Hong Kong Cantonese in jeopardy
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From a fluent speaker of Mandarin:
This past weekend, I watched the latest film from Marvel Studios: "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings" (an Asian superhero movie). I was rather surprised to hear about 30% of all lines spoken in Pǔtōnghuà 普通话 (Mandarin), especially when given that some scenes were set in Macau and characters from ancient Chinese villages. Although I could not find an article or commentary on this specific topic I was interested in, I did find this Reddit post—the author discusses how strange and peculiar the creators' decision to use Mandarin in particular is in the context of the movie.
From a native speaker of Mandarin:
In my estimation, all of this bodes ill for the future of Cantonese in Hong Kong, where it has thriven for centuries. The difference now is the imposition of the PRC National Security Law by the CCP in the middle of 2020. Although, in accordance with the peace treaty between Great Britain and China signed on July 1, 1997, the PRC promised to allow Hong Kong to retain its rights and customs for half a century — until 2047 — all of that changed with the passage of the National Security Law. Now the laws and norms of the PRC are operative in Hong Kong, such that, for example, vigils can no longer be held for the Tiananmen Square Protests and Massacre of June 4, 1989 and it has increasingly become a patriotic duty to learn and speak Mandarin, as we have seen above. Cantonese was already long since under severe threat in Guangzhou and the whole of Canton / Guangdong Province, but now the same thing is happening in Hong Kong, the last bastion of Cantonese in China.
Selected readings
- "The Future of Cantonese" (5/27/18)
- "The future of Cantonese, part 2" (6/10/18)
- "Public Romanization in Canton" (5/30/20) — "Speak Mandarin; Write Standard [i.e., simplified] Characters"
- "A quick exit for Cantonese" (7/22/15) — how hard it is nowadays to find a decent elementary school in Hong Kong that offers instruction in Cantonese, rather than in Mandarin
- "Cantonese v Mandarin: When Hong Kong languages get political",
[Thanks to Yoonseo Kim and Xinwei Yao]
Y said,
September 19, 2021 @ 1:07 pm
It looks as if, along with the PRC's other grand gestures showing off its power, like damming the Yangtze river, it now aims to render extinct a language with 80 million speakers.
Gene Anderson said,
September 19, 2021 @ 1:58 pm
This is awful. Cutting down any language is extremely bad, but an ancient one with a huge literature is a real world-class tragedy to lose. This is a truly Orwellian situation: people tend to forget the appendix on Newspeak in 1984. Newspeak was an all-too-realistic mashup of propaganda use by Hitler and Stalin with Winston Churchill's "Basic English" campaign, which Orwell loathed. He wrote several essays about the whole issue. They read sadly predictive of what's happening in China, and are worth seeking out now.
Mehmet Oguz Derin said,
September 19, 2021 @ 2:27 pm
Just the reality with CCP. I always wonder about the reason for the elimination of not only different languages but also the varieties. I think the main driving factor is that linguistic diversity is tough to keep up with (even with our current advancement in technology), and it is much easier to control people and things when you have just one "proper" way of expression, and I believe that motives of CCP in this aspect stem from much more practical ones than historical. However, others might have different opinions.
Antonio L. Banderas said,
September 19, 2021 @ 2:34 pm
Fowler reads
The regular or ‘weak’ form "thrived" has won the centuries-old battle between the irregular or ‘strong’ past (participle), which are now rarely used, largely in BrE, and have an aura of archaism.
John Rohsenow said,
September 19, 2021 @ 2:36 pm
Speakers of Taiwanese Hokkien (Minnanhua) and Hakka in Taiwan had to go thru this in the 1950s; perhaps they already had some experience of 'linguistic imperialism' having been forced to learn Japanese during the Japanese occupation of 1895-1945. Many ethnic Chinese in SE Asia have chosen to set up schools teaching Mandarin since Chinese started to emerge from isolation in the late 1970s, primarily for business/trade purposes, and Mandarin is one of the four official languages of Singapore (along with English, Malay and Tamil) for the same reasons.
I doubt that Cantonese will disappear in Hong Kong any more than it has/will in Guangzhou/Canton city, but it is perhaps not a bad thing that Hongkongers be fluent in both their own (version of) their native topolect AND their now defacto 'national language'.
Jonathan Dushoff said,
September 19, 2021 @ 3:04 pm
I don't think I've seen "has thriven" in the wild before.
Philip Taylor said,
September 19, 2021 @ 4:17 pm
"Fowler reads …". Not really. Fowler would never have used a singular subject ("thrived") with a plural verb ("are"). What he actually wrote was :
AntC said,
September 19, 2021 @ 4:42 pm
Speakers of Taiwanese Hokkien (Minnanhua) and Hakka in Taiwan had to go thru this in the 1950s; perhaps they already had some experience of 'linguistic imperialism' having been forced to learn Japanese during the Japanese occupation of 1895-1945.
(Not that I'm defending the Japanese occupation but …)
Hokkien and Hakka (and indigenous languages) were not actively suppressed by the Japanese, in the way that they were when the KMT came to power. And I don't think the KMT were ever as brutal as the CCP is now being in HK. Nowadays linguistic diversity is positively celebrated in Taiwan: there are Hakka and indigenous cultural centres all over the place; government documents are produced in multiple languages; President Tsai Ing-wen boosts her Hakka and indigenous heritage — even though it's probably over-stated.
Curiously, it's Hokkien that isn't getting so much positive discrimination — not that it's in any danger of disappearing: everybody seems to at least understand it, and there's Hokkien soap-operas on TV.
AntC said,
September 19, 2021 @ 4:56 pm
linguistic diversity is tough to keep up with …, and it is much easier to control people and things when you have just one "proper" way of expression
Nonsense. There have been plenty of Empires (Roman, Austro-Hungarian, even PRC before Xi Jinping) where the deal is: government will be conducted in one language, and failing to speak it will not be an excuse; but you can speak whatever you like socially.
I believe that motives of CCP in this aspect stem from much more practical ones than historical
You mean when ordering about ethnic minorities in internment camps in XinJiang? Or suppressing the truth about how many have actually died from COVID? Or trying to stop 'riots' (alleged) by people who've lost their life savings in the government-promoted property bubble? The ordinary practical matters of managing a brutal (and often incompetent) dictatorship.
Mehmet Oguz Derin said,
September 19, 2021 @ 5:26 pm
Sorry, my wording was not clear, and I was not trying to express anything political to trigger an emotional response; I just want to clarify a few points. I find it a bit too generalizing of what CCP has become to compare with any preceding states in such a way; I am not well-versed in methods or conditions of Roman or Austro-Hungarian Empires to conclude whether they were aiming to become total surveillance states, but communist states do indeed desire to become one (even if that takes brutality to achieve, USSR did that too), and CCP was "lucky" enough to make it into the digital age where it can actually achieve that, they are keen on social engineering. What they are doing in Xinjiang or East Turkestan is disgusting and inhumane, to say the least, but what they are doing makes it evident that a moral compass is nowhere to be found at the base of reasoning.
Antonio L. Banderas said,
September 19, 2021 @ 5:36 pm
@Philip Taylor
What about "between" meaning "against" ? That is, "A won the battle 'tween B and C" to mean "A won against (both) B and (against) C."
Dwight Williams said,
September 19, 2021 @ 6:58 pm
Han-supremacism has its price. We're seeing it extracted in these contexts too now, aren't we?
Jenny Chu said,
September 19, 2021 @ 7:06 pm
Long before the type of political stresses we see now reached their height, Cantonese was already viewed by the mainstream in Hong Kong as "just a dialect" or "just slang." I can't tell you how often, as far back as 1999, I was asked, "Why are you learning Cantonese instead of Mandarin?" followed by the usual, "It only has 4 tones and Cantonese has 9" or "Mandarin is easier" or "Cantonese isn't real Chinese* or "Cantonese is just slang." And these were all Hong Kong residents and native speakers of Cantonese saying these things.
Victor Mair said,
September 19, 2021 @ 9:43 pm
In many previous posts, I have emphasized how many topolect speakers in China, not just Cantonese speakers, have been trained by the Mandarin majority to think of their own mother tongues as "vulgar", "crude", "slang", etc. Never mind that it is Mandarin that is the youngest and most adulterated (here I'm avoiding a more sensitive modifier) in terms of including alien elements.
R. Fenwick said,
September 19, 2021 @ 10:51 pm
@AntC: Nonsense. There have been plenty of Empires (Roman, Austro-Hungarian, even PRC before Xi Jinping) where the deal is: government will be conducted in one language, and failing to speak it will not be an excuse; but you can speak whatever you like socially.
I can't speak to the PRC, but your other examples are themselves, with respect, nonsense. Though Latin was the language of the Roman core, and was certainly politically advantageous in the western Empire, Latin was not a prerequisite for Roman citizenship, nor was it formally imposed on lands conquered by the Empire and most of those areas used Greek. More, there are numerous well-recorded instances of court cases, public proceedings, and formal inscriptions of various sorts where speakers of languages other than Latin or Greek – such as Aramaic, Punic, Syriac, and Coptic – were formally accommodated by the system rather than rejected from it. The jurist Ulpian even wrote overtly about the necessity of recognising verbal contracts in Gaulish. (https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9781444343397.ch30)
Also, the non-single-language policies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire are suggested right there in its name. Both German and Hungarian were locally and governmentally dominant in their respective core areas, and Croatian had primary legal language standing in Croatia-Slavonia. More, the rights of populations of at least the Austrian-administered portions of the Empire to use their own languages in public, including in schooling and administrative functions, was expressly enshrined in the Staatsgrundgesetz vom 21. December 1867 über die allgemeinen Rechte der Staatsbürger (State Law of 21 December 1867 on the General Rights of State Citizens):
19.1-2. Alle Volksstämme des Staates sind gleichberechtigt, und jeder Volksstamm hat ein unverletzliches Recht auf Wahrung und Pflege seiner Nationalität und Sprache. Die Gleichberechtigung aller landesüblichen Sprachen in Schule, Amt und öffentlichem Leben wird vom Staate anerkannt.
All races of the empire have equal rights, and every race has an inviolable right to the preservation and use of its own nationality and language. The state recognizes the equal rights of all current languages in schools, administration and public life. (my emphasis)
Twill said,
September 19, 2021 @ 11:44 pm
@Philip Taylor As much as common sentiment abhors disrespecting Fowler, beatissimae memoriae, I'm pretty sure he was capable of solecisms, and his Bible for schoolmarms was indeed revised several times to correct various lapsi calami that appeared in the text. It is amusing that his book in not a few places admonishes sticklers while such people today wave around his century-old style guide as inspired.
AntC said,
September 20, 2021 @ 1:58 am
@Jenny Long before the type of political stresses we see now reached their height, Cantonese was already viewed by the mainstream in Hong Kong as "just a dialect" or "just slang." I can't tell you how often, as far back as 1999, …
1999 is hardly "far back". The watershed was 1984. That's when the political stresses were already apparent.
I lived/worked in HK from late 1980's to 1992 (at the start of which time most people spoke only Cantonese, except those who did business on the mainland). Everybody was furiously learning Putonghua as an inevitability, given that Thatcher had sold out to the PRC. Cantonese described as "just a dialect" by 1999 (after the PRC takeover) would be the 'Party Line'/nobody would tell an off-comer what they really thought.
AntC said,
September 20, 2021 @ 2:11 am
@R. Fenwick thank you: so language policy was even less dictatorial than I'd understood.
I suppose amongst the Empires not dictating language policy we should also include Imperial China (Southern Song) — under which Cantonese literature flourished. And even the British — whose attitude might best be described as 'benign neglect'/indifference. By the second half of C20th, legal and government proceedings in HK were bilingual.
AntC said,
September 20, 2021 @ 2:18 am
nobody would tell an off-comer what they really thought.
Heh heh, I well remember a veggie seller in the wet market behind Signal Hill, TST telling me off: if you're going to ask for 'bok choi' in Cantonese, you can get your tones right, none of this mumbled half-Putonghua.
David Marjanović said,
September 20, 2021 @ 4:16 am
Translating Volksstämme as "races" is… anachronistic at best. The word, now obsolete, combines "peoples" and "tribes/stocks"; I'd just go with "peoples" or "ethnic groups".
Didn't the Ottoman empire have a Roman-like lack of language policy?
Peter Grubtal said,
September 20, 2021 @ 9:16 am
AntC: "given that Thatcher had sold out to the PRC" : lefty twaddle. The UK government was obliged by treaty to return the New Territories to China, without which the remainder wouldn't have been viable. They had no negotiating position at all, and the agreement which was reached was almost certainly the best which could have been obtained.
The UK is powerless to do anything about the brutal abrogation of that agreement by China, and the international community has been less than supportive.
Guy said,
September 20, 2021 @ 9:45 am
Slightly off topic, but watching those videos with Jasper and his parents, it appears he prefers to speak English. Which is rather unusual…most local HK kids who are educated in the English school system in HK (even the international schools) universally prefer to speak Cantonese as their mother tongue.
His mom (Taiwanese American actress Cherrie Ying) speaks English and Mandarin, and his dad probably hasn't bothered to teach him much Cantonese. So somehow English has won out!
Rodger C said,
September 20, 2021 @ 11:46 am
*lapsus calami
Edward J Cunningham said,
September 20, 2021 @ 2:23 pm
Ironically, the antagonist in "Shang-Chi" (not quite a villain), Shang's father Xu Wenwu is based on the Marvel villain The Mandarin.
wanda said,
September 23, 2021 @ 3:01 pm
Man, I was really looking forward to the Language Log entry about Shang-Chi, but I guess this isn't it. My questions about the movie:
– Why would a 1000-year-old warlord speak Mandarin with a Cantonese accent?
– Why would some people in the mystical village where the qilin, hundun, and river dragons live speak Mandarin but have such different accents? The character played by Michelle Yeoh is supposed to be Shang-Chi's aunt but has a completely different accent than Shang Chi's mom?
The thread brings up Macau, but the only place we see in Macau is the illegal fight club, and the owner of the club is not a Cantonese speaker. The manager guy speaks English and Mandarin with a Malaysian accent, so maybe the club mostly serves non-locals? The fighters we recognize aren't local to Macau.
Michael Watts said,
September 24, 2021 @ 5:36 pm
The same reason Charlton Heston is speaking English in The Ten Commandments. What would be the point of having dialogue in Middle Chinese?
As a similar issue, though, I watched an episode of a Chinese TV show in which someone from the Han Dynasty has been preserved in stasis until the modern day, and I was amused by a bit of dialog in which the protagonist refers to Nezha and gets the response "who is Nezha?". (The idea is that Nezha, as a Buddhist deity, would not be familiar to a man of the Han.)
One interesting thing here is the striking contrast between popular awareness of the change in mythology and blithe indifference to the fact that a man of the Han Dynasty would be unable to speak modern Chinese.
Though I think the awareness of the distinction between Buddhist gods and Daoist gods is interesting in its own right; it reminds me of the poorly-understood distinction between Norse Asa-gods and Vana-gods.
Chas Belov said,
September 25, 2021 @ 3:44 pm
This might be a relevant place to note that on the YouTube Music streaming service, Cantonese song titles are rendered in Pinyin Mandarin rather than as Chinese characters. My Cantonese is already wretched to begin with and my Mandarin virtually nonexistent, so this places a heavy burden on my attempts to re-find songs.
For example Hei Boon Lei by Beyond gets transcribed as Xi Huan Ni, which, as you can see, is completely different. When I searched YouTube Music for "Hei Boon Lei" (without the quotes) it only came up with Lai Lai Hei by Einsferum (which, coincidentally, I am familiar with and happen to love). I had to adjust my search to "Hei Boon Lei Beyond" for it to find the song. But because the Cantonese and Mandarin are so different, I couldn't be sure my search was successful until I clicked play.
Hei Boon Lei on YouTube Music.
Michael Watts said,
September 26, 2021 @ 6:46 pm
If I search for "喜欢你" on YouTube Music, "喜欢你 beyond" is a suggested search, and running it produces several results, such as "Xi Huan Ni (Live in Hong Kong / 1991)" by Beyond, "Xi Huan Ni" by Beyond, "喜歡你", by BEYOND, and "喜歡你", by G.E.M. After listening to the beginnings, I feel safe in saying all of these are the same song.
Those are just the song results; there are also several video results, such as "Beyond 喜欢你 HQ".
Is it really true that Cantonese song titles are rendered in Pinyin Mandarin rather than as Chinese characters? They sure seem to use a lot of Chinese characters, and even where they don't (it is true that "Xi Huan Ni" appears to be the standard, album-style release from Beyond, though G.E.M.'s album release is still titled 喜歡你), a search using the characters will turn up the Pinyin title among the results.
Chas Belov said,
September 30, 2021 @ 1:08 am
I actually misstated my point. While they sometimes use Chinese characters, they too often use Mandarin Pinyin, which is not useful for rendering Cantonese. I am specifically referring to the albums and singles, not the video results.
The video titles are dependent on what whovever uploaded the video used as the title, while those from albums and singles are presumably supplied by the record company. Of course, a record company can upload a video.
But Hei Boon Lei is the Yale Cantonese and is audibly what they are singing. They are not singing anything remotely close to "Xi Huan Ni". When I search on Hei Boon Lei Beyond it returns the correct song but labels it Xi Huan Ni for the non-video song.
This is not consistent across artists. If I search on Zen songs, it returns the English name of the song. For example https://music.youtube.com/search?q=%E5%BF%83%E5%BA%95%E6%8E%A7%E8%A8%B4+zen returns Complaint.