Our vanishing language skills
I write in response to the debate about the decline of English usage in Hong Kong. I don't claim that this contribution is a scientific analysis of the problem but observations and impressions garnered over nearly 30 years.
Central to the success in the usage of any language is the concept of 'critical mass'. If a large enough proportion of people speak a language, the incentive is there for all to speak it.
It becomes self-sustaining. If it is spoken well, this becomes similarly self-sustaining because models of excellence are heard everywhere. But if that critical mass erodes, the decline in usage of a language can be similarly self-sustaining.
If standards of English fall, so do standards of English teaching and the numbers capable of teaching it, and a vicious circle ensues.
It is my belief that in a period roughly from the mid-1980s to the handover in 1997 the critical mass of those speaking English - and using it effectively - declined and the decline became self-sustaining. How did this come to pass? There has been much unhelpful naming and blaming in the press in recent months, generally directed at the post-1997 administration and standards of English teaching, and of the embarrassing failures in benchmark tests for English teachers. This misses the point. The causes of the decline in English usage lay not primarily in education but in demographic and political change. It lay first in large-scale immigration, mainly from the mainland, through the 1980s and 1990s, and in the (sometimes temporary) emigration of many educated English-speaking families after the promulgation of the Joint Declaration in 1984, and especially after Tiananmen in 1989.
