I REFER to Mr Ernest Ho's letter headlined, 'Putonghua - let student choose' (South China Morning Post, October 25). Mr Ho has viewed the language problem in an oversimplified way. He stressed that if a language is made compulsory in a school, then the result will be very unsatisfactory as can be seen with English in Hong Kong. However, look at the case of Singapore. Would Mr Ho claim that the Singaporean Government let its students decide whether or not they wanted to learn English? Surely he does not think that the high standard of English there was achieved by voluntary English classes. With regard to Putonghua, it is not a foreign language, but a national dialect. Linguistically, it ranks with Cantonese and Hakka. It is also a symbol of the Chinese people, a point which Mr Ho also made. Whether we like it or not, all Hong Kong people will be Chinese after 1997 and Putonghua must be introduced as a symbol of this nationality, unless the Central Government recognises us as a minority and lets us retain our 'national language'. I recall growing up in the early 1960s in the New Territories. When I started in school, I was in a Cantonese-speaking classroom. Almost all of my classmates, including me, were Hakka speakers. It would actually have been easier for me to learn Putonghua than Cantonese, as Hakka shares more characteristics with Putonghua. However, the policy of Hong Kong was to adopt Cantonese as the lingua franca of the Chinese population. I 'chose' Cantonese not because I liked it, but because I was born in Hong Kong. Now, I speak perfect Cantonese because I need to. Today, a Hakka-speaking child in Hong Kong is as rare as a giant panda, because almost all the children of Hakka people 'choose' to speak Cantonese. It is unrealistic for parents to think their child can 'choose' his or her language in school. EDMUND LAU New Territories
