I run a website ToastyNews (多事新聞) that aggregates independent news sites in Hong Kong. In this post, I will present some statistics of Hong Kongese usage in these sites.
What is Hong Kongese?
Hong Kong is a diglossic society. Almost everyone speaks Cantonese as their mother tongue but are taught to write in Standard Chinese as the formal language. There is a long history of writing in Cantonese though, and the Hong Kong government created a supplementary character set for use in computers. Written Cantonese is mostly found in online forums, but there is also a version of Wikipedia in this language. Because of the way it is not taught, the word Cantonese has the connotation of a local dialect rather than a real language. Some people would instead call the written version Yue, which refers to the ancient name of the geographic region and gives the language a higher prestige. To me, Yue technically includes several dialects other than Cantonese, so I prefer to use the word Hong Kongese to precisely mean the Yue used in Hong Kong.
Why does the Hong Kongese usage statistics matter?
Independent news sites in Hong Kong usually publish both news articles and blog posts. These are mostly written by Hong Kongers and could be in Standard Chinese, Hong Kongese and English. Unlike physical publications like newspapers or magazines, there is generally no rules about which language to write in, and so it is up to the authors to decide. Since most of the readers are also Hong Kongers, there is no communication barrier to writing everything in Hong Kongese. The choice of the language to use is then up to society norms and personal identity. Statistics can help track the movement of these choices in the long run.
Here is the complete list of the independent news media sites covered:
- CitizenNews (眾新聞)
- InMediaHK (香港獨立媒體網)
- Local Press (本土新聞)
- Memehk (謎米香港)
- PassionTimes (熱血時報)
- Pentoy (評台)
- Polymer (聚言時報)
- Post852 (852郵報)
- Stand News (立場新聞)
- Truth Media Hong Kong
- VJMedia (輔仁網)
The statistics
To collect the statistics, I created a classifier to identify the languages and used it on articles from 2018. News articles in Standard Chinese that contains Cantonese quotes are considered primarily Standard Chinese, unless the majority of the article are quotes. Since the data came from crawling these sites, there could be crawling or parsing errors. The exact number might be a little off, but the percentages should be close.
In concrete numbers, there were 42421 Standard Chinese articles, 1609 Hong Kongese articles and 200 English articles. Per day, it would be 5 Hong Kongese articles compared to 116 Standard Chinese articles. One really have to make an effort look for them.
Some of the sites publish more casual contents than others. The more casual sites like VJMedia and Polymer publishes a much higher percentage of articles in Hong Kongese than the more serious sites like Stand News and CitizenNews. It is worth noting that the more localist sites like Local Press and PassionTimes publish very low percentage of articles in Hong Kongese. Another interesting observation is that Local Press publishes a much higher percentage of articles in English than any other site.
VJMedia published the highest number of Hong Kongese articles in 2018, which is expected because of the high percentage within the site. Stand News publishes only 2.2% of their site in Hong Kongese, but it publishes a very large number of articles overall so it ended as second largest publisher of Hong Kongese articles.
Conclusion
To me, the percentage of Hong Kongese articles is very low among these sites. The fact that only the more casual sites use more Hong Kongese suggests that it is still considered a language for informal uses only. This is just a guess though, it might be interesting to create a classifier to identify the kinds of articles that are written in Hong Kongese.
The current usage is low, but there are encouraging signs. For example, there is an increasing number of Hong Kongese writers here on medium.com. There are also sites like Shikoto (紙言) that features longer Hong Kongese fiction works.
