A Tale of Two Languages

In 2014 the Education Bureau of Hong Kong posted an article on its website extolling the fact that English and Chinese are the two official languages in Hong Kong. The article labeled Cantonese as a “dialect” of Chinese, while simultaneously using the terms “Chinese” and “Cantonese” interchangeably.

It is a fact that approximately 1.3 billion people, or one-fifth of the global population, speak some form of Chinese, making it the language with the most native speakers. But the designation of “Chinese” is broad. With over 1,000 years of history, Cantonese is considered a purer form of the Chinese language by academics. Mandarin, meanwhile, is known to be an eclectic mishmash of various regional dialects of the ancient Han language, and even non-related languages from neighboring areas, with considerable adoption of the official language of China’s last imperial Qing dynasty, which was a distinct Manchurian language.

To the unfamiliar, it would not be a technical mistake to think that Cantonese falls within the “Chinese” language. Cantonese has indeed been considered a dialect of Chinese by some, but it has also been identified as a separate language by others. Academics deem Cantonese as a Sinitic language, a geographical identifier more than a linguistic one. Yet it is a much older language and pre-dates the lingua-franca of Mainland China, or (as the government has labeled it) “Putonghua”, which roughly translates to “common language,” though it is all but unintelligible to Cantonese native speakers.

The fact that approximately 97 percent of the Hong Kong population are taught Cantonese as their commonly used daily language at schools, and that the majority of Hong Kongers speak it as their first language, makes it almost farcical -- and definitely deliberate -- that Cantonese is not listed as an official language of Hong Kong. Putonghua is in a distant second place when it comes to usage. That is to say that while most people can communicate in Putonghua at a basic level, it is by no means a “common language” in Hong Kong.

There is a wide cultural gap between Hong Kong and Mainland China, and local Hong Kongers vehemently oppose the spread of Putonghua, and the associated simplified written script, within the semi-autonomous territory. In February 2016, Hong Kong’s TVB television network switched its subtitles, news graphics, and other characters to simplified Chinese from the traditional form during its Putonghua newscast. Within a day, the Communications Authority of Hong Kong had received over 10,000 complaints about the switch.

Both Cantonese and Mandarin are virtually incomprehensible when spoken, but they generally share the same script, so that they are mutually understandable in written form. For the longest time, China’s cultural influence was underpinned and unified by the use of this written text. This can still be seen in places such as Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, where China’s historical influence has left a significant, lingering mark in the traditional written texts.

However, in the 1950s the Chinese government began to implement a simplified version of Chinese characters. This was met by strong resistance from both academia and the public within the country, but by the time the Great Leap Forward movement began, any objections were swiftly dealt with by way of persecution and violence. The changes to the script itself were so significant that today the traditional script -- still in use in Hong Kong and Taiwan – is virtually unintelligible to simplified readers, and vice versa, without ample re-learning. (To provide one example, the character rang, meaning “to allow,” is written 讓 in the traditional script and 让 in simplified.)

During an interview with the Legislative Council President Jasper Tsang Yok-sing in August, pro-Beijing political veteran and former president of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, Rita Fan Hsu Lai-tai, attributed the tense relations between the mainland and Hong Kong partly to mainland envoys’ lack of understanding of Cantonese, and an unwillingness to venture away from their Mandarin-speaking bubbles and into the public sphere of Hong Kong.

“You have to live in Hong Kong to understand Hong Kong. You cannot just stay at home all the time; you should be going out to feel the social sentiment,” said Fan.

Fan’s comments were significant given that she is the city’s sole deputy on China’s legislative body, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress. She said that the behavior of Beijing’s envoys, who communicate only in Putonghua (Mandarin), prevents them from having a comprehensive understanding of the social sentiment in the city.

“You need to feel how the people feel. You need to feel and understand what makes them happy and what makes them unhappy. But first, you need to speak Cantonese, otherwise it will be very difficult,” said Fan.

A side-effect of these linguistic differences is that the simplified script has become a flag of allegiance, or at least a marker of belonging. Within the context of the ethnic Chinese in Hong Kong, not every person that reads simplified Chinese is a Mainlander; but every ethnic Chinese person who cannot read traditional script is almost certainly a Mainlander.

This interesting phenomenon -- language as cultural maker -- is most prominent in the starkly different reactions to Taiwanese “Standard Mandarin.” Hong Kongers simply do not show the same levels of disdain toward “Guo Yu” or “national language,” as Mandarin is referred to in Taiwan. Hong Kong’s specific aversion to Putonghua is perhaps due to the timing and method by which the simplified script was implemented. Hong Kong came to prominence, in part, as a vantage point on Communist China’s rise. It was through the lens of Hong Kong that the world saw China rise, and fall, and rise again. The Communist Party’s attempts to claim all cultural aspects of “China” and “Chinese-ness” at the exclusion of others, while exerting its iron-fisted rule, left no small imprint on the people of Hong Kong. The same can be said for the adoption of simplified Chinese. Even the use of the term “Putonghua” in Hong Kong was only widely adopted after the 1997 handover; up until that point, the common term for Mandarin was “Guo Yu.”

Perhaps the different attitude toward Taiwanese Standard Mandarin is because there isn’t an idea that Taiwan is (or should be) the “same” as Hong Kong. In the minds of the people, Taiwan and Mainland China are equally different and separate from Hong Kong. The difference is that while China asserts the concept of “sameness,” Taiwan doesn’t try to control Hong Kong culturally or politically.

Beijing’s assertiveness has often been interpreted as an attack on the Cantonese language and culture itself. Cantonese has been "tremendously weakened" in Guangdong province since the People's Republic was established in 1949. "If it weren't for Hong Kong, Cantonese would soon cease to exist as a significant linguistic force," Victor Mair, professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania, told Business Insider.

Cantonese remains a linguistic and cultural force in Hong Kong, at least. Based on linguistic rules, any two kinds of speech that are mutually incomprehensible to one another are technically separate languages, let alone languages using two separate scripts. This will undoubtedly enrage Chinese nationalists almost as much as the Education Bureau’s post enraged the people of Hong Kong. In the end, the Bureau saw it necessary to remove the post.