Opinion | In patriotic Hong Kong, why are most of the top court’s judgments only available in English?
- Many Court of Final Appeal judgments – including those of great relevance to everyone – are not officially translated into Chinese, depriving the majority of reading the decisions in their own language
- The symbolic messaging of a legal system that continues to treat English as the ‘high’ language cannot be ignored in postcolonial Hong Kong
Hong Kong was characterised during the colonial period by what linguists call diglossia – the presence of two different languages, demarcated by function. Cantonese was the “low” language – the language of the street, of family, of everyday life. English was the “high”’ language – the language of the government, of law, of power.
It was not until the adoption of the Official Languages Ordinance in 1974 that Chinese was declared an official language alongside English, and that the two were to be considered equal for a range of official uses.
Yet, in the decades that followed, there remained a stark bias towards English within the legal system. Ordinances were published only in English until the late 1980s, and it was not until 1995 that Chinese was allowed to be used as a procedural language in the courtroom.
The use of Chinese as a procedural language is now widespread across the lower levels of the court hierarchy, and thus an increasing number of judgments in those courts are published in Chinese.
However, the higher up the court hierarchy one travels, the more English remains dominant. At the apex, as a matter of course, the Court of Final Appeal hears matters and writes its decisions in English. Monolingual Chinese speakers are thus dependent on timely and accurate translation of those decisions if they wish to read the top court’s output in the official language of their choice.