Reflections | Hong Kong’s Cantonese speakers have long had to code switch, but is that a disadvantage?

Hong Kong’s education chief Kevin Yeung Yun-hung recently got flak for asserting the obvious: “the future development of Chinese language learning across the globe will rely mainly on Mandarin”, before wondering aloud whether Hongkongers, most of whom learn Chinese in Cantonese, would be disadvantaged.

Yeung should know to exercise greater care when making such statements in the political tinderbox that is present-day Hong Kong, where any real or imagined threat to Cantonese, the mother tongue and key cultural marker of the Hong Kong identity, sparks firestorms that are both unnecessary and unproductive.

In school, I learned Chinese in Mandarin, the language that is closest – or many would say equivalent – to Modern Standard Chinese. Reading a standard Chinese text in Mandarin sounds “natural”. Not so for people whose mother tongue is Cantonese (or any other Chinese dialect). Reading the same text in Cantonese sounds stilted and artificial.

The most obvious difference concerns vocabulary. Many words in Modern Standard Chinese are simply not used by Cantonese speakers, who have their own expressions to represent the same ideas and objects. Consider the commonly used pronoun “they”. Cantonese speakers would say “kui-dei” and write it as “佢哋”. However, the written form would be inadmissible in Modern Standard Chinese. Most non-Cantonese speakers would not even know how to pronounce the characters, let alone understand what they mean.

Writing in standard Chinese, and to make themselves understood by all Chinese speakers, Hongkongers must therefore use the Modern Standard Chinese word for “they” – “他們”, pronounced in Cantonese as “ta-moon”, a word that they would almost never use in conversation.