Last Friday, Feb 21, was the International Mother Language Day. Given the recent feud between patriots and separatists in Hong Kong over "the status of Cantonese", it is extraordinary the day passed by without being noticed. Taiwan's separatist-leaning media, for one, was very enthusiastic about promotion of this non-event, but perhaps our homebrewed secessionists were too parochial to understand its significance. However, I did find a piece of commentary titled "The International Mother Language Day" (in Chinese) on the online media platform The House News, written by a local postgraduate student. This may well be a sign we are soon going to see this term more often.

The International Mother Language Day, first announced by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) on 1999, represents the day in 1952 when university students demonstrating for the recognition of their language, Bengali, as one of the two national languages of Pakistan were shot and killed by police in Dhaka. When the commemoration of the event is neutralized in the form of a "UNESCO day", one word is conspicuously missing, and that is "independence". After all, what happened to Bengali? It became the national language of Bangladesh, the place that used to be called East Pakistan back in 1952.

Bangladesh's independence took place in 1971, 19 years after the Bengali Language Movement in 1952. In the process, there was a war that lasted for nine months, involving large-scale atrocities, the exodus of 10 million refugees and the displacement of 30 million people.

No one, except perhaps the Bangladeshi themselves, are in a position to judge whether Bangladeshi Independence was a worthwhile cause - certainly not UNESCO and other cheerleaders of cultural nationalism in the guise of the "mother language". However, it is worth noting that two days before the Language Martyrs' Day in Feb 21, Bangladesh's main opposition alliance won 72 vice-chairman posts in the first phase of the Upazila Parishad (district council) election, while the ruling Awami League only won 63. Candidates supported by the Jamaat-e-Islami, a key component of the opposition alliance, won an impressive 30 vice-chairman posts.

The popular Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami (not to be confused with its sister organization the Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan) stood against the independence of Bangladesh and opposed the breakup of Pakistan. Many of Jamaat's leaders were accused of committing war crimes during the liberation war in 1971. The International Crimes Tribunal had already convicted several. Polarizing trials in the local war tribunal is ongoing, and hundreds were killed during political rallies last year alone.

With the global and historical context in mind, let's review the local debate. The Education Bureau posted something on its website saying, "Although the Basic Law stipulates that Chinese and English are the two official languages in Hong Kong, nearly 97 percent cent of the local population learn Cantonese (a Chinese dialect that is not an official language) as their commonly used daily language." So what's the big deal? And why was it treated as a declaration of war against Cantonese?

"By the comprehensibility criterion, Cantonese is not a dialect of Chinese. Rather it is a language, as are Shanghainese, Mandarin and other kinds of Chinese," says The Economist, but this hardly clarifies the issues. As South China Morning Post columnist Peter Gordon put it succinctly, "Whether Cantonese is a language or dialect is, at least for the Cantonese themselves, more a question of identity - and hence politics - than linguistics."

I usually agree with Alex Lo of the South China Morning Post, but not this time. Contrary to his belief, the Chinese written script does not work "equally well for Putonghua, Cantonese or other Chinese speakers." A dialect, or more accurately "place speech", has a unique syntax and a distinguished set of vocabularies. Reducing Cantonese to mere phonetics does much more harm than the Education Bureau.

The "mother tongue" is a misleading and dangerous myth. My mother did not speak the same way her mother did, and I do not speak the same way she did. Look at the descendants of the Shanghainese refugees who came here in the 1940s, or the numerous people of Chaozhou origin including the legendary Lee Ka-shing: What do they speak? No, they don't speak Shanghainese or Teochew. They submit to the dominating Cantonese language. Language is a powerful unifying force.

The author is a veteran current affairs commentator.

(HK Edition 02/25/2014 page9)