Some myths about Cantonese

Lau Nai-keung says conditions that encouraged the expansion of Cantonese no longer exist - but academics and cultural gatekeepers need not lament its demise

For some mysterious reasons, recently many writers are lamenting the demise of the Cantonese dialect, er language. Some of them are academics and they claim that their peer-reviewed scholarly studies, either by quantitative or qualitative methods, have revealed that Cantonese proficiency in Hong Kong has fallen - presumably mostly among young people.

They, of course, find these findings alarming. For people with "localist" tendencies, the alleged demise of Cantonese serves as further evidence that Hong Kong must cut itself off from the mainland to protect the integrity of its local culture against the strong and assertive centralizing forces from the north.

The fact that I am not a professor makes me immune to the worst of this academic nonsense. I do not intend to read all these journal articles anytime soon. But they are not exactly intended for the public anyway. You have to be a paid subscriber to download and view most of them; so much for academia's contribution to public debate.

Instead of debating the validity of the "demise of Cantonese" thesis, I would like to talk about the rise of Cantonese. This is based on personal recollections and reflections.

Some say Cantonese is a language. What they forget is that there are many versions of Cantonese. In the province of Guangdong, there are people who do not speak Cantonese. Teochew and Hakka are also major languages spoken in Guangdong. Take Teochew, for example; it is a language very different from Cantonese. To an untrained Cantonese ear, Teochew is as incomprehensible as Japanese. If, as some people claim, Cantonese - the most spoken language within Guangdong - is dying, I wonder why Teochew and Hakka still seem to be alive and well.

My mother-in-law was born in Zhongshan, a city in Guangdong province. People there speak the dialect of Shiqi, which is similar to Cantonese as we know it in Hong Kong, but with a strong accent (from our point of view). Her daughter, my wife, can understand Shiqi, but she herself is no longer able to produce the exact tones. Her grandsons, i.e., my sons, have difficulty fully comprehending what she says.

There is an irony here: It is a story about how the "mother tongue" in our family is being destroyed by the dominant language in this city - Cantonese. This is a story that you do not hear a lot from "localists".

What the localists see as Cantonese's demise can perhaps more accurately be perceived as the end of its expansionism. This statement may seem provocative at first glance, but it makes perfect sense. Take Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying as an example: Both his parents came from the city of Weihai in Shandong province. I am no expert but I am pretty sure people in Weihai do not speak Cantonese, and I am also sure that Leung's children have proficiency issues when it comes to speaking whatever Weihai dialect their grandparents spoke.

The same sort of story is also true for many other people. They or their parents or grandparents came to Hong Kong from a place which does not speak Cantonese. For both social and political reasons, they adopted Cantonese as a common working language. As such, the rise of Cantonese in the city is both historical and arbitrary.

Before the British colonizers came to Hong Kong, the inhabitants of the place were mostly Hakka. They certainly did not speak Cantonese.

Decades ago, especially before the mainland's reforms in 1978, people from all over the mainland came to Hong Kong thinking that this was their last refuge, that there was nowhere else in the mainland they could possibly return to. Many of them therefore began to learn the local language dominant at that time - Cantonese. The British government also discouraged the people in Hong Kong from getting too close to popular trends occurring in the mainland - such as Marxism and revolution - and I am also talking about policies even before 1949. Instead, the British encouraged us and our predecessors to see Hong Kong and its Cantonese culture as the ultimate reference point.

These were the conditions that supported the period of Cantonese expansion. Now, they no longer exist. New immigrants from the mainland can feel free to maintain their own cultural identity. They can communicate with the rest of the community, within Hong Kong and beyond, in Putonghua.

(HK Edition 08/12/2015 page12)