Hokkien renaissance
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This is cause for rejoicing:
"Meet the Malaysian on a mission to make Hokkien great again, amid Mandarin’s rising popularity in Southeast Asia"
Linguist Sim Tze Wei has been accused of trying to divide the Chinese people, as there are those who see the use of other Chinese languages ‘as a sign of disunity and weakness’
But he points out that Chinese immigrants to Asia have for generations been speaking their own languages, which are being edged out as more turn to learning Mandarin
Randy Mulyanto, SCMP, 1/24/21
When Sim Tze Wei began working to raise awareness of the Hokkien language, he never expected he would be accused of trying to divide the Chinese people.
“Han Chinese nationalists everywhere are keen to equate Mandarin to [real] Chinese,” said Sim, adding that there are those who find ethnic Chinese people speaking in Chinese languages other than Mandarin “as a sign of disunity and weakness”.
The Malaysian-Chinese linguist, who is in his mid-30s, is president of the Hokkien Language Association of Penang. Through the association, Sim is campaigning for the wider use of Hokkien, and advocating that it be reinstated as a language of instruction in independent and Chinese primary schools in the northern Malaysian state, as he fears Hokkien will “continue to be eroded by Mandarin and English”.
Sim grew up in Penang and spoke Teochew with his family, before picking up Hokkien from residents of the state, where it is the lingua franca of the majority ethnically Chinese population – who originally emigrated from the southern Chinese province of Fujian.
“Hokkien, being one of the largest linguistic groups in Malaysia, is one of the few southern Chinese languages that stand a chance to survive,” he said. “I grew up with it and I have the knowledge to do something about it.”
He said Hokkien was “not a subset or dialect of Mandarin”, with the latter originating in the country’s north.
“By calling Hokkien a Chinese dialect, people would perceive Hokkien as a dialect of Mandarin, and through that, [Han Chinese nationalists] would achieve their aim of denigrating the status of Hokkien,” Sim said.
…
Catherine Churchman, who lectures in Asian studies at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, predicted five years ago during field work in Penang that the language would disappear in three decades’ time unless something changed.
Churchman, who has been studying Hokkien since 2000 and is currently working on a Penang Hokkien-English dictionary, explains that many Penang locals were told in school that there was no use for Hokkien.
“If I see [more] parents speaking Hokkien to their children and [more] children speaking Hokkien to each other again, [only] then I will say that the renaissance is happening,” she said.
…
“Han [Chinese] nationalists believe that this single Chinese language has since diverged into different dialects and therefore should be rectified in order to make Chinese people great again,” he said.
“Saying that ethnic Chinese have to speak Mandarin in order to be considered ‘legit Chinese’ is like saying every European has to speak English to be considered a ‘legit European’.”
…
Sim should be applauded for his clear linguistic understanding of Hokkien as a separate language, not a dialect of Mandarin. Hokkien and Mandarin are both daughters of their parent Sinitic mother, with Mandarin being by far the younger of the two (perhaps the youngest of all Sinitic languages, and one that is heavily influenced by northern, non-Sinitic languages), and Hokkien representing one of the oldest (perhaps the oldest living descendant of the parent Sinitic Muttersprache).
Selected readings
- "Our Taiwan" (11/19/13)
- "Polyscriptal Taiwanese" (7/24/10)
- "No character for the most frequent morpheme in Taiwanese" (12/10/13)
- "On not speaking Taiwanese" (12/2/18)
- Victor H. Mair, "How to Forget Your Mother Tongue and Remember Your National Language" (2003)
- Deborah Beaser, "The Outlook for Taiwanese Language Preservation ", Sino-Platonic Papers, 172 (August, 2006), 1-18 (free pdf)
- Christine Louise Lin, "The Presbyterian Church in Taiwan and the Advocacy of Local Autonomy", Sino-Platonic Papers, 92 (January, 1999), xiii + 136 (free pdf)
Alvin Lin, "Writing Taiwanese: The Development of Modern Written Taiwanese", Sino-Platonic Papers, 89 (January, 1999), 4 + 41 + 4 (free pdf) - Ralph Jennings, "Isolation-wary, Chinese-speaking Taiwan moves to make English an official language", Los Angeles Times (10/15/18)
- "The geo-, socio-, ethno-, and politicolinguistics of Taiwan" (7/24/18)
- "The Opacity and Difficulty of the Chinese Script" (9/18/08)
- "Vitally worst: 'Chinese' sounds like 'to tear you to die'" (4/7/07)
- "Writing Sinitic languages with phonetic scripts" (5/20/16)
- "Confessions of an Ex-Hokkien Creationist" (9/20/16)
- "Eurasian eureka" (9/12/16)
- "Trainspotting-like Voices in Chinese" (3/12/11)
- "The Base, Al Qaeda, and gays in China" (8/12/13)
- "Yet another polysyllabic Chinese character" (10/31/16)
- "Progress in the war on Chinglish" (12/2/17)
- "Hokkien in Singapore" (9/16/16)
- "Hoklo" (9/18/16)
- "The importance of being and speaking Taiwanese" (7/21/20)
- "Graduation speech by a West African student at National Taiwan University" (6/10/20)
- "French girl sells crêpes in a Taiwan market" (4/9/20)
- "Writing Taiwanese with Romanization" (10/7/20)
- "Sia suay (or xia suay): a Hokkien expression in Singapore English" (3/23/20)
[Thanks to Arthur Waldron]
Jim Breen said,
January 25, 2021 @ 7:47 pm
Penang is a very interesting place, and the southern Chinese presence, especially in Georgetown, is strong and fascinating. All strength to those trying to preserve Hokkien and other aspects of their culture.
Arthur Waldron said,
January 25, 2021 @ 8:27 pm
Victor and I are on the same page. To understand the reason that I see this as very important, read if you have not, Nationalism and Social Communication by Karl Deutsch MIT 1951. A great and illuminating classic. LKY late of Singapore learned Mandarin at the same age I did. How foolish he was to force simplified CCP on a rich organic SE Asian community having its own Sinitic culture. Tear down unique priceless nineteenth century streets. I first set foot there in 1972 when it was intact. Now without cultural logic. In the 1920s Hu Shih and others recognized the damage centralization and standardization did to China. The proof is today everywhere. Karl understands though he does not mention China. This issue is forming a huge wave off shore now. Wait till it breaks! My warmest good wishes, dear Comrādes. Arthur
Luke said,
January 26, 2021 @ 6:22 am
"Han Chinese nationalists" seems to imply that non-Han Chinese nationalists also exist, I suppose they would be in favour of a non-Sinitic lingua franca then?
Ouen said,
January 26, 2021 @ 10:42 am
@Luke I disagree. I think Han Chinese nationalists rather than simply Chinese nationalists makes the most sense here. The distinction between the two being that a Han Chinese nationalist are driven by the idea not only of China's glory, but also by the idea that Han culture and people are rightfully first among the ethnic groups of China. Simply saying 'Chinese nationalist' just refers to less specific type of nationalism, not a pointedly non-Han kind of Chinese nationalist sentiment.
Victor Mair said,
January 26, 2021 @ 2:54 pm
From Kate Baldanza:
Thanks for sending this. Zhao Lu and I have been working on a translation of 海南雜著, a 19th century account of Vietnam by Cai Tinglan, for a couple of years (we're almost done). Cai Tinglan spoke Hokkien, and he found that he could get by speaking to other Hokkien-speakers all across Vietnam. Zhao Lu and I are trying to transcribe some words in Hokkien instead of Mandarin so as not to give the false sense that people were speaking Mandarin. (Catherine Churchman gave me some advice on how to do this.) Of course, we also have to transcribe things in Vietnamese and Cantonese, so things are getting messy, just like they were in real life!
E. N. Anderson said,
January 26, 2021 @ 3:17 pm
Every language has its own genius, its oral literature, its body of knowledge. Loss of or reduction of a language is always a cost to humanity. Linguists and linguistic anthropologists have been working for two centuries now to preserve languages, because of these values and because suppressing a language is a form of "soft genocide." George Orwell showed in his works how putting language in a straitjacket is tyrannical and destructive. Hokkien in particular is a beautiful, interesting language with a great deal of diversity and history. It should be cultivated, widely taught, and brought into the world mainstream, not attacked.
Calvin said,
January 26, 2021 @ 5:04 pm
@Arthur Waldron
Were you saying LKY was foolish to impose Mandarin on the local Chinese communities, or just the choice of Simplified Chinese, or both? What would be better alternatives?
Since you also mentioned Hu Shih, you should know he was a proponent for simplifying Chinese characters, though he was better known for advocating writing with the vernacular spoken language (see 《國語月刊》“漢字改革號”卷頭言).
Victor Mair said,
January 26, 2021 @ 11:56 pm
From an anonymous native speaker of Taiwanese:
Hokkien been all but eased out by Mandarin even in Jinmen / Quemoy. It’s ironical to see the failure of the supporters of Taiwan independence to teach their children Taiwanese.
Michael Watts said,
January 27, 2021 @ 2:46 am
What is this supposed to mean? On the assumption, repeated here, that they descend from a common source, how could one be any older than the other?
Philip Taylor said,
January 27, 2021 @ 9:04 am
"On the assumption, repeated here, that they descend from a common source, how could one be any older than the other ?"
If a married couple have children, the probability is very high that one or more of their children will be older than the others. Does not the same hold true for languages ?
Shannon said,
January 27, 2021 @ 11:36 am
“Han [Chinese] nationalists believe that this single Chinese language has since diverged into different dialects and therefore should be rectified in order to make Chinese people great again,” he said.
“Saying that ethnic Chinese have to speak Mandarin in order to be considered ‘legit Chinese’ is like saying every European has to speak English to be considered a ‘legit European’.”
Is there any other analogs of this way of thinking in other diasporas outside their ancestral land — that one must re-align one's language to match the homeland's linguistic policy to count as self-described (insert ethnicity that came from that homeland), even when the diaspora is generations removed?
While there are certainly lots of examples with historically modern nation-states imposing the view that the nation should be equated with those who speak the national language (e.g. France with Parisian French vs. Occitan, Basque, Breton etc.), it's striking to me that in the Chinese identity case, this language imposition extends to the diaspora (traditionally non-Mandarin speakers), as in S. E Asia etc like Singapore who have been far removed from the politics of the old country. That's to say, did overseas descendants of Hokkien or Cantonese speakers from afar whose forebears never spoke Mandarin really later buy into the idea that learning the homeland's Mandarin makes them more "authentic" and aligned to their roots? You wouldn't find this attitude obviously in a case like English where American English speakers and Anglophone Aussies, South Africans etc. go and think the "Queen's English" of the UK makes them better and more authentic English speakers just because the UK is where English originated.
While I can think of some sort-of-vaguely similar cases but not quite (e.g. the decline of Yiddish, and other Jewish diasporic languages like Ladino, in the Jewish diaspora vs. Hebrew in modern Israel as Hebrew increasingly became seen as the language of not just the homeland but diaspora), I don't know how often non-Mandarin speaking Chinese diaspora "hold out" and resist the idea that the "old country" and its norms has a monopoly on their ethnic identity based on what language they speak.
Chau said,
January 27, 2021 @ 11:42 am
@Michael Watts: "What is this supposed to mean? On the assumption, repeated here, that they descend from a common source, how could one be any older than the other?"
My understanding of Prof. Mair's statement regarding Hokkien being "older" than Mandarin is that Hokkien, having split off from the main branch of Sinitic very early and staying isolated from the main arena all the time, has retained a lot of the archaic features of Old Sinitic. The situation is similar to Icelandic as compared with its sister Scandinavian languages on the continent, all having descended from Old Norse. The Icelanders today can still read the sagas and Edda in Old Norse with ease.
Mandarin emerged from Sinitic in northern China during the Khitan period, heavily influenced by various languages of northern nomads. Comparing Hokkien and Mandarin is like looking at children in a family, as Philip Taylor has nicely pointed out. But I go one step further. Say, a man married three times, the first two wives having passed away. His third wife is a foreigner. The children of the first two marriages have grown and left home (think Hokkien). Because the third wife is a foreigner, the children of the third marriage speak a language with uncommon phrasal expressions and mixed with a lot of foreign words which they picked up from their mother (that's Mandarin there).
The main theme of the o.p. calls to mind the opening lines of a famous Tang poem by 賀知章 (Hè Zhīzhāng) entitled, 回鄉偶書 Huíxiāng Ŏushū (Incidental writing on returning home):
少小離家老大回 Shàoxiăo lí jiā lăodà huí,
鄉音無改鬢毛衰 Xiāngyīn wúgăi bìnmáo cuī.
When (I) was young, (I) left home, and when (I) returned, (I am) past my prime;
(My) home accent never changed but (my) sideburns have withered.
– My rough translation
The poet's accent has never changed, but his home town's has.
A poem 1,000 years ago speaks so well about my own experience. I left Taiwan in 1965, at a time when Taiwanese was spoken by about 75% of the population. Every time when I visited home, I noticed remarkable changes. Now among the younger generation, it has been reported that only about 20% of them show some proficiency. My sideburns have withered too.
Shannon said,
January 27, 2021 @ 11:46 am
"Hokkien been all but eased out by Mandarin even in Jinmen / Quemoy. It’s ironical to see the failure of the supporters of Taiwan independence to teach their children Taiwanese."
Hasn't this kind of thing happened before for other national/independence movements? For example, how well Irish as a language is doing after independence, even after it went from surpressed to promoted in the wider culture.
It'd be interesting to compare cases where political autonomy of a place saved a declining language spoken in the place vs. cases where it did not, and why.
Calvin said,
January 27, 2021 @ 12:24 pm
Kinmen (Jinmen / Quemoy) is different from the rest of Taiwan for a few reasons: geographically and historically closer to mainland China (never been part of a Japanese colony), feeling neglected by the central government, more dependent on Chinese tourism, etc.
Here is a good article from NYT about its current affairs with some historical context.
Michael Watts said,
January 27, 2021 @ 7:28 pm
No, how could it? Languages are not born child from adult like humans; they divide one from another like amoebae. After a cell divides, which daughter cell is older than the other one?
David C. said,
January 27, 2021 @ 9:39 pm
If we want to be precise, Kinmen is not in Taiwan, but rather, Fukien Province (romanized Fujian in Hanyu Pinyin).
It's one thing to say that the loss of linguistic diversity is lamentable. It's another to suggest that a language has more value because it is the oldest living descendant of the parent language.
The 1970 census in Malaysia reported that while the Hokkien were the plurality, they represented only 32% of ethnic Chinese Malaysians. Even when we add on the linguistically related Teochew to the tally, we come to about 44%.
Despite the constant political pressure that compelled the use of Mandarin in China in the last century, it is not surprising that Standard Mandarin naturally emerged as the lingua franca in China as the majority of the Han population speaks a Mandarin topolect.
The fact that Chinese Malaysians began using Mandarin as a lingua franca in the past few decades can't all be ascribed to "nationalists". There's a strong element of practicality as well: 1) as the spoken version of the written language that Chinese Malaysians learn at school; 2) as a neutral language that favors no particular group; 3) as a common tongue that can be taught to all in a Chinese-language educational system; 4) proliferation of its use in mainland China and Taiwan.
I would argue that Chinese Malaysians have in fact done a great job in passing on their linguistic heritage. It's not at all uncommon to find Malaysians who can speak English, Malay, Mandarin, and one or two Chinese languages/topolects, and are proficient in all of them. It's in Singapore where the push for English as a lingua franca has drastically cut down the proportion of families that speak any Chinese language at home.
Philip Taylor said,
January 28, 2021 @ 2:13 am
Michael — "Languages are not born child from adult like humans; they divide one from another like amoebae" I respectfully disagree. When a cell divides, the original cell ceases to exist and is replaced by its daughter cells. When a language gives birth to a daughter language, it may nonetheless continue to exists, and later give birth to another daughter language, and so so. See Chau's comment above.
Michael Watts said,
January 28, 2021 @ 11:03 pm
The immediate implication here is that a language may continue to exist over time even while it is not giving off daughter languages. But we know this is impossible; all languages change over time. The political doctrine of the Mandate of Heaven tells us that, at any given time, exactly one claimant to the throne of China was legitimate, ordained by Heaven. No more than one, and no less. But there is no analogous claim for languages, nor for species. Every branch of the tree changes over time, and while we may say that two branches diverged from each other more or less recently, we cannot say that one branch is older than another — by definition, all are equally old. It is not possible for Hokkien to be older than Mandarin just as it is not possible for orcas to be an older species than harp seals.
Here are some questions for the one-language-can-be-older-than-another model:
1 (a). Of the many Romance languages, one of them is still Latin. Which one?
1 (b). Of the many Romance languages, none of them are still Latin. How could this be? For each one, when did it cease to be Latin?
1 (c). Of the many Romance languages, two or more, despite their differences with each other, are still Latin. Which ones? Why aren't the others still Latin?
2. Ancient Greek and Classical Latin both had robust case systems. Modern Latin does not. Modern Greek does. Is Modern Greek older than Modern Latin?
3.1. Suppose two languages diverge from each other a long time ago, say 3000 years. 2000 years ago, one of the two branches radiates into many different languages. We now have a case where many languages exist, most are closely related to each other, and one is distantly related. We take the one which is distant from all the others as being older than all the others are.
3.2. 1200 years ago, the second branch also radiates, into a few separate languages. Now instead of having a clear outgroup of a single language, we see a large group and a small group. Two languages from the small group diverged from each other far more recently than either diverged from any language in the large group. There are 15 languages in the large group and 6 in the small group. Which of the 21 languages is the oldest?
3.3. 700 years ago, the large group shrinks; the populations speaking its languages die out or take up another language. Now there's one language left in the large group and 7 in the small group. We see again that many languages exist and one is a clear outgroup to all the others, diverging from them 2000 years ago where divergence within the "main line" takes place at most 1200 years ago. May we take the distant relation as being the oldest? When did it stop being the youngest?
If it stopped being the youngest when the "small" branch radiated, what would have happened if the die-off affected the small branch instead of the large branch? In that case, we would observe a large group of related languages, with a single obvious outgroup in the small branch — exactly the same situation that obtained in paragraph 3.1. May we still take the single language in the small branch as being the oldest? How can the dying off of languages that were related to it have made it older than it used to be?
Philip Taylor said,
January 30, 2021 @ 5:39 am
MIchael, please forgive me if I do not attempt to answer your multiple hypothetical questions above, but if I may, I would like to ask you just one question in return. If I were to ask you "which is the older language, Tamil or Afrikaans", what would your answer be ?
Twill said,
January 31, 2021 @ 8:56 am
@Philip Taylor If Afrikaans should be less divergent from Middle Dutch than what they speak in Amsterdam, would it make sense to you to date Afrikaans to a medieval date and Standard Dutch to the 17th century? This is where the political, social, anthropological factors cloud the purely linguistic.
If we strip off the labels and consider that language A and language B that both can be traced as far as writing takes us through periods of linguistic innovation and conservatism, is there any sense in which one is "older"? If we can demonstrate that they are derived from an earlier language and one is more divergent from that than the other, does that make one older than the other, despite the same amount of years transpiring?
Philip Taylor said,
January 31, 2021 @ 10:50 am
Your questions, Twill, like Michael's, raise valid points but it seems to me that in the specific case that in question, the finer points do not affect the final conclusion. Afrikaans, as a language, did not exist prior to the 18th century, whereas Tamil was in existence 5000 years ago. Yes, of course both derived from earlier/"older" languages, but the question was not "is the oldest language to which we can trace Afrikaans back older than the oldest language to which we can trace Tamil back ?" but the much simpler question "which is older, Afrikaans or Tamil", and it seems to me at least that the answer to the question as asked is "Tamil is the older". Expressed in these terms, would you (Twill), and would Michael, agree ?
To give an analogy, if one were asked "how old is Estuary English", the simple answer is surely "a few decades, maybe a century at most"; but if one were asked whether one could trace the roots of Estuary English back to an earlier dialect/topolect, then of course the answer is "yes", since it inherits a great deal, primarily from Cockney but also from the various other topolects found in and around London.
Twill said,
January 31, 2021 @ 8:03 pm
@Philip Taylor "Afrikaans as a language" is totally a question of language politics that does not meaningfully correspond to a bare linguistic reality. So too "Macedonian" has only existed for about a century, yet it would be farcical to pretend that the first people who consciously spoke "Macedonian" spoke any language other than what their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents spoke.
Considering "Estuary English" should surely demonstrate the epistemic limits of these constructs. Linguists have found it useful to describe contemporary shifts in SE English as constituting a dialect called "Estuary English". We could broaden or narrow the definition to refer to any period of English considered together, which may be more or less useful, but equally validly corresponds to reality. To say "Estuary English is ~30 years old" is really to say that "English as spoken in SE England over the past 30 years is 30 years old".
In the same vein, Tamil is only older than Afrikaans by virtue of the former conventionally signifying millennia of language tradition and the former a few centuries. There is no particular reason why we could not redefine Tamil such that it only refers to the contemporary form of language and Afrikaans as extending past proto-Germanic, and as such, it does not actually demonstrate anything more than that the labels refer to broader and narrower periods of linguistic history.
Philip Taylor said,
February 1, 2021 @ 12:19 am
"There is no particular reason why we could not redefine Tamil such that it only refers to the contemporary form of language and Afrikaans as extending past proto-Germanic" — I complete agree, we could so re-define them. But I am trying to deal with reality rather than with hypothesis, and as those are not the definitions of those languages, does it make any sense to discuss "what if" scenarios rather than those scenarios (and languages) that actually obtain ?
"[…] it does not actually demonstrate anything more than that the labels refer to broader and narrower periods of linguistic history". Agreed. But why does Tamil refer to a long period of linguistic history and Afrikaans only to a very short period ? There must be a good reason, and I would suggest (but not from a position of knowledge, merely conjecture) that the reason that Tamil refers to a long period of linguistic history is that the language has changed only slowly over that period, whilst Afrikaans represents a very rapid divergence from the language(s) from which it descends. But of course I may be wrong.
Twill said,
February 1, 2021 @ 2:54 am
@Philip Taylor The reality, as I stated, is that it reflects language politics/anthropology/etc. rather than anything about the languages per se. Despite how illogical it seems to linguists, Brazilian Portuguese is a dialect and Afrikaans a separate language, the North Germanic language continuum resolves to three major languages where Arabic is a single language, and so on.
Tamil is the continuation of Old Tamil rather than Malayalam because they are considered the continuation of the Tamil people, not because Tamils today can pick up the Tolkappiyam without difficulty. Indeed, I believe an Afrikaner has significantly less difficulty reading Middle Dutch. Italian is not the same language as Latin, naturally, yet Greek extends from Homer to today, even though a man on the street in Athens can make neither head nor tails of Pindar. Both languages diverged significantly in the past few millennia. It is simply that modern and ancient Athenians are both identified as Hellenes where the Roman is today an Italian.
All Afrikaans being a different language really tells us is that the Afrikaners decided that their language is not Dutch. It is rather divergent to be sure, but that is not a requirement to be "a different" language (Malay vs Indonesian, the languages of the former Yugoslavia, etc.). Political/cultural considerations are much more important than any linguistic ones.
Philip Taylor said,
February 1, 2021 @ 5:24 am
Fair enough, I'm happy to leave it at that.
alex said,
February 1, 2021 @ 10:59 pm
I thought this video was interesting. Especially the part where he uses phonetic spellings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGShuqqBf9A
Philip Taylor said,
February 2, 2021 @ 4:49 am
Interesting indeed, although the psychedelic introduction must cause havoc with migraine suffferers, etc., but the part that intriged me was at 01:47 where he transcribed 餓 as "eh". Now I know that "erhua" is primarily a Beijing phenomenon, but I nonetheless thought that the canonical transcription of 餓 was "è" or "èr" rather than "eh" (or as I assume that he meant, "èh").