number 10 Downing Street.
Things began to change slowly in the late 1960s and early 1970s with growing affluence and the emergence of a community which saw Hong Kong as its permanent home, rather than as a jumping-off point for emigration. Attention then turned to basic issues like decent housing to replace squatter huts, education and dealing with the pervasive corruption. One by one, these matters were addressed but politics was still pretty much a minority sport until the Sino-British agreementof 1984 on Hong Kong’s future. From then on, it gradually dawned on more people that we were going to have to play a greater role in running our own affairs. So we arrived at the Basic Law and the idea of Hong Kong people governing Hong Kong.
The contrast with that earlier, simpler time could hardly be more stark. Now everything, however trivial, is political and it seems like everyone has something to say about it. Where, how and from whom to buy a train ticket to go to Guangdong, and with what service charge? When, where and how to stand when singing the national anthem? Let’s have a debate about it. Now, we must even have a discussion about our mother tongue and whether Mandarin and Cantonese are really languages or dialects.
When social welfare constituency lawmaker Shiu Ka-chun asked Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor whether her mother tongue was Cantonese, Lam declined to answer on the grounds that the question was “frivolous”. It clearly was, but there might have been a smoother way to respond that could have dampened the flames rather than fan them. The issue of language is at the heart of fears about the increasing “mainlandisation” of Hong Kong, our identity as a city, and “one country, two systems”. The debate over a national language was settled soon after the establishment of the Republic of China in 1911. Cantonese, as the language widely used in the south, may have been a contender, but Mandarin, the main language of the northern provinces, prevailed, and the central government has since promoted its wider usage partly as a means of unifying the nation and partly on the practical grounds of facilitating communication between different parts of the country. This continued when the Republic became the People’s Republic in 1949.
Now, throughout the mainland, Mandarin (known as “Putonghua”, meaning common language) is used in schools to teach all subjects. That practice has been extended to schools in Guangdong province so, gradually, a younger generation is emerging that uses Cantonese less. Previously in the south, Mandarin was only widely used in Shenzhen which, being the first special economic zone created by Deng Xiaoping, attracted people from all over the country.
There have been suggestions that the government here has a secret agenda to make Mandarin the language of instruction in Hong Kong schools. This has been officially denied, and no doubt that is true for the time being. But if we look at the subject from a wider perspective, several trends are clear. First, the percentage of people aged six to 65 that reports using Cantonese at home is slowly declining, from 90.3 in 2013 to 88.1 in 2016 according to Census Bureau surveys. Secondly, Hong Kong accepts around 55,000 migrants a year from the mainland, mostly to reunite families. Since they come predominantly from Guangdong province, in the past this has meant a steady influx of more Cantonese speakers. For reasons explained earlier, that balance is shifting, and future inflows will bring more Mandarin speakers. Thirdly, when the rest of the world learns Chinese, it overwhelmingly means Mandarin.
Finally, there is a basic economic argument. Hong Kong’s role is to bring the world to China and take China to the world. That means every child finishing secondary school here must be proficient in both English and Mandarin in order to have decent job prospects. Typically, Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew worked this out decades ago and made these the two main languages in the country. When will we have the courage to copy him? There is no mileage in fighting history. It is inevitable, then, that Hongkongers will make increasing use of Mandarin in future and it will be the mother tongue of an increasing percentage of young people. But that is not a sinister development and Cantonese can continue to be a thriving language alongside, particularly as it becomes increasingly established in written form. It would be nice if we could depoliticise the issue and just allow conversations to take place naturally in whatever language the participants feel more comfortable. Mike Rowse is the CEO of Treloar Enterprises. [email protected]
Driving Cantonese out of Hong Kong would change the city’s culture
I refer to Mike Rowse’s opinion piece on depoliticising the mother tongue conversation (May 20). Unfortunately, it seems that he wants to have it both ways. He mentions that, in Guangdong, the government has extended the use of Mandarin as a medium of instruction in schools and has therefore decreased the use of Cantonese in the region. At the same time, he says Cantonese can “be a thriving language alongside” Mandarin here in Hong Kong. My question is, how?
Language to most people is akin to culture and Hong Kong – with its Cantonese-speaking culture – is unique. As a teacher in local schools, I see the difficulties students face, not just in their studies, but in finding a way to identify themselves in the world. Cantonese is not taught in schools here. It is used as a medium of instruction, but that is not the same thing. Students are not explicitly taught Cantonese in the same ways that Mandarin and English are. For that reason, the language has already found itself being de-emphasised.
While Cantonese, as Mr Rowse aptly mentioned, is not unique to Hong Kong, the way in which it is employed here is very much so. The slang and euphemisms that are employed in the Cantonese style of speaking are so central to the idea of being a Hongkonger that to replace it with Mandarin would be to wipe clean the slate and replace it with a purely mainland identity.
If Mr Rowse cannot see that this option is the most preferable for the mainland government, then he hasn’t been paying attention. In my comparatively short 10 years here in Hong Kong, I have seen the swift changes already driven by corporations and money. Progress is erasing the more local landscape. Mandarin’s march to become the language of Hong Kong is the last step in changing the culture for ever.
Tongue Tired: Hong Kong's Disappearing Dialects
Yannie Chan meets some of the last speakers of Hong Kong’s disappearing dialects. Photos byEmily Chu
Hong Kong's disappearing dialectsPutonghua usage may be increasing in Hong Kong, but the same isn’t true for China’s many other dialects. According to the 2011 census, the number of people in the city who speak another variant of Chinese as their main language is on the decline: from 352,562 in 2001 to 273,745 only 10 years later—that’s just 3.9 percent of the population. With fewer and fewer people speaking these dialects, we meet those keeping the old tongues alive and they give us the universal greeting: sik jor fan mei—have you eaten yet?
Tanka:"Sik jor fan mei?"The Tanka, or boat people, stay true to the name. They have traditionally resided on boats and junks along the southern coast of Hong Kong, living a simple fishermen’s life. They don’t call themselves Tanka, which some view as offensive, but sui seung yan, “people of the water.” Cheung For-yau is a spokesperson for the Hong Kong’s Fishermen’s Association.
"I was born in Tai O into a fishing family. The Tanka I know is already very different to that spoken two or three generations ago. Most people my age, including me, learned Cantonese first, but with a heavy Tanka accent. Even my grandmother did not speak pure Tanka. Hers was a mix of Tanka and Cantonese. My family have always been fishermen. My grandfather’s grandfather’s generation moored their boats in Tai O and gradually built settlements in the area. We use Tanka phrases. We refer to fishing as hoi sum, which means “happy” in Cantonese. I am a water person and was born into a fishing family, but still, I get seasick every single time. If we were going on a one-week fishing trip, I’d be sick the first day and throw up. I only begin to feel better the second day. The fish maw of the Chinese bahaba was the most sought after. It used to cost $30,000 a catty. That was a lot of money back then. Now I’ve heard it’s worth about $100,000 a catty! But you rarely see the fish in these waters anymore. I once caught it and the dried fish maw alone weighed more than two catties. We didn’t have to worry about money for a few months. Fishermen avoid dolphins. We call dark dolphins “black taboo” and Chinese white dolphins “white taboo.” Dolphins follow our fishing nets, tear them and eat the fish. We don’t welcome them. But now fishing by nets is banned, this perception has probably changed.
My kids no longer have the Tanka accent. No one speaks Tanka anymore. A couple of years ago, there were three elderly Tai O residents who spoke only Tanka. They have all passed away. Before a wedding, the bride-to-be is required to sing folk songs for two nights straight to thank their families. No one follows it now, but my big sister did it. She sang folk songs for two nights, from evening till the next morning. She sang it along with my mother and aunties. As the Tanka dialect disappears, the culture and practices are going away as well. Hardly any Tanka practices will be passed onto the generation after me. I don’t really have any strong feelings about it. We can’t force a language to live on. After I left Tai O to work, people made fun of my accent. They still do! I never really took it to heart. I know my accent comes from the Tanka dialect and is part of our culture. Weitou: "Hack fau meh?"A close cousin of Cantonese, “Weitou” means “walled village.” The dialect is spoken, increasingly rarely, within the walled villages in the New Territories and among older generations in Shenzhen. Chung Yung-kwai (right) and Chung Hoi-wai (left) are indigenous villagers of Chung Uk Tsuen in Lam Tsuen, Tai Po. They are the last generation who can speak fluent Weitou. Cliff Chung, also an indigenous villager in Chung Uk Tsuen, has mapped out the genealogy of the entire Chung family in his village.
Share:Chung Yung-kwai: I am 84 years old, the 26th generation of Chung Uk Tsuen villagers. The first language I learned was the Weitou dialect. The next generation spoke Cantonese as their first language. There used to be ‘blind’ marriages. If a man was out in the city working, his family would find him a girlfriend and then use a chicken to represent him at the wedding. People returned to find that they’d got married! When we speak of these things, and how poor we used to be, people don’t seem to really believe it. We don’t teach our children the Weitou dialect. It is very similar to Cantonese anyway. There’s no need for them to learn. I don’t feel sad about it. Chung Hoi-wah: My father went to England to work in the 50s. I followed him later in the 60s. In most families in England, the Weitou dialect seems better preserved. The Weitou you find in our village now has been diluted. More Cantonese phrases slip into our everyday speech, and the dialect has become closer and closer to Cantonese. Cliff Chung: I built a graph mapping all the people in our village. I realized I am a true Hongkonger: My family has been here for more than 700 years. It makes me feel very proud.
Share:I have no problem understanding the Weitou dialect but I have trouble speaking it. To be honest, I think the younger generation is simply not aware of Weitou. Only several village elders still speak it. I began a website and posted some Weitou phrases, hoping that would get people to share and learn the dialect online. After one more generation, I’m sure the Weitou dialect will become extinct. Whenever I hear and speak Weitou, I remember my grandmother.
Share: Teochew: "Jak bung meh?"Teochew, or Chiu Chow, originates in Eastern Guangdong province. The dialect preserves much of the pronunciation and vocabulary of Old Chinese, which dates back to the beginning of written records. Notable Teochew Hongkongers include Li Ka-shing and Emperor group chairman Albert Yeung. Hui Pak-kin teaches a Teochew dialect course at Polytechnic University.
Share:I was born in Chenghai, Shantou. I came to Hong Kong when I was 11 years old. My father taught me three sentences in Cantonese before my first day of school: “I don’t understand Cantonese,” “I can’t speak Cantonese,” and “I don’t know.” Many from my father’s generation see Hong Kong as only a temporary home. They came to Hong Kong not to find a better home, but to make money. They believe that they will return home in the end. When many Teochew elderly say they want to go home, they mean Teochew, not their Hong Kong homes. My name is pronounced “Hui Bak-geen” in Cantonese but my father told me it was pronounced “Hoy Bak-geen,” because of his accent. So that’s how I said it in school. People would laugh at me and I didn’t know why. It wasn’t until a year later, when someone with the same surname came into our class that I found out it was pronounced Hui! It used to worry me that I speak Cantonese with an accent. I had this fear that the minute I spoke people would notice and laugh at me. I only truly stopped caring much later in life. There is actually no single Teochew dialect because Teochew consists of many different regions. Each area speaks its own version of the Teochew dialect. There’s a saying: “You’d rather argue with Teochew people than chat with Chaoyang people.” Teochew refers to the capital within Teochew city, and Chaoyang was another region under the bigger Teochew umbrella. People from the capital spoke very gently because they were upper class, and Chaoyang people were known for being loud and rude. In Teochew, lo li refers to a truck. It came from the English word “lorry.” Many Teochew people went to southern Asia to work and adopted the word. My favorite part of Teochew culture is kung fu tea. It is not about the quality of tea leaves, but the social ties. Teochew people never drink kung fu tea alone—whenever people visit, they make kung fu tea. So kung fu tea really stands for relationships among people. Many of my students want to reconnect with their past. They grew up listening to Teochew, but cannot speak it well. When they were younger, some avoided and looked down on their dialect. The mother of one of my students speaks only Teochew. Before his wedding day, he asked me to teach him to read a speech in Teochew. During the wedding, he dedicated the speech to his mother. It was very moving. The Teochew dialect is disappearing. There’s no stopping the trend. A language is spoken to communicate with others. When it gets to a point where everyone can reach the US in two hours, languages will become increasingly similar. Hakka: "Seek or fan ng chian o?"“Hakka” literally means “guest families,” thanks to a long history of migration: From north China to the south, and then overseas. Hakka people have long been prominent in public affairs. Well-known Hakka Hongkongers include politicians Martin Lee and Lau Wong-fat, and actors Chow Yun-fat and Leslie Cheung. Lau Chun-fat founded the Association for Conservation of Hong Kong Indigenous Languages, and studies the Hakka dialect.
Share:I was born in Tsuen Wan. We later moved to Leung Uk Tsuen in Pat Heung, Tuen Mun, and became villagers here. In the past, from Pat Heung to Tsuen Wan, everyone spoke Hakka. At school, we were not allowed to speak Hakka, just like how schools nowadays make students only speak English in school. All our parents wanted us to speak perfect Cantonese. It would be easier to find a good school, get a decent job and climb up the social ladder. It was bad if people could hear from your accent that you spoke Hakka at home. I found out later that people sacrificed Hakka to speak Cantonese. It’s one of the reasons Hakka is diminishing in the New Territories. I don’t think of Hakka as an inferior language, but when I discussed this with my wife and relatives, I found that they do. They didn’t like Hakka because it signified you were “from the village.” Some relatives even urged me to not speak Hakka to my son, calling Hakka “an ugly language.” But if I speak English or German to my son, they say he’s a genius. When I was a child, there were no Cantonese songs. All songs were in Putonghua. I had no idea it was a different language. I thought singing meant you had to say words in a funny way. I’ve always been interested in linguistics. Speaking many languages—Hakka, Weitou, some Teochew, Cantonese, English—prompted me to consider some philosophical questions.
Share:In Hakka, “I” sounds like ai. In Cantonese, it’s ngor. But in English, “I” comes closer to the Hakka version. I always wondered if all languages share a common ancestry. In 1982, I was collecting water samples from wells in the New Territories for a project when I came across a 10-year-old boy. I asked him in Hakka where the closest well was. He did not understand me! I was shocked. My own kids, who were born in Germany, speak perfect Hakka. I wanted my children to know it—but when they came back, no one spoke it anymore. I was sad and wondered if my children would give up on Hakka because no one their age speaks it. Even adults were unwilling to speak it to my children. In 2000, I became a doctoral student and studied the Hakka dialect. A friend told me that Weitou is suffering a worse fate. We decided to set up an organization to actively conserve indigenous languages. Cantonese used to have the “sh” consonant. So the names of MTR stations were not a result of bad transliteration—it was really how they were pronounced! So Sha Tin, Tsim Sha Tsui and Sheung Wan were pronounced with the sh sound in Cantonese. The sh sound began to disappear in 1900, because there were more people learning Cantonese and the language was gradually simplified. Hakka folk songs are really impressive. It’s like Chinese rap—the singer improvises the lyrics. Hakka people mostly sing them to woo the opposite sex. After a work day, they would sing these songs across mountains. The content can be quite explicit. Very explicit sometimes!
Learn more about the Association for Conservation of Hong Kong Indigenous Languages at www.hkilang.org . Share:
Hokkien: "Jak bung weh?"Hokkien people, also known as Hoklo, hail from eastern Guangdong and southern Fujian provinces. This area was a trading and migration center, and so the Hokkien dialect is commonly encountered overseas, particularly in Taiwan and the Philippines. So Chi-keung is the chairman of Tai Wong Yeh Temple Management Office at Yuen Chau Tsai, Tai Po.
Share:My family was from Hong Kong island at first. We fished along the shores, and gradually found and settled in Tai Po in the 1940s. Hokkien is my first language. I didn’t start learning Cantonese until the 1950s, when it became popular. You had to learn Cantonese to do business and buy daily essentials. Hoklo people have a bad reputation for being ferocious. In the past, Teochew people occupied the piers. If Hoklo people weren’t aggressive enough, we couldn’t do business. We were also bullied because we came from the sea. People who had already settled in an area saw us as intruders. Everywhere we went, people on the land would try to get us to leave. We had to be aggressive. People would say mean things to us. I’ve been told that because I was a fisherman I had no future and no prospects. I had never been proud of being Hoklo. There was nothing to be proud of. Now, it’s better. People are accepting and are interested in our culture. In the 70s, the government wanted to develop Tai Po into a new town, and moved us from fishing villages to public housing. There was nothing we could do. The city has to develop and we should accommodate the changes. Most Hokkien stopped being fishermen. Many went into the construction industry.
Share:Hoklo culture is very much different to what it was when I was a child. They’re very fond memories to me, but I don’t really miss it. What’s the point? A lot of people still speak Hokkien. My siblings’ grandchildren speak it very well. In newer families, however, its use is decreasing because Hoklo people rarely marry other Hoklo anymore. Dragon boats are a big part of our weddings. When we still lived on fishing boats, we used them to carry the bride to the husband’s boat. We would tie several fishing boats together to hold a wedding banquet. When my son got married, all the boats came together for the wedding banquet. The feast lasted for three days. It’s a real achievement to welcome a daughter-in-law. Hoklo culture and its dialect will probably die out eventually. But I can’t be sad about it. I mean, in the past, women couldn’t eat until the men finished eating. Now? If they don’t feel like it they won’t cook for us. Things change and most of the time it’s for the better.
Learn more about Hoklo culture at the Tai Wong Yeh Temple, Yuen Chau Tsai, Tai Po.
Dialect DishesTeochew: Shantou Ting Hoi Lo Sze Restaurant
Known as the “King of Marinated Goose,” this venerable restaurant serves some of the most authentic Teochew dishes in town. “I’m not sure if ho lok is on the menu, but you can ask for it,” says Teochew dialect instructor Hui Bak-kin. “It’s fluffy scrambled eggs with oyster. It’s the best I’ve had in Hong Kong.” Also try the Teochew foie gras, white pepper and pork belly soup, and fried yam sticks with a hard sugar coating. 37-39 Lung Kong Rd., Kowloon City, 2382-6899.
Weitou: Tai Wing Wah Village Cuisine
Tai Wing Wah Village Cuisine opened in Yuen Long in 1950 helmed by well-known Chef Hugo “To To” Leung. Walled village cuisine is all about seasonal ingredients and fatty meat, so consider yourself warned. Popular dishes include suckling pig, made with high quality soy sauce, homemade poon choi pork, steamed fish head and Chinese lard rice. Various locations including G-1/F, 1 Stewart Rd., Wan Chai, 2511-1663.
Tanka: Ping Fat
A specialty dried goods shop in busy Tai O market, Ping Fat sells salted fish, dried fish belly, fried oysters, dried squid and more. It’s one of the few remaining shops to dry its own fish maw. 12 Tai O Market St., Tai O, 9471-2517. Hakka: Hak Ka Hut
This chain was specifically created with the intention of keeping classic Hakka dishes alive and is a reliable option for the newbie. 3/F, 26 Nathan Rd., Tsim Sha Tsui, 8300-8103. Hokkien: Zhen Zhen Food Stall
Chun Yeung Street Wet Market in North Point is also known as “Little Hokkien,” as it houses several stores specializing in Hokkien food and snacks. Among them, Zhen Zhen Food Stall—said to be a favorite of legendary food critic Chua Lam—serves hard-to-find Hokkien dishes. Savory rice, a signature Hokkien dish, is a mix of white rice, glutinous rice, mushrooms and peanuts, seasoned with soy sauce. Shop B, 70-74 Chun Yeung St., North Point. Check out even more regional Chinese cuisines right here!
Speak The Dialects
Greetings Teochew: Hello, luh hoh Hokkien: Good morning, ja sin Delicious! Hakka: hao sit Teochew: o jak Thank you! Cantonese:ng goi Hakka: ng goi Teochew: lui luh Hokkien: gum sia I love Hong Kong Cantonese: ngor oi heung gong Hakka: ai oi heung gong Teochew: wa ai hiang gang Hokkien: wo ai hiang gang
Putonghua is the official language on the mainland, but if history had played out differently the vast majority could have been speaking Cantonese. In 1912, shortly after the fall of the Qing dynasty, the founding fathers of the republic met to decide which language should be spoken in the new China.
Mandarin - now known as Putonghua [the common language] - was then a northern dialect spoken by the hated Manchurian officials. While it had served as China's lingua franca for centuries, many perceived it as an 'impure form' of Chinese. Many of the revolutionary leaders, including Sun Yat-sen, were from Guangdong - which has long been China's land of new ideas. A great debate started between the delegates and eventually led to a formal vote. Cantonese lost out by a small margin to Putonghua and the rest is history.
While historians today still argue about the authenticity of the story, it is something Guangdong people love to tell. Many Cantonese speakers feel proud of their native language, saying it has more in common with ancient classical Chinese than Putonghua - which is a mix of northern dialects heavily influenced by Manchurian and Mongolian.
Linguists agree to some extent. 'Cantonese is closer to classical Chinese in its pronunciation and some grammar,' Jiang Wenxian, a Chinese language scholar, said. 'Using Cantonese to read classical poetry is a real pleasure,' he said. 'Many ancient poems don't rhyme when you read them in Putonghua, but they do in Cantonese.
'Cantonese retains a flavour of archaic and ancient Chinese. Nowadays few people understand classical Chinese, so Cantonese should be protected as a type of language fossil helping us study ancient Chinese culture.'
Cantonese is spoken by about 70 million people in Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macau and communities abroad.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, Guangdong was the only Chinese province allowed to trade directly with foreigners. Many Westerners at the time learned Cantonese. Up till very recently, there were more Cantonese speakers in overseas Chinese communities than Putonghua speakers. In Canada, for instance, Cantonese is the third most commonly spoken language after English and French.
Hong Kong educators should embrace the system that’s crucial for teaching Cantonese to non-Chinese "Written Chinese is largely non-phonetic, so Jyutping is a quick and accurate way of showing how a character is pronounced," writes Maggie Holmes.
One of the biggest challenges faced by children from non-Chinese speaking families who study in local schools is the absence of Jyutping (Cantonese romanisation) in their Chinese- language textbooks and other study materials.
The government provides HK$200 million in annual funding for schools to implement the “Chinese Language Curriculum Second Language Learning Framework.” However the Education Bureau has no requirement that core teaching materials created for the scheme include Jyutping.
Without Jyutping, students will not be able to learn Chinese effectively and the money will be wasted.
Written Chinese is largely non-phonetic, so Jyutping is a quick and accurate way of showing how a character is pronounced. Without this clarity, it’s extremely difficult for students to memorise the thousands of Chinese characters required by the local school curriculum.
Jyutping helps children learn new vocabulary more quickly, before they know the Chinese characters. It also provides a convenient way to input Chinese characters into digital devices.
Jyutping also has an interesting role to play in the teaching of spoken Cantonese. While many teachers are reluctant to use non-standard Cantonese characters in a classroom setting, they may be more willing to use Jyutping to write Cantonese words and phrases.
Research by Hong Kong academics shows a clear association between the early use of Mandarin Pinyin and the development of Chinese reading skills.
In the early years, the provision of audio, either via QR code or digi-pen, can be used to clarify pronunciation, until parent and child get to grips with Jyutping. Photo: Maggie Holmes.
Romanisation strengthens a child’s “phonological awareness,” an understanding of a language’s sound system which is a predictor of literacy skills. Pinyin also allows children to read materials which use Chinese characters that they have not already studied. It is reasonable to assume the same positive effect for Cantonese romanisation. Yet the Education Bureau does not require, or even recommend, the use of Jyutping on classroom resources in Hong Kong and it’s hard to get a true picture of how many schools use it.
Some schools, usually those with a higher concentration of non-Chinese students, do use Jyutping and go to great lengths to make Chinese learning accessible to children from all linguistic backgrounds. Still, too many students are left struggling through textbooks which have essentially been created for native Chinese speakers and do not include a phonetic aid. Learning Chinese as an additional language without romanisation is unthinkable outside of Hong Kong.
In other parts of Asia that use Chinese characters, even native speakers learn a standard phonetic form in early childhood.
To make matters worse, some schools use textbooks with Mandarin Pinyin written above the text, in classes where Chinese is being taught in Cantonese. This is most unhelpful, especially for children from non-Chinese speaking families. Photo: Maggie Holmes.
Mainland China teaches Hanyu Pinyin in Primary One, Taiwan uses the Bopomofo system and in Japan, books for young children are written entirely in Hiragana, which is also placed alongside or above the Kanji (Chinese characters) in materials for older children. Hong Kong makes some use of romanisation but students of Cantonese must navigate a mish-mash of different systems, some of which date back to the work of 19th Century missionaries.
Place names and personal names are transliterated using the government’s unpublished and unfathomable system of romanisation. Adult learners of Cantonese switch between “Sidney Lau”, “Yale” and “Jyutping”, according to the preference of their teaching institution or textbook publisher.
Jyutping, developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong in 1993, is the most recent form of romanisation and is our best hope for a Hong Kong standard form of romanisation in the future. So why are children in Hong Kong not taught Jyutping?
Some schools, usually those with a higher concentration of non-Chinese students, do use Jyutping and go to great lengths to make Chinese learning accessible to children from all linguistic backgrounds. Photo: Maggie Holmes.
The most commonly cited reason for not using Cantonese romanisation is that children rely on the Jyutping and do not learn to read the characters. In fact, the problem is not with romanisation per se so much as the way it is used. Too often, romanisation is placed above every Chinese character in a piece of text. For students whose first language is alphabetic, the eye is inextricably drawn to the romanised form, at the expense of reading the Chinese character.
To make matters worse, some schools use textbooks with Mandarin Pinyin written above the text, in classes where Chinese is being taught in Cantonese. This is most unhelpful, especially for children from non-Chinese speaking families.
Romanisation should not be used in this way. Instead, the target vocabulary for a piece of text should be listed separately, with romanisation (and preferably English or other home language) written adjacent.
Some teachers are understandably concerned that mastering Jyutping is too big a burden for children, who are learning Chinese and even English from scratch.
However, many teachers already write an approximation of Cantonese pronunciation, based on their knowledge of English, on homework materials. Students and even parents scribble their own self-invented versions of Cantonese sounds onto the textbook.
Unfortunately, these ad hoc attempts at romanisation do not help the child develop an accurate understanding of the Cantonese sound system, upon which they can build. It would be much better for all students to begin learning Jyutping in the early years and use it methodically throughout their school life.
Even an incomplete knowledge of Jyutping can help jog the child’s memory of how a character is pronounced, whilst instantly making the language more accessible to parents who are not literate in Chinese. In the early years, the provision of audio, either via QR code or digi-pen, can be used to clarify pronunciation until parent and child get to grips with Jyutping. Jyutping is an indispensable tool for the teaching of Chinese as an additional language in Hong Kong, so its inclusion in core study materials should not be left to the whims of individual schools.
The Education Bureau must integrate Jyutping into the Chinese Language Curriculum Second Language Learning Framework, require its usage on CSL textbooks and provide Jyutping training for teachers.
Without Jyutping, children from non-Chinese speaking families cannot learn Chinese effectively and no amount of government funding will bring about a substantial improvement.
Maggie Holmes is co-founder of Chinese as an Additional Language Hong Kong, an organisation which supports students studying Chinese in Hong Kong.
Last week the Education Ministry issued a report which urged Hong Kong to legally recognise Mandarin and simplified Chinese. It also said that Mandarin should be incorporated into the city’s exam system and student assessments. Given all that has happened here during the last 12 months, this report has made many wonder about the future of traditional characters and of Cantonese as the main medium of instruction in the schools. Hong Kong people are deeply attached to both. Language is the treasure house of a nation’s history, traditions, wisdom and customs. By every measure, traditional characters embody and express these better than simplified ones.
The 2,250 simplified characters used in the mainland since the 1950s were the result of historical circumstances at that time. The new government was rebuilding a country ravaged by 18 years of war. This had devastated its education system. As a consequence, the national level of adult literacy was no more than 20 per cent.
The main objective was to increase literacy by making it easier to learn characters. The policy has been a great success. By 1982, it had reached 65.5 per of the adult population of the mainland and 97 per cent in 2018.
But conditions in Hong Kong and Taiwan were different. Neither suffered the devastation of a civil war and literacy levels were higher. Their education systems were denser than those in the mainland and improved rapidly after 1949 with the arrival of thousands of teachers and missionaries who set up schools and colleges.
Both achieved almost total adult literacy of those educated after 1950 in traditional characters. Blessed with this knowledge, Hong Kong people can easily read simplified characters, which are based on traditional ones. The reverse is not the case. This knowledge is essential to read material printed in the mainland, use social media and exchange e-mails with friends there.
So why did the Ministry of Education need to make this recommendation -- it appears superfluous?
Mainland officials who come here are shocked to see how little simplified characters are used, the least of any place in China. They want a uniform national standard. Perhaps, they are also angry at their own inability to understand everything they read in Hong Kong newspapers, magazines and bookshops.
One result of the simplification programme of the 1950s is that mainlanders who do not learn traditional characters cannot read material written before 1949 nor that published here and Taiwan. Was this also one purpose of the programme? When Kim Il-sung (金日成) took power in North Korea in 1945, he went a step further. He abolished the Chinese characters used in Korea for 2,300 years and only allowed the use of the Hangul alphabet created by King Sejong the Great in 1443. At a stroke, he made his people illiterate in their own literature, history and knowledge before 1945. South Korea has continued to use both systems.
On a visit with my Hong Kong taitai to North Korea, a polished government official graciously invited us to a historical museum. This guilao and his Chinese wife could read everything written on the walls – in characters – but our well-educated guide could understand nothing. It was shocking.
Hong Kong people are very attached to their characters. “I moved here from Guangzhou 10 years ago,” said Lee Mei-lan, a teacher. “I learnt the traditional characters there and here. Of course, they are more beautiful and expressive and contain the complexity of meaning. They are the precious heritage of our national culture and history.”
In Taiwan, the issue is more emotive. The government sees itself as the guardian of traditional Chinese culture, of which the characters are an essential part.
Hong Kong people are flexible; they use traditional or simplified characters as the occasion demands and according to the person they are dealing with.
But many Taiwan people despise the simplified ones. Some call them “殘體字” (cantizi, crippled characters), a reference to the fact that they have lost some of their original limbs.
In many ditties, they mock them – 开 開關無門 (kai, kai guan wu men); ‘kai’ is the simplified form for ‘open’, formed by removing the ‘door’ character.
Or: 厂 厰内空空 (chang, changnei kong kong); ‘chang’ is the simplified form for ‘factory’ – but there is no activity within it. The most outrageous example is: 爱 愛而無心 (ai, ai er wuxin); ‘ai’ is the simplified form for ‘love’ – but the heart has been removed, an astonishing decision by the literary committee.
Posting in the Globasa Facebook Page by Ray Bergmann (17/12/20)
Varieties of Chinese and Terms for them Globasa presently uses the word “Putunhwa” as an approximation of Chinese “Pǔtōnghuà” (普通話 - simplified as 普通话, lit. common speech) which is often translated as “Mandarin” (Guānhuà 官話 - simplified as 官话, lit. official language), or in Taiwan as Guóyǔ (國語, lit. national language). In the broadest sense, “Pǔtōnghuà” (普通话) encompasses all the varieties known as in linguistics as Sinitic languages (i.e. all extant descendants of Old Chinese, including Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, etc.), but since “Pǔtōnghuà” (普通话) is commonly used to refer to “Zhōngguó-deGuānhuà” 中国的官話 or Zhōngguó guānfāng yǔyán 中国官方语言, i.e. China’s official language, it’s better to use Hànyǔ 漢語 (simplified as 汉语) for the wider sense of Chinese, meaning the whole group of Sinitic languages, and Zhōngguó-huà 中國話 (中话国for the whole group of languages represented as “Chinese” in Modern China and Taiwan. If we cluster different dialects of Chinese by their mutual intelligibility, then the dialects of Mandarin (Guānhuà 官話 (官话), which includes Taiwanese Guóyǔ (國語), would be the largest of such clusters. Their hierarchical relations are shown as: 1. Chinese (Hànyǔ 漢語 (汉语), and the Sinitic ancestor-languages Chūshǐ-yǔyán 初始语言 (初始语言), lit. initial languages; 2. Mandarin / Guānhuà 官話 (官话), the main dialects of Mandarin Chinese being (a) Northeastern / Dōngběi-Guānhuà 東北官話 (东北官话); (b) Beijing / Běijīng-Guānhuà 北京官話 (北京官话), the standardized form being called Pǔtōnghuà” 普通話 (普通话) on the mainland, and Guóyǔ 國語 on Taiwan; (c) Southwestern / Xīnán-Guānhuà 西南官話 (西南官话); (d) Central Plains / Zhōngyuán-Guānhuà 中原官話 (中原官话); (e) and Other Mandarin Varieties / Qítā Guānhuà Pǐnzhǒng 其他官話品種 (其他官话品种); 3. Cantonese / Gwóngdūng-wá 廣東話 (Yuèyǔ 粤语); 4. Hokkien / 閩南語 (Mǐnnán-yǔ 闽南语); 5. Taiwanese / Tâi-gí 臺語 (Tái yǔ 台语), Taiwanese variety of Hokkien, which is different from Pǔtōnghuà/Guóyǔ); 6. Hakka / Hakkâ-fa 客家話 (Kèjiā-huà 客家话); 7. and China’s-Other Chinese-language Varieties / Zhōngguó-de-qítā hànyǔ pǐnzhǒng Zhōngguó-qítā-pǐnzhǒng 中國其他漢語品種 (中国的其他汉语品种).
Hong Kong to cancel Cantonese taught Chinese when conditions are met, says education chief https://www.thestandard.com.hk/breaking-news/section/4/192836/Hong-Kong-to-cancel-Cantonese-taught-Chinese-when-conditions-are-met,-says-education-chief
28 Jul 2022
Hong Kong will soon push to teach local students the Chinese language using Putonghua instead of Cantonese - the most commonly spoken language in Hong Kong, said secretary for education Christine Choi Yuk-lin.
The education chief told state-funded Global Times in a recent interview that local schools in Hong Kong should offer education in Putonghua, as failing to master the language will put youths at a disadvantage - missing out on opportunities amid the country’s rapid development.
Not only for the Chinese language subject, but Choi said if certain conditions are met in the future, in which teachers’ ability and school environment allows, Hong Kong schools should deliver all their classes in Putonghua.
Currently, the Chinese Language subject at most local schools is taught in Cantonese, whereas Putonghua is taught as a separate subject.
Choi pointed out that using Putonghua to teach the Chinese language has been promulgated as a long-term goal by the Curriculum Development Council back in 2000, but the goal has yet to be achieved.
Separately, she said the SAR government will in the future strengthen its support for students who wish to further their studies on the mainland and welcome more mainland students to study in Hong Kong.
British Columbia B.C.'s Cantonese speakers fight to preserve language amid uncertainty in Hong Kong
Some speakers say language's fate in its homeland is uncertain and look for safe space to promote itChuck Chiang, Nono Shen· The Canadian Press · Posted: Sep 08, 2023 7:57 PM EDT | Last Updated: September 9
Community members say they have seen an upsurge of Cantonese speakers in Metro Vancouver, in part due to an exodus of Hong Kong residents.(CBC)
You wouldn't know that Cantonese is under threat, judging from the food court of the Parker Place shopping mall in Richmond, B.C., the most ethnically Chinese city in the world outside Asia.
All around, tables of diners, young and old, meet to "chui sui," literally, to "blow water," or gossip in the language that originated in southern China and Hong Kong.
Charles Chan, who immigrated to British Columbia from Hong Kong 40 years ago, said he raised his children to speak Cantonese at home.
"You better let your children learn Cantonese to help them be more competitive in the job market," said Chan as he waited for his wife to buy dumplings. He said he was confident about the language's future.
But some Metro Vancouver Cantonese speakers say its fate is uncertain in its homeland, and overseas communities play a vital role in its preservation.
The concerns come after the shutdown of an online group promoting Cantonese in late August after authorities in Hong Kong said content on the website violated the city's national security laws.
Mandarin, China's official spoken language, is increasingly taught and promoted in Hong Kong, even though education officials there have denied plans to switch Chinese instruction away from Cantonese. But Cantonese advocacy has been associated with a localist movement that is facing suppression in Hong Kong.
Zoe Lam, a lecturer at the University of British Columbia's Cantonese language and culture program, said the situation in Hong Kong means language learning has been inevitably politicized, something that is much less of an issue in overseas communities.
It means Cantonese speakers and learners can view overseas Chinese communities as a "very safe space," which can promote the language's survival and growth. "I think these will be major hubs of overseas Cantonese communities," she said of cities including Vancouver and Toronto. "That's why our language program also wants to play the role of the education hub of Cantonese in North America." New wave of Cantonese speakersUBC offers Canada's only comprehensive, for-credit Cantonese-language university program, and enrolment has climbed steadily from 67 when the courses launched in 2015 to 559 last school year. Community members said they have seen a new wave of Cantonese speakers in places such as Metro Vancouver in recent years, triggered in part by an exodus of Hong Kong residents amid a crackdown on political dissent.
Data from the 2021 census released last year showed a 6.1 per cent increase of Hong Kong-born people in Vancouver's census metropolitan area in the past five years, where it had previously been falling for decades. The census also showed about 183,000 people in Vancouver's census area claimed Cantonese as their mother tongue in 2021, up by about 38 per cent from 133,000 in 2011.
Non-profit group HK House runs the annual Vancouver Hong Kong Fair. Board member Agnes Hui said she and a significant number of friends moved from Hong Kong to Canada last year, joining a new pathway to permanent residency. "From my circle, I have quite of lot of friends coming to other cities, including Vancouver, Toronto and even Ottawa and Calgary," Hui said. "So it is true that there's a growing number of Hong Kongers coming over, specifically through the lifeboat scheme that the Canadian government has started."
Hong Kong immigrant Jack Chen was having dim sum with his wife at the Lansdowne Mall food court in Richmond, where 54 per cent of the population has Chinese heritage.
He said he has heard Cantonese being used more frequently over the past two years. Chen said it makes him "feel at home." Chen said the surge has helped his case for teaching his two children Cantonese and "Canto" culture is a part of the family's identity. He also plays classic Cantopop songs at home.
"The young generation nowadays might not be able to totally get the meanings and stories behind these songs, but I am so glad that my children can still speak the language at home and they could still use it at school sometimes," Chen said. Despite the large number of newcomers from Hong Kong, it's parents such as Chen who hold the key to the future health of the Cantonese language beyond China, said teacher Fay Wong.
Wong is the director of Familogue, a new non-profit launched by parents who recently emigrated from Hong Kong and want to ensure their children retain the Cantonese language and culture. The group has been holding Cantonese story time for children in Metro Vancouver parks every two months over the past year. It is also hosting seminars for children of immigrants who might be unable to use the language outside household settings.
Such in-person interactions are crucial for the language's survival, Wong said.
"It's very important for [learners] to know it is meaningful to use the language, especially with their parents," Wong said. "That's what we want to encourage, because it's family bonding. Language and culture they cannot be separated." Other groups have created community events where Cantonese speakers can interact and promote the language and culture to non-speakers.
HK House's Vancouver Hong Kong Fair drew about 5,000 participants in May.
Board member Wendy Fung said overseas organizations felt responsibility to the health of Cantonese as more Hong Kong residents emigrate.
"For my personal feelings, of course it's a little bit worrying," Fung said about the future of Cantonese in Hong Kong. "But I always thought to myself: What can I do to keep this alive? "I can't really comment on if Cantonese is going to fade away in Hong Kong," she said. "This is too far away for me to talk about right now. But what I can [do] right now here in Vancouver is try to keep the language alive."
UBC lecturer Lam said the Cantonese-speaking community already recognized a problem and acted on it. "The future of a language depends on how many people speak it," she said. "So as long as there are people who speak it, then it's still all right. If we do nothing, then, of course we would be pessimistic. But we are the people who determine the future, and we can definitely still do something about it."
China in 1965
Interesting retrospective by a BBC reporter returning to Beijing in 2012 after last visiting in 1965.
Martin Jacques on China
The economist Martin Jacques argued in his 2009 book When China Rules the World, that China is on track to replace the USA as the dominant world power, that its `democratisation' is not inevitable and that as a `civilisation state' rather than a `nation state' its attitudes and behaviour are fundamentally different from those of western nations. Some of his views are explained in `Making sense of China', an October 12 radio talk available on the BBC website.