Cantonese as a Second Language

Issues, Experiences and Suggestions for Teaching and Learning

John C. Wakefield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351184236
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Cantonese is a language from southern China that is spoken by roughly 70 million people worldwide. It is the language of Hong Kong cinema and has traditionally been the most prominent language spoken in Chinatowns around the world. People choose to learn Cantonese for a variety of social and economic reasons: because it is a heritage language that one's relatives speak; because it is the language of one's partner and monolingual in-laws; because it is necessary for living and working in Hong Kong, Macau, Guangzhou, or other Cantonese-speaking communities; because it is the bridge to fully appreciating and understanding Cantonese culture; or simply because it is an irresistible challenge. Whatever the motivation, more and more people are choosing to learn Cantonese as an additional language.

This book discusses many issues related to both acquiring and teaching Cantonese. If you are a learner of Cantonese, this long overdue volume is essential to understanding both the grammatical and the social issues involved with learning this notoriously difficult language. If you are a teacher, this book will be invaluable to gaining insight into your students' motivations and needs. And finally, if you are an applied linguist, the unique aspects related to the acquisition of Cantonese offer a fascinating contribution to the literature.

1 The Cantonese language

Robert S. Bauer (包睿舜) and John C. Wakefield (莊域飛)

Introduction

Hong Kong Cantonese as an extraordinary Chinese variety

Today, among all the regional varieties of the Chinese language spoken throughout China, it is Hong Kong Cantonese that particularly stands out for its extraordinary – even unique – phonological, lexical, grammatical, orthographic, and sociolinguistic features. In this chapter, we have selected some of these remarkable characteristics of Cantonese for presentation to and analysis for the readers of this book, as we believe they will find this material both interesting and useful. We assume that one group of readers will be learners of Cantonese as a second language (CanSL), who would naturally be interested in knowing more about the language that they have chosen to devote their time and energy to learn. Another group of readers will be Cantonese language teachers, who may benefit from reading our suggestions about what to include in their lesson plans, as well as learning about the reference materials that we cite here. Yet another group of readers that we assume will read this book are linguists, some of whom we hope will find some new and useful information here, or at least learn about some reference materials they can go to for further study. This chapter provides some useful, basic background knowledge for those who need it, and we very much believe this will help some readers to more fully appreciate and comprehend the chapters that follow.

Classification of Cantonese: language or dialect?

Students of Cantonese will be interested to know that this variety of Chinese is sometimes called Yue Chinese in English and that it goes by various names in Chinese, e.g. 白話 baak6 waa6/2 (“plain (white) speech”), 廣東話 Gwong2 dung1 waa6/2 (“speech of Guangdong (province)”), 廣府話 Gwong2 fu2 waa6/2 (“speech of Canton prefecture”), 廣州話 Gwong2 zau1 waa6/2 (“speech of Guangzhou (i.e. Canton)”), 香港話 Hoeng1 gong2 waa6/2 (“speech of Hong Kong”), 香港粵語Hoeng1 gong2 Jyut6 jyu5 (“Hong Kong Cantonese”), 粵語 Jyut6 jyu5 (“Cantonese language”), 省城話 saang2 sing4 waa6/2 (“speech of the provincial capital” – i.e. Canton), and 唐話 Tong4 waa6/2 (“Tang (dynasty) speech”) (Bauer and Benedict, 1997, xxxi; Wikipedia, 2018). It is one of the most widely spoken linguistic varieties in China after Mandarin (also called 普通話 Pou2 tung1 waa6/2 (“Putonghua”)) (Bauer and Benedict, 1997, xxxv). It is currently spoken as the “usual, daily language” by about 90 percent of the ethnic Chinese population of Hong Kong (Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department, 2017); although it was also once the dominant Chinese variety spoken in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, it has been in steady decline there as the result of the heavy-handed promotion of Putonghua and national and provincial laws on language and script. Cantonese is commonly referred to as “a dialect of Chinese”, but whether from a technically linguistic standpoint, or even the layman’s viewpoint, that is an inaccurate and dubious classification that turns out to have more to do with politics than linguistics – let us not forget the oft-quoted aphorism attributed to Uriel Weinreich: A language is a dialect with an army and a navy (Chambers, 1997, p. 214).

It is important to note that no linguistic variety is inferior to another, and what linguists call “dialects” are not in any way considered by linguists to be less complete than what they call “languages”. Nevertheless, classifications are important in any field of study, so it is worth explaining why Cantonese is technically a language, having its own dialectal varieties, rather than being merely a dialect of the Chinese language. Classifying linguistic varieties based on their relationships to one another using the terms “dialect” and “language” is much more complicated than most non-specialists realize, but mutual intelligibility can be and typically is used as one of the basic criteria for determining whether two varieties are distinct languages from each other (by being mutually unintelligible), or whether they are two dialects of a single language (through their mutual intelligibility). So, if we were to rely on the criterion of mutual intelligibility for classification, then the fact that Cantonese and Mandarin are mutually unintelligible for people who speak only one of them, but have never learned the other, means that they should be classified as two distinct languages. They are as different from each other as French is from Italian, so referring to Cantonese and Mandarin as two dialects of a single language would be like saying that French and Italian are dialects of Romance, which is not something people say.

Even though Cantonese and Mandarin, along with other mutually unintelligible regional Chinese varieties, such as Min, Hakka, Wu, etc., should be considered distinct languages, they can all be classified as belonging to the same Chinese language family or 漢語 Hon3 jyu5. Ethnologue (2018) captures this relationship among Mandarin, Cantonese, and all the other regional varieties of Chinese without calling them dialects by referring to Chinese as the “macrolanguage of China” that includes a number of languages, two of which are Mandarin and Yue.¹

Cantonese as 中文

Unless and until the sociopolitical situation changes, it is necessary to categorize all of China’s languages (excluding the non-Chinese minority languages) as being “Chinese”. This is because the speakers themselves identify as speakers of a Chinese language. Cantonese and Mandarin speakers commonly refer to their own variety as 中文 (Cantonese: Zung1 man4/2; Mandarin: zhōngwén) which is a very broad, elastic, but ambiguous category that includes any kind or form of the Chinese language, such as modern or classical, written or spoken, etc. When people in Hong Kong use Cantonese to refer to “Chinese” or to “knowing how to speak Chinese” (識講中文 sik1 gong2 Zung1 man4/2), the default reference is to Cantonese rather than to Mandarin. This is even done officially. For example, the Hong Kong Government’s official website states that “Chinese and English are the official languages of Hong Kong”, and directly below that, it states that 89.5 percent of the population speak Cantonese, while only 1.38 percent of the population speak Putonghua.² Debates and discussions in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council are virtually all conducted in Cantonese, making it the de facto official variety of Chinese that is referred to by the government as its official language. Hong Kong’s Education Bureau says it “is committed to encouraging and supporting the early integration of [non-Chinese-speaking] NCS students (notably ethnic minority students) into the community, including facilitating their adaptation to the local education system and mastery of the Chinese language”.³ The bureau’s reference to “non-Chinese speaking” in this statement by default refers to not being able to speak Cantonese, considering that the local education system uses Cantonese as the medium of instruction and that integration into the community requires learning Cantonese rather than Mandarin. One final example of Cantonese being the default variety of Chinese comes from the Language Centre at Hong Kong Baptist University, whose website lists (at the time of this writing) all of its Cantonese and Chinese writing classes under the heading “Chinese courses” but lists all of its Mandarin classes under the heading “Putonghua courses”. All of these examples demonstrate the need to continue referring to all Chinese languages as (flexible) “Chinese”. However, it should be kept in mind that they are separate languages, rather than dialects of the same language, even though the practice of calling them dialects will probably not cease any time soon, if ever.

Number of Cantonese speakers worldwide

Ethnologue (2018) estimates that there are 73,355,610 people who speak Cantonese as their first language (L1), and 402,000 people who speak it as a second language (L2).⁴ Despite the apparent precision of these numbers, we believe they are no more than rough estimates based on the assumption that all of the people residing in Guangdong, Guangxi, and Hong Kong speak varieties of Yue. If there actually are 70+ million people who speak Cantonese as their L1, then this figure includes all varieties of it, only one of which is the variety called Hong Kong Cantonese (HKC). Hong Kong has been referred to as the “Cantonese-speaking capital of the world” (Bolton, 2011, p. 64), having taken this mantle away from Guangzhou where Cantonese has gone into decline as a result of the successful promotion of Putonghua there. We should also take into consideration the powerful economic influence of Hong Kong’s business and financial sectors, as well as the widespread sociocultural influence of Hong Kong-based Cantonese television and movies. Today HKC is typically the target variety for most writers of Cantonese language-learning materials, as well as for most learners of CanSL. The Guangzhou variety of Cantonese has been traditionally regarded as being the standard form throughout the South China region; as for the Cantonese varieties spoken in the major cities of the Pearl River Delta, or what is now being dubbed 大彎區 Daai6 waan1 keoi1 (“the Greater Bay Area”), plus those spoken in overseas Cantonese-speaking immigrant communities, these all generally resemble the Hong Kong variety. The cities o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The Cantonese language
• Part I The teaching and learning of Cantonese
• Part II Experience and advice from advanced learners
• Part III Cantonese as a second language in the Hong Kong education system
• Appendices
• Index