Cantonese as Written Language in Hong Kong

What is it about?

That Hong Kong Cantonese has traditionally been regarded as “merely a dialect” has created some misconceptions about it; e.g., it is not a written language, or that it cannot or should not be written down (and thus compete with standard Chinese), or that it does have a written form but it is exactly the same as standard Chinese, etc. Indeed, as it turns out, the very thing that sets Hong Kong Cantonese well apart from all other regional Chinese varieties is its highly conventionalized written form that appears widely throughout the Hong Kong speech community in newspapers, magazines, government announcements, personal correspondence, internet forums, etc. Today Hong Kong Cantonese-speakers are transcribing with Chinese characters and even English letters the lexicon and grammar of their Cantonese speech; this practice was precisely expressed by the Qing dynasty poet Huang Zunxian 黃遵憲 (1848-1905) in his apt phrase 我手寫我口 ngo5 sau2 se2 ngo5 hau2, literally, ‘my hand writes my mouth’, i.e. I write the way I speak. Hong Kong written Cantonese combines the standard Chinese characters that are used in both traditional and non-standard ways with uniquely Cantonese (i.e. nonstandard, dialectal) characters, along with English letters; not surprisingly, a typical Cantonese text is almost unintelligible to Putonghua speakers from mainland China and Taiwan. This study recognizes five processes operating in written Cantonese: namely, traditional usage of the standard Chinese characters, as well as their phoneticization, indigenization, semanticization, and alphabeticization (through intimate contact between Cantonese and English). Associated with these five processes are 12 basic principles underlying written Cantonese. Joined together, these processes and principles provide us with the means for systematically analyzing how the Hong Kong Cantonese language is being written today. The eventual standardization of written Cantonese requires the satisfactory resolution of two main problems of variation in the transcription of Cantonese lexical items.

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Why is it important?

Writing in Cantonese must be appreciated as no mean feat, given the lack of its formal standardization, along with the fact that Cantonese-speaking schoolchildren who acquire their Cantonese speech in the usual way from their parents and peers do not receive explicit instruction in how to read and write Cantonese but learn to do so informally and indirectly through their exposure to its pervasive use outside their classrooms. Up until relatively recently with the introduction of Putonghua, both as a subject and medium of instruction, Hong Kong schoolchildren had been learning through the medium of Cantonese how to read and write the standard Chinese language which was a language they did not speak in their daily lives.

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