Opinion | To truly protect Cantonese culture, Hongkongers should look to Guangdong
- Campaigns like ‘I Am Hong Konger’ politicise Cantonese from the other side of the world when the way forward lies in mutual understanding and integration with Guangdong, the ancestral home of the language
“Dad, you can’t judge a place you’ve never been to,” said Lisa Simpson to her oafish father in television’s iconic dysfunctional nuclear family The Simpsons. “Yeah, that’s what people do in Russia,” added her rebellious brother Bart.
Since I arrived, many locals have asked me if Cantonese is spoken in Guangzhou. The diplomat in me simply politely replied “of course they do”. The impatient soul who has struggled with basic daily tasks using only Mandarin in Guangzhou, such as buying vegetables from locals who only speak Cantonese, wanted to scream profanities and shout: “Of course they speak Cantonese in Canton!”.
Yet herein lies one source of the misperception. The word “Cantonese” is derived from the French word “canton” meaning corner or district and became known as the English word for Guangzhou when European powers sought to establish trading corners and districts in the city regarded as a gateway to the treasures of the Orient.
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Perhaps with Hong Kong’s history as a British colony, the English side of people’s brains overlook the language’s Chinese name, Guangdonghua or the “language of Guangdong”, and conveniently ignore the language’s real, natural and otherwise obvious connective tissue to the province.