Linguistic Minorities in Hong Kong 

1. Language shift and language death in Hong Kong

 

 

 

 

 

 

Li, Saravanan, and Ng (2010) found that language shift happened in Singapore from the 18th to the 19th century. They found that a huge proportion of Chinese immigrants abandoned their original chinese dialects such as Teochew and Hokkien and started to shift to English and Mandarin. Many of them thought that it was useless for them to preserve their original dialects as they do not need it in Singapore.

 

Hence, with this example in mind, we intend to investigate how the situation is in Hong Kong. We want to find out whether the language minorities in Hong Kong will choose the same course of action as their counterparts from Singapore, as well as their views on language shift as their language may be threatened under the pressure from the dominant languages (Cantonese, English and Mandarin) in Hong Kong.

 

 

2. The appreciation of their mother tongue in linguistic minorities

 

One of the ways appreciation of mother tongue can be observed is through investigating how well-preserved the corresponding minority languages are in the country either through government policies or protests for mother tongue education.

 

Azizi’s (2011) study in Macedonia with regards the language used in education reveals the preference of linguistic minorities to be taught in their native tongue. In Macedonia, Macedonians comprise of 62.4% of the population, while Albanian comprise of 25.2% (Kostadinova, 2011).

 

Before the establishment of a university in which the medium of instruction was Albanian, it was revealed that Albanians and other minorities had a low participation rate in secondary and tertiary institutions. The armed conflict in 2001 ended when the Macedonian majority and the Albanian minority came to a political agreement through the signing of the Ohrid Agreement. This agreement basically guarantees that state financial support will be given to “higher education in the language in the language that is spoken by at least 20% of the population in Macedonia.” Azizi (2011) attributes the subsequent increase in Albanian participation in higher education to the establishment of non-Macedonian-speaking universities.

 

This particular case study demonstrates that minorities do not necessarily assimilate with the majority in terms of language and culture, just as Albanians have insisted on being taught in Albanian. While the association is rather weak, it is seen that Albanians appreciate their native tongue by the fact that 1) they remain more proficient in Albanian than Macedonian, 2) they prefer to be taught in Albanian, and 3) they have stood their ground and fought for their rights to be educated in Albanian as seen in the 2001 armed conflict and the establishing of the University of Tetova.

 

A stronger example of how the native tongues of minorities are preserved is seen in Singapore, where the official languages are English, Mandarin Chinese, Malay and Tamil. The acknowledgement of Tamil as an official language is most noteworthy given that only 9.1% of the population is of Indian ethnicity (Department of Statistics Singapore, 2013), and that Tamil is not the native tongue of all Singaporean Indians.

 

In the case of Hong Kong, most ethnic minorities form less than 5% of the population, with Filipinos comprising only at most 2.1% of the population (Census and Statistics Department Hong Kong, 2011). Given their numbers, there is not enough representation of these minorities in government and in the policy-formulating process. Hence the investigation of appreciation of native tongues will have to be done in microscale (at the individual level) through interviews to determine whether the native tongues are preserved and/or will continue to be preserved in these minorities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. The sense of identity of linguistic minorities in Hong Kong 

 

 

 

 

The language that linguistic minorities use significantly affects their participation in society, and hence it may have influence on their views about their national and regional origins.

 

An example of this is evident from the recent disputes between Russia and Ukraine over the Crimean peninsula (citation needed). Hitherto, Crimea legal status as part of Ukraine has been recognized by Russia since 1994 through the Budapest memorandum in the same year. The official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, but more than half of the residents of Crimea speak Russian. As a result of this, many of them consider themselves as Russian (Crimea State Medicine University).

 

We want to investigate to what extent the identity of the linguistic minorities is affected by their use of language.