TITLE:
Languagehood of Cantonese: A Renewed Front in an Old Debate
AUTHORS:
Siu-Pong Cheng, Sze-Wing Tang
KEYWORDS:
Cantonese, Language, Dialect, Orthography, Register
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Modern Linguistics,
Vol.4 No.3,
July
23,
2014
ABSTRACT:
This paper studies
the discourses that underlie the controversy in the first half of 2014 over the
status of Cantonese in Hong Kong. It turns out that the factors of mutual
intelligibility and hard power are insufficient for this language/dialect debate.
The writing system and literary tradition of Chinese complicate the status and
identity issues of Cantonese. These complicating factors are language-specific
in the sense that the orthographic depth and the “elegant” standard might
differ significantly across languages. Added to these is the semantic
complication that the meaning of terms varies not just because of translation,
but also that there are alternative ways to conceptualize them. This paper
concludes that the definition of linguistic terms like “language” and “dialect”
is becoming more and more in the hands of the people. Recent developments in
communication have brought the debate in Hong Kong to a new level. It is
expected to be the trend of how sociolinguistic topics are pursued.