Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

French is Not the Only Endangered Language in Canada

Dis­tinct soci­ety! Dis­tinct soci­ety! Oh, won’t those whiny Que­be­cois ever shut up?

That is hon­estly what I had been think­ing for years. Yet, like an expe­ri­ence out of the movie Dis­trict 9, I find myself now emi­nently able to relate to their plight. I looked around and recently real­ized that my own cul­ture and lan­guage are in jeopardy.

Many North Amer­i­cans may not real­ize that there is no sin­gu­lar Chi­nese cul­ture or spo­ken Chi­nese lan­guage.  But there may soon be.

I speak Can­tonese. I grew up in a Can­tonese home and for me, until recently, “Chi­nese” = Can­tonese. Here, in the hereto­fore self-selected North Amer­i­can Chi­nese envi­ron­ment, that used to be true. But it never was in China itself, and now as Chi­nese nation­als emi­grate around the world, the Can­tonese lan­guage is being threat­ened, and the cul­ture that I know as Chi­nese is being rapidly moved aside.

For this post, I will con­cen­trate on the lan­guage. I will leave the mat­ter of cul­ture for another time, because it is not Can­tonese cul­ture per se that is assailed, but Hong Kong Can­tonese cul­ture. That is a thornier, more con­tentious, and riskier topic — I am not yet ready to write in pub­lic about that.

With regards to lan­guage, Man­darin is the only offi­cial spo­ken lan­guage in China, and Sim­pli­fied Chi­nese is the way bil­lions of Chi­nese in China since Mao’s rule have been taught how to write.

Can­tonese as a spo­ken lan­guage is but a sideshow in China, much as Que­be­cois French has, for all prac­ti­cal pur­poses, been rel­e­gated to the side­lines in Canada.  But surely there are enclaves where the lan­guage remains strong, right? Not really. I trav­eled back to Can­ton (now prop­erly called Guan­dong) Province in China — home of the Can­tonese lan­guage — and yet Man­darin pre­vailed there.  The Can­tonese in Can­ton are being out­num­bered by emi­grants from other provinces.

Here in North Amer­ica, in Toronto with a vibrant Chi­nese com­mu­nity and a strong Can­tonese pop­u­la­tion, I hear Can­tonese with friends and fam­ily but when I go to Chi­nese super­mar­kets I hear Man­darin on the PA system.

I even read an arti­cle not too long ago that there are Can­tonese in China mak­ing real efforts to keep the lan­guage from dying in its native land. It is an uphill bat­tle, and not one with a sure outcome.

It was not until I real­ized that the super­mar­kets — pos­si­bly the most lin­guis­ti­cally demo­c­ra­tic of places, since every­one has to buy food to eat — had become Mandarin-based that I real­ized my own lan­guage is in jeopardy.

With regards to the writ­ten lan­guage, Mao’s Com­mu­nist Party devel­oped and stan­dard­ized Sim­pli­fied Chi­nese. Chi­nese peo­ple out­side of Com­mu­nist China con­tinue to use Tra­di­tional Chi­nese. But as immi­grants from China itself con­tinue to come over to North Amer­ica — some­thing that in and of itself is nei­ther good nor bad — while the pool of Chi­nese immi­grants from else­where has dried up, even the writ­ten lan­guage is in peril.

“Tra­di­tional Chi­nese will be superceded by Sim­pli­fied Chi­nese here in Canada in 5, maybe 10 years.”

I heard that just the other day, and I fear it will hap­pen. Sim­pli­fied Chi­nese is not a nat­ural evo­lu­tion of the lan­guage — it is a delib­er­ately, arti­fi­cially mod­i­fied ver­sion of the writ­ten lan­guage. It is, to many Can­tonese here in North Amer­ica, an abom­i­na­tion and an unwel­come cre­ation of the Com­mu­nist Party. Yet, the way the num­bers will play out, Sim­pli­fied will likely become the stan­dard the world over. Even Tai­wan has begun to tran­si­tion to Sim­pli­fied, bow­ing under the pres­sure of it’s enor­mous neighbor.

The lan­guage that I have grown up with, that I have always known as Chi­nese, is endan­gered and threat­ened. That it will even­tu­ally become irrel­e­vant on the main stage, even amongst North Amer­i­can Chi­nese, is no longer in ques­tion. The ques­tion is whether it will be wiped out.

At least I now under­stand much bet­ter where the Que­be­cois are com­ing from. But for the Can­tonese, there won’t be any pub­lic cries of dis­tinct soci­ety — the Chi­nese lan­guage in any form is not an offi­cial lan­guage here, and Can­tonese doesn’t get spe­cial recog­ni­tion even in its own homeland.

I am Cana­dian, and my lan­guage is in peril. But I’m Can­tonese, not Que­be­cois. How inter­est­ing that the same sto­ries are played out in only slightly dif­fer­ent ways.  Even more inter­est­ing how my per­spec­tive on the Que­be­cois cries for recog­ni­tion and appre­ci­a­tion changed almost overnight.