Posted on 08/01/2010 4:43:55 AM PDT by csvset
Hong Kong people rally to save Cantonese language By admin Created 01/08/2010 - 12:59
More than 1,000 protesters rallied in Guangzhou and Hong Kong on Sunday against what they say is China's bid to champion the national language Mandarin over their local dialect Cantonese.
Hundreds of mainland police officers were deployed to disperse protesters who gathered in People's Park in Guangzhou to call on authorities to preserve the Cantonese language and culture, Hong Kong broadcasters RTHK and Cable TV reported.
"Guangzhou people speak the Guangzhou language!" some angry protesters chanted as the size of the crowd grew to about 1,000, RTHK said.
Videos from Cable TV and YouTube showed that some of the rally participants were forcefully carried away. A number of Hong Kong journalists were taken for questioning, according to Cable TV.
Chinese authorities have been anxious to suppress the growing pro-Cantonese movement, sparked after a political advisory body in Guangzhou proposed this month that local TV stations broadcast their prime-time shows in Mandarin instead of Cantonese ahead of the Asian Games there in November.
Adopting China's official language, also known as Putonghua, would promote unity, "forge a good language environment" and cater to non-Cantonese-speaking Chinese visitors at the huge sporting event, authorities were quoted as saying.
Hundreds of Guangzhou residents defied government orders and staged their first demonstration last Sunday. But the protest was soon suppressed by the authorities, according to reports.
To echo the Guangzhou campaign, about 200 protesters marched to the government headquarters in Hong Kong Sunday.
"We want to show our support to our Guangzhou friends in their campaign to protect Cantonese against any threat of elimination," said Choi Suk-fong, organiser of the rally.
Participants wore white T-shirts with a logo which said: "You want us to shut up! We will speak louder in Cantonese!"
A number of Guangzhou residents crossed the border to take part in the Hong Kong rally, saying that authorities there were trying to silence the protesters.
"I really regretted not going to the rally in Guangzhou last week. I came to Hong Kong today because I want to protect my own culture. Unlike on the mainland, here I can voice my view more directly," said 21-year-old Wyman, who refused to give his family name for fear of retaliation by the Chinese authorities.
Instances of mainland protests spilling over into Hong Kong, which was returned to China in 1997, are rare since China's 1989 Tiananmen crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators.
Cantonese is the mother tongue for an estimated 70 million people in Hong Kong, Macau and China's southern Guangdong province, and is widely spoken in overseas Chinese communities.
The Guangzhou city government on Thursday sought to deny rumours that they planned to ditch Cantonese in favour of Mandarin, according to the state-run Guangzhou Daily.
Its spokesman Ouyang Yongsheng was quoted as saying that the government had a responsibility to protect and promote Cantonese culture, including the language.
"The citizens and concerned people can be reassured that Guangzhou would... not go for the so-called cause of 'abolishing Cantonese to promote Mandarin'," he said.
China has long been a patchwork of often mutually unintelligible dialects.
Beijing made Mandarin the country's official language in 1982, leading to bans on other dialects at many radio and television stations.
The dialect has been further promoted in recent years as migrant workers moved to China's coastal areas to find jobs.
Mandarin language lessons became compulsory in schools in Hong Kong after its return to Chinese rule in 1997 and an increasing number of professionals began to learn the dialect after the handover as Hong Kong's business links with the mainland intensified.
However, many Hong Kongers are fiercely proud and protective of Cantonese and see Mandarin only as a language of convenience.
Go Cantonese! (Mandarin just doesn’t sound right)
Realistically speaking, it is in China’s long-term interest to have everybody speaking the same language.
There is an attractive woman from Hong Kong I work with, maybe she should give me private lessons.
try www.engrish.com
A half-hour later, you'll need more lessons. :)
Are cantonese speakers still “Han” Chinese?
The Chinese I have met at College are the most arrogant group of people I have ever met.
I thought they were composed of a lot of the Hakka (?) people. Chinese do consider themselves the “Middle Kingdom” and were some of my most prejudice Asian friends (don’t like Vietnamese, Japanese, etc) but on the other hand, they were pro-Western. It’s a shame for China to have to make everyone homogenous. If they want a common(2nd)language, let it be English!
Um, pictures ?
The pics are on the Why do white men like Asian women thread.
I did that for years with Brasileiras and Colombianas.
Eventually I also learned the languages.
Meanwhile the children speak a little of the language.
I highly recommend the lessons!
Well it does if you are talking about oranges.
Oh, I saw those. I was talking about Perdogg’s female of interest. ;-)
Not at the expense of wiping put an entire cultural and thousands of years of it shistory, which is the real goal here.
Article doesn’t make clear if Mandarin & Cantonese are separate LANGUAGES — if one is a dialect, then which is the authentic language and which is the dialect? For example, there are regions of Italy that have dialects of Italian — but in Spain, Catalan is a separate LANGUAGE, not a dialect of Spanish. So is Basque.
It’s worth a shot. :’)
Chinese is kind of weird. There is a common written form (with no phonetic content) that everybody learns in school. But only Mandarin-speakers talk the way they write - in terms of sentence structure - and even then, maybe only with 70 or so per cent fidelity between the oral and written structures. In the spoken form, China's so-called dialects are mutually incomprehensible - the word sounds are completely different. The word "wok" is Cantonese - the Mandarin equivalent sounds something like "goo-or". That is to say, you could listen to someone talk in a different dialect* and not understand a single world of what he said. You could listen for a week to him talking non-stop for 24 hours a day and still not understand what he's saying. Does this mean they are dialects or distinct languages? The Chinese government maintains that they're dialects. I think they're dialects in the sense that Indo Europeans languages are dialects of each other - in Western terminology, though, they would be distinct languages.
* Now, there are dialects of Mandarin where Mandarin-speakers could eventually figure out what his opposite number is saying. Ditto with Cantonese. But a Mandarin-speaker with no training in Cantonese would not be able to understand a Cantonese radio broadcast, anymore than a Cantonese-speaker with no training in Mandarin would be able to understand a Mandarin radio broadcast. It would be like asking an American to figure out a Greek language broadcast. Common roots, but the word sounds are completely different.
thank you so much for your informative posting.
It does seem to be a grey area, how very odd.
I would say that if one can’t undertand the other,
it’s a language.
Chinese writing is ideogram, one Chinese character has different pronunciations in different ares, but the meaning is same. This is the secret why Chinese can read text wrote in ancient, character’s pronunciation always changes in the past thousands years, but the meaning is almost dateless.
Two people from distant areas even can’t understand each a single pronunciation, but give them a pen and a paper, they can have conversation without ANY barriers.
Don’t be mislead by stupid people, it’s very very different from Indo-European languages.
That’s fascinating. Thank you so much for the information.
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