Cantonese vs. Mandarin in HK

desmond

nyt article on cantonese vs. mandarin in hk hong kong -- like their british predecessors who landed here staking territorial claims in victorian patois, china's officials sent to this waning colony swagger about today in the thick argot of beijing. for the people of hong kong, both languages are equally alien, the speech of their rulers. instead, the lingua franca of hong kong, a dialect of the cantonese spoken in the southern chinese province of guangdong, clatters like blocks thrown down stairs, whines with steel-guitar languor, hustles with a street-smart staccato. it is to the ponderous language of beijing what italian is to french, a tongue with roots nearer the complex clipped rhythms of medieval chinese than the restrained tones of modern mandarin, the language of north china. "i was born in swatow," said maggie on-yuk leung, referring to the former foreign treaty port along china's southern coast now called shantou. "and my mother's first worry when we came here was if i couldn't speak cantonese, i'd have problems with other kids. we spoke chiu chow dialect." "if you want to be part of a group," said ms. leung, who teaches japanese at the city university of hong kong, "if you want to get a job, you have to speak cantonese. maybe mandarin is the national language, but here you have to speak cantonese. there are some hong kong people who say we should all learn mandarin, but that is more political than anything else." indeed, there is a growing feeling here in hong kong that cantonese is under assault, an assault that is accelerating as the colonial flame fades. during recent proceedings surrounding the selection of hong kong's first chief executive -- the person who will replace britain's colonial governor, chris patten -- chinese officials droned on in mandarin. sitting in neat rows before them, hong kong's business elite labored to follow along, most with translated cantonese piped discreetly through earphones. when question time arrived, the hong kong business leaders lobbed questions in cantonese and the man expected to be chosen as chief executive on wednesday, the shipping magnate tung chee-hwa, replied in kind. at one point, though, a member of the beijing-appointed selection committee rose and proceeded to flounder around in mandarin, or what people presumed was mandarin, before retreating to cantonese. "it's the language everybody speaks," said ms. leung. yet even as beijing begins to push mandarin here, insisting that it be used even by its cantonese-speaking officials, a groundswell of ethnic and linguistic pride is surging. "even though i'm from shanghai, i speak cantonese with my children at home," said johnson chang, who runs the hanart gallery, which shows the work of most of the important contemporary mainland chinese artists. "it will be much more helpful to them with classical chinese than mandarin." in the great canon of chinese literature, it was the poets of the tang dynasty who penned the most subtle, allusive verse. and it is when these poems are read aloud in cantonese, not mandarin, that much of the original rhyme and meter of the medieval tongue surfaces. contributing more to this resurgence, though, is the intense localism of hong kong's distinctive cantonese, embodying the lightning changes in culture common to a population swamped by waves of refugees and infiltrated by much that is not chinese. oscar ho, a leading hong kong artist who makes dark charcoal drawings of folk tales and local myths, moved in recent years to writing inscriptions on his works in a mixture of cantonese and standard chinese characters. "language is one of the prime things to separate yourself from others," ho said. "in hong kong there are two kinds of people, those who arrived before the 1950s and the baby boom generation. we baby boomers are 100 percent hong kong -- drinking coke, watching hollywood movies, listening to the beatles. we really don't have any contact, emotional or otherwise, with china. "now there is such a danger. there is more and more use of putonghua" -- the chinese term for mandarin, literally meaning the common language. "in terms of cultural identity, language is so important," ho said. "it is so important to keep the language alive. all these hong kong poets, no matter how local, still write in traditional chinese style. in my drawings, i write in cantonese. i don't care if the chinese don't understand." although all hong kongers can read standard written chinese, the cantonese language here has evolved written elements of its own, using ideographs incomprehensible on the mainland. with a distinct grammar, pronunciation, and the flourishing of its own written forms, seen most often in popular magazines, hong kong has become a linguistic enclave, a place that defines itself in a language all its own. but there is a growing sense here that with china's resumption of sovereignty just seven months away, storm clouds of national conformity are gathering over cantonese. "cantonese has never been encouraged in china itself," explained stephen matthews, a linguist at the university of hong kong. "china has always had a very strong wish to keep a very high formal language intact." in the last year, there has been a profusion of courses in mandarin -- in schools and companies and by private tutors posting their availability on trees with little tear-off phone numbers. even the local english-language radio station, which long provided cantonese lessons, has begun running a quick course in basic mandarin. "we did a series called barefoot cantonese for 10 or 12 years," said martin clarke, the director of radio 3. "mandarin was thought to be the one to follow that up. a lot of people are learning mandarin now. a lot of cantonese want to learn mandarin as well. it is a more popular language to learn than 10 or 12 years ago." despite worries that cantonese may be overwhelmed by mandarin (in the nearby chinese city of guangzhou, once known in the west as canton, where cantonese is the native dialect, signs still read, "please speak mandarin"), there is evidence that hong kong cantonese is begin to permeate the mainland. advertising agencies in hong kong that work in guangzhou consistently use hong kong cantonese writing, causing periodic clampdowns by the chinese language enforcers. and in beijing, strange amalgams of mandarin and cantonese have been creeping into daily speech, words like miandi for taxi minivans, a conjunction of the mandarin word mian, from mianbao, meaning bread, and di, from the cantonese diksyi, or taxi. "one reason you're getting bits of cantonese in beijing," matthews said, "is that there's a bit of status in knowing cantonese. the prestige is the money, basically. and guangdong, and more importantly hong kong, is where money is made."

wai

篇文章有段講到廣州，真係幾諷刺~~~希望香港粵語唔好真係畀國語搶走主流地位。

desmond

呢段提及廣州。 despite worries that cantonese may be overwhelmed by mandarin (in the nearby chinese city of guangzhou, once known in the west as canton, where cantonese is the native dialect, signs still read, "please speak mandarin"), there is evidence that hong kong cantonese is begin to permeate the mainland.

Ultra

几好啊，写学术论文就应该客观啲，值得大家借鉴。