Hakka academic spreading the word on saving languages
Lau Chun-fat is on a mission to get people talking in their ancestral tongues again to preserve the languages and dialects from extinction
When Lau Chun-fat returned after eight years in Germany to live in the New Territories village where he grew up, he was shocked to find none of the children spoke Hakka any more. The language of the Hakka people simply wasn't being passed down to the next generation.
"I taught my children to speak Hakka," he says. "When they were small, I always spoke Hakka with them."
Lau's first academic career had been in biology. He initially studied at Chinese University, and in 1983 he went to Berlin and Gottingen in central Germany to read for a doctorate and post-doctoral degree in biology.
But his permanent return to Leung Uk village, near Yuen Long, in 1993 proved to be a transitional point in his life and career. "The children were no longer speaking Hakka," he says.
"Every language in the world deserves preserving. But no parents were talking with their children in their ancestral tongue."
So Lau started to study linguistics, first part-time and then for a full-time doctorate in which he examined local indigenous languages such as Hakka, the weitou dialect, Ting Kok and Tung Ping Chau - which are all in danger of extinction in a world of ever-increasing homogeny.