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Why does the Chinese government persist in thinking that Mandarin Chinese should be the medium of communication, when Cantonese is the most widely spoken language among Hong Kongers? If the Chinese government respects Hong Kong, Cantonese would be seen as a language rather than an unnecessary dialect.
Hong Kong is a kaleidoscope with not only a sophisticated fusion of East and West, but is also a city of diversity where new is encompassed by distinctive past. These characteristics can be reflected by its official languages－English, Chinese and Cantonese. Between 1842 to 1898, there was an influx of merchants and workers from the Canton region in China to Hong Kong, that’s when Cantonese became the regional language in Hong Kong. Plus, due to the 99-year colonization of Britain and the handover to China in 1997, English and Chinese are the two other official languages. Funny enough, there was no mention of Cantonese as one of the official languages. Is it because Cantonese is merely seen as a dialect that can not be written? The Chinese government has shown a conspicuous lack of a properly informed book about the importance of Cantonese to Hong Kongers and the true meaning of One country, two systems.
The recent incident which further brings the debate to boil is when a local public primary school bans its students from speaking Cantonese except Mandarin Chinese and English at school. The rage from netizens is totally understandable- why does a language that has been used in 99% of our daily lives for almost 200 years have to be eradicated? Cantonese is the common ground shared by Hong Kong people, it is what links our community together. It is one of the reasons that shapes Hong Kongers’ self- identification. Even though Hong Kong is a part of China since the return of the sovereignty from the Great Britain in 1997, the fact that it is a special administrative region turns it into a society is undeniable. Every human society has a unique speech form, while it is Cantonese in Hong Kong’s context. Besides, Cantonese has an essential historical value and is an indispensable part of Chinese culture — it has a much more venerable lineage than Mandarin Chinese (also known as Putonghua), a mix of the Han Chinese, Mongolian and Manchu languages from the Qing dynasty. The language itself can be traced back to the Warring States period in Chinese history. It is essential that this property should be preserved well in a place like Hong Kong in which Cantonese has a prominent usage. Although Cantonese shares a lot of similarities with Putonghua, it doesn’t mean that the Hong Kong majored medium of communication has to be neutralized into the latter. Can’t we learn from places such as Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, Ireland, India and South Africa which are multilingual? The mainland China also consists of 56 ethnic minorities, does it make sense when their ethnic mother-tongue are maintained while ours is cleaned? If the intention of the Chinese government to wipe out the territorial language so as to strengthen its power over ruling Hong Kong and Hong Kongers’ loyalty towards China, it shows how shallow they are in terms of embracing language varieties. Furthermore, the Chinese political system reflects a discriminatory hierarchical idea of human speech: they rank speech form from worst to best, and the highest forms are Mandarin Chinese. In no way should Cantonese be inherently inferior to any other human speech form.
Strictly speaking, it is not entirely wrong to argue that Cantonese is a dialect since it is commonly refers to as a substandard form of speech. However, the biggest mistake China has made is her mentality in treating a dialect like Cantonese. It seems that the Chinese government thinks they are capable of stopping the outcry among Hong Kongers from turning into a revolution.
Cantonese and Hakka originated from the Tang dynasty in China; Hokkien was Song dynasty’s national language while Putonghua was developed in the recent centuries. They are all Chinese languages which are still used by people today, why can’t they co-exist?