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Question of the week: how many ethnic minorities are there in Hong Kong? This is more important than you realise. Think carefully before answering, or Jeremy Hanley might run off to Britain with the wrong message.

  The British minister for Hong Kong says he is here to 'listen again to the arguments'. So let's make sure he gets the arguments right.

  OK. Your starter for 10, as they used to say on a famous British quiz-show. Are there:   a) between 4,000 and 8,000?   b) a few?   c) millions?      Most people in Hong Kong would probably answer a).

  Most people in Britain would die of fright at the thought of giving that many minorities passports. They would immediately think that meant the answer was really c).

  Things do sometimes look different from offshore islands at opposite ends of the Eurasian landmass. But what neither side has really understood is that the correct answer is b).

  It is one of those odd quirks of Hong Kong English which so regularly give us pedants the screaming abdabs. True, you can be a minority of one. But mostly you are not. Especially when you are described as an ethnic minority.

  If the majority are Han Chinese, then the minorities are perhaps Indians, Eurasians, Belorussians. But they are not individual Indians, Eurasians or Belorussians. They are Indians, Eurasians or Belorussians as distinct ethnic or racial groups within our multiracial, multicultural society.

  Now you may think this is just Week Ending being incredibly boring about a very minor little linguistic point. And if you are incredibly bored by it, then in one sense you are probably right. But like that other little bit of Hong Kong English we have been incredibly boring about in the past - the grim, totalitarian conceit that you can be lenient with the innocent - it does make a difference.

  It makes a very big difference when the minority groups themselves get it wrong. And it makes an even bigger difference when those in Government and the legislature - the very people trying to communicate the plight of the minorities to British politicians and their constituents - follow their example.

   Take the lady behind the fish and chip shop counter - let's call her Pauline (to pluck a name out of a hat). If Pauline from down the chippie thinks there are up to 8,000 minorities all looking for passports, she will multiply that number by half a million for each group, add a few husbands by arranged marriages, assume they're all coming to scrounge off the National Health and spread the word to all her customers.

  That makes about four billion people all trying to come to Britain.

  Now, in her more lucid moments, not even Pauline really believes there is a rainbow coalition of billions of people all trying to take away her son's job as a professional dole recipient.

 But most of the time she is far from lucid. So her MP, let's call him Michael Howard - to pluck another name at random - is in no position to be rational either.

  OK, this is all a wild exaggeration. No one in Britain is really counting in billions.

  But by talking of thousands of minorities, lobbyists are doing a disservice to a relatively small number of human beings who happen to be members of a few minority groups. Instead of talking about the plight of a few thousand real people to whom Britain owes a debt of honour and gratitude, we end up giving the impression of a large number of strange beings called minorities, whom nobody can satisfactorily categorise.

  The object must be to humanise their complicated story, not to dehumanise them.

  So come on, guys, just listen to the pedants for once and stop using jargon. Otherwise, you will damage a just cause.



Minor matter of integrity in linguistics