To learn a language, immerse yourself in its culture. That has been my excuse over the past few years for using the Luk Yu Teahouse as a base for studying Cantonese. Founded in 1933, it exists in a time warp of its own. Waiters are considered 'new' if they have been there less than 10 years. Profits are of little consequence to the 26 shareholders, who include some of the city's legendary tycoons. In 1982, my teacher, Linda Liang Ling-ling, was a newcomer to the institution. By now, she is considered a regular, and spends much of my classroom hour bantering with the waiters or explaining the fine points of the menu.
When we turn to more serious issues, such as grammar and vocabulary, it is my turn to giggle at the saltiness and improbabilities of the language from the perspective of Putonghua, which I began learning in 1974, the same year that the Luk Yu moved to Stanley Street. Cantonese and Putonghua are not only mutually unintelligible; Cantonese is like an antique shop of the Chinese language, with characters and grammatical elements dating from the Tang dynasty and much earlier. The Chinese that was brought to Nara in the sixth century by Prince Shotoku was a Cantonese variant, and Japanese is full of Cantonese-sounding words. The classic compilation of 300 Tang poems sounds right only in Cantonese, with its cadence, tones and rhymes. The differences between Cantonese, Putonghua and, for that matter, English are nothing new to residents of the city, many of whom speak one or two of these languages but are baffled by the third. Less well known is the wrinkle added by Hong Kong's post-1997 official language policy, which makes English and 'Chinese' the official languages but skirts around the distinction between Putonghua and Cantonese by leaving it ambiguous.
In practice, Hong Kong's civil service identifies two official written languages and three official spoken languages. This assumes that written Putonghua and written Cantonese are identical, when they are not, and produces the regular comedy of officials struggling with simultaneous translation of Putonghua texts into Cantonese speech. The language officers of Hong Kong's Official Languages Agency are kept busy providing bilingual versions of documents and trilingual simultaneous translation for events.
One consequence of the government's peculiar way of dealing with Cantonese is that it has created a shortage of language textbooks. The classic Cantonese textbook for British civil servants, by Sidney Lau, is archaic. Many popular ones neglect to supply Chinese characters and use bizarre transcription systems. It took me years to find a language textbook from Putonghua to Cantonese, and its transcription system is the strangest of all.
The real problem with Hong Kong's language policy is that it sells Cantonese short. Language may be seen as a tool or as an end in itself but really, it is both. The official policy seems to place Cantonese in the category only of 'tool', rather than as a medium for thought or literature. This is unfair to a language that links Hong Kong to Guangdong's 50 million people and to 70 million overseas Chinese.
Rather than waste time and money on an Official Languages Agency, why not look at Hong Kong's multilingualism as an asset in its own right? The agency could be disbanded and its funds transferred to the education system, to improve language instruction across the board. Priority might go to English, Putonghua and Cantonese, but other Asian and European languages would be included. If we need an official language, let it be Putonghua. Hong Kong could then do as the native speakers of China's other 16 languages do, dutifully learning the national language but embracing its own languages in daily life.
