Linguistic Minorities in Hong Kong 

 As what we have mentioned in BACKGROUND, the mother tongue of a person affects his/her identity. To simiplify the idea of identiy in the interview, we put the questions into question 11 and 16 by simiply asking them if they consider theirselves as a Hong Konger and what cultural holidays they celebrate. 

 

Based on our observation, the sense of identity is related to how much knowledge of a person has. The fact is that: 

1. Mr. A does not believe in identity. He speaks fluently in English, Italian, German and Swedish. He does not celebrate any cultural or religious holidays.

2. Ms. Y considers herself as Japanese. She speaks fluent Japanese but she cannot speak in Cantonese. She celebrates all cultural or religious holidays.

3. Seedera considers herself as a Hong Kong citizen. She speaks fluently in both Urdu and Cantonese. She celebrates the Islamic New Year, which is the Islamic culture’s holiday.

 

Comparing 1, 2 and 3, it can be concluded that the more languages a person can speak fluently, the more likely that the interviewee has less sense of identity. But when a person is more familiar with his/her mother tongue than the other languages, his/her identity is likely to be determined by the first language. To elaborate, Mr. A could speak much more languages than the other two interviewees, that’s why Mr. A seems to be not having a sense of identity. Ms. Y is the case that there is a significant difference between the knowledge of different languages she knows, so she may feel that she is a Japanese even though she has lived in Hong Kong for 20 years. The sense of identity of Seedera is in between Mr. A and Ms. Y, that although her first language is Urdu, she thinks she is a Hong Konger, because she has similar communication skills for all languages she knows about.

 

Besides the above, multilingual people seem to have multiple identities. From 2 and 3, both Ms. Y and Seedera celebrate the cultural holidays which do not belong to their own culture. (‘Own culture’ here means the culture which is related to their identity, i.e. Ms. Y’s ‘own culture’ is the Japanese culture, and Seedera’s ‘own culture’ is the Chinese culture.) For Mr. A’s case, similar conclusion can be drawn that due to his linguistic background, he could hardly identify his own culture.

 

Obviously, this conclusion is not accurate and there are many factors affecting the sense of identity of a person. The reason why Ms. Y would still consider herself as Japanese may be due to the nationalism implanted like many Japanese (Iida, 2002). And the reason of the lack of sense of identity for Mr. A may be due to his board knowledge about the concept of identity. Norton and Toohey (2011, p.415) also mentioned that the identity of a perosn is also determined by subjectivity and postioning. So it is important to note that the above deduction is only based on the answers we obtained, and that all other factors which are not related to linguistic are ignored.