What is it about?
In Hong Kong the Cantonese language has acquired an extraordinary status due to its distinctive vocabulary and indigenous Chinese characters, identifiably colloquial phonetic features, highly conventionalized written form, large inventory of English loanwords borrowed through phonetic transliteration, and the tradition of lexicography combined with romanization.
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Why is it important?
Cantonese continues to be Hong Kong’s predominant spoken language, nonetheless, a worrying trend is the increasing number of schools switching their medium of instruction from Cantonese to Putonghua, just one noticeable difference between now and 1997 when Hong Kong, a British Crown Colony since 1841, was returned to China’s sovereignty as a Special Administrative Region. The Hong Kong speech community’s attitudes toward Cantonese are contradictory: some people have denigrated this language as “a coarse, vulgar relic of China’s feudal past” that should be replaced by Putonghua, the national language, while others have praised it for preserving ancient rimes and extolled it for expressing social, political, and cultural differences that set Hong Kong apart from mainland China.
Perspectives
That Cantonese continues to decline in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province of southern China, may be a harbinger of things to come in Hong Kong. Ironically, the Hong Kong government’s recognition of the Cantonese language as intangible cultural heritage which would seem to give it a positive status, on the contrary, has made some people fear it could become extinct in the future.
Robert Bauer
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Hong Kong Cantonese language: Current features and future prospects, Global Chinese, January 2016, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/glochi-2016-0007.
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