Thread by @ZevHandel

I recently wrote a thread in which I emphasized that spoken Cantonese 🇭🇰 and spoken Mandarin are distinct, non-mutually intelligible spoken languages. (They are two of the several dozen distinctly spoken languages that make up the Chinese language family.)
🧵

I wanted to show in that thread that there is a widely used *written* form of the spoken Cantonese language: Written Cantonese.

It's distinct in grammar and vocabulary from Modern Standard Written Chinese (MSWC), so not fully readable by speakers of other Chinese languages.

One claim I made in the course of that thread was disputed by some Cantonese speakers, particularly those living in Hong Kong. I appreciate the feedback and I’ve been ruminating on their comments.

In this (shorter! 😌) thread I’m going to revisit my claim, make an apology, and reframe the issue in a (hopefully) more nuanced and culturally respectful way. 🙏

Here's the thread I'm referring to:

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1414796995290570764

The tweet in the long thread that received pushback is this one. Specifically, it was my assertion that the Standard Written Chinese used every day by Cantonese speakers in a multitude of cultural contexts is a kind of “Mandarin”.

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1414802328838754305

Among those who politely but firmly objected, based on their direct lived experience in the language and culture, were @superwusirsri, @StarDust2019721, @xinwenxiaojie, and @patrickpoon.

https://twitter.com/xinwenxiaojie/status/1415613728263913473

For Hong Kong Cantonese speakers, the two written idioms MSWC and WrCanto—which differ considerably in both grammar and vocabulary—are not conceptualized as two distinct languages, but rather as points along a continuum.

That continuum runs from a more formal, literary writing style
(syu1 min6>2 jyu5 書面語/书面语)
at one end, to a more informal, colloquial writing style
(hau2tau4jyu5 口頭語/口头语)
at the other. The latter end is closer to natural speech.

@superwusirsir explains this very nicely in a brief reply thread.

https://twitter.com/superwusirsir/status/1416665559760994304

In fact, every literate culture has this sort of stylistic continuum available to it. Written English too exists in many registers, from highly informal, vernacularized writing to highly formal, educated writing.

They differ primarily in word choice, but also in such stylistic aspects as sentence length.

Informal English sentence: “There are many schools nearby, so ….”

Formal English sentence: “There are numerous educational institutions in close proximity. Thus, ….”

Spoken language also varies along the same continuum. There are social settings in which people speak in a high-register style that is closer to formal writing, such as when giving a speech or delivering a classroom lecture.

But the gap between the vernacular and the literary in Chinese languages like Cantonese, Taiwanese, Shanghainese, and so on is much greater than for English. It is in technical terms “diglossia”: speech in one language and formal writing in another.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diglossia

From a historical perspective, MSWC—even as used in Hong Kong—is clearly based on an elevated spoken Mandarin. This is a direct result of the early 20th-century 白話 '(writing in) plain speech' movement.

This language reform sought to modernize Chinese writing and raise literacy rates by putting an end to the use of Classical Chinese—which was difficult to learn—as the standard written language.

In its place, writing would become closer to speech, just as in Europe. This Chinese movement was in turn inspired by the late 19th-and early 20th-century Japanese movement for the unification of speech and writing (genbun itchi 言文一致).

The development of a Mandarin-based 白話文 (writing in plain speech) was part of the broader trend of vernacularization that swept across East and Southeast Asia in the early 20th century, dislodging Classical Chinese (文言文) from its role around the region.

The speech that served as the basis of the new Standard Written Chinese was northern Chinese, aka Mandarin. The Mandarin-based historical origins of what in Hong Kong is called 書面語 are indisputable. They are clearly evident in its linguistic features.

What spoken variety of Chinese has:
他們 as its third-person plural pronoun ‘they’
的 as its possessive particle
走路 as its word meaning ‘to walk’
比 as its comparative marker ‘than’
不 as its general negator
給 as its word meaning ‘to give’
etc. ?

None of these features of MSWC are found in spoken Cantonese or in Classical Chinese. In fact, there is only *one* spoken language in the world that has all of these linguistic features: Mandarin.

(I’ll give an example at the end of this thread that shows the significant grammatical differences, not just vocabulary differences, between spoken Cantonese and MSWC. And I’ll show that the grammar of MSWC matches that of spoken Mandarin.)

BUT ... my perspective as a historical linguist, and as a foreign learner who approached spoken and written Cantonese through the lens of the Mandarin I had studied, is very different from the lived experience of Cantonese-speaking communities, especially in Hong Kong and Macau.

For those communities, there is no perceived connection between their written language and the spoken Mandarin language. And there is no reason there should be.

Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong learn how to read and write in school. What they are learning is not called "Mandarin"—it's called 書面語 ‘formal writing’. Spoken Mandarin does not mediate that learning process.

The shift that Hong Kong Cantonese speakers make every day between the more formal writing style learned in school and the more colloquial writing style called 口頭語 (i.e. Written Cantonese) happens within a purely Cantonese-language cultural context.

To put it another way: Speakers of Mandarin don’t “own” MSWC, even though its origins are found in spoken Mandarin.

MSWC belongs equally to all of the communities who use it. That’s one of the things I’ve learned from the replies I’ve gotten to my thread.

And framing it otherwise is what I want to apologize for.

Well, this thread is already far longer than I intended. Brevity isn’t my strong suit 😞. It’s a character flaw.

But I want to close with a few thoughts as I reflect on all this.

First, I noticed that Hong Kongers reacted quite differently than members of the Cantonese diaspora in North America did to my description of Cantonese diglossia. I think that must be because of the different ways that these Cantonese-speaking communities encounter written MSWC.

Hong Kongers are immersed in MSWC from the age of about four. It’s all around them, and it’s taught in schools. But for children of Cantonese-speaking immigrants living in other parts of the world such as North America, MSWC is often not a part of their upbringing.

They hear Cantonese spoken by their parents and members of their parents’ generation; and they themselves master the *spoken* language to varying degrees. But they don't get formal schooling in Cantonese language. They likely become literate first in their new country’s language.

Their first encounters with MSWC are typically in a Mandarin-education context! For example a Saturday "Chinese school" where Mandarin is taught, or university courses in Mandarin Chinese.

As the official language of China, Taiwan, and Singapore, Mandarin (aka Pǔtōnghuà 普通話, aka Guóyǔ 國語, aka Huáyǔ 華語) is the most widely taught Chinese language, and many parents who speak other Chinese languages hope for their kids to master it as a practical skill.

So for these children, spoken Mandarin and written Chinese are learned side by side, and it’s very obvious to them that the spoken Mandarin they are being taught and the written Chinese they are being taught are essentially the same language—

and that both differ considerably from the spoken Cantonese of their home lives. This makes the diglossia very evident in way that is harder to see and experience in the immersive environment of Hong Kong.

Which leads me to my final point, which I'd love to hear feedback on.

I think there is a real benefit to Hong Kongers asserting that MSWC is, also, “Cantonese”: a part of their linguistic and cultural heritage.

Why?

Because it’s an effective way of pushing back against the cultural and political hegemonic forces of northern China. A way of making equal claim to the formal written language.

But I would argue that it’s equally important to recognize that in claiming MSWC as simply a more formal register—a 書面語—of Cantonese, there is a real danger of something important being lost, something that is unique and special about Cantonese linguistic culture.

If Written Cantonese is reduced to being nothing more than the informal 口頭語 end of a spectrum with MSWC at the other end, instead of a separate language of equal prestige, the amazing cultural treasure that is Written Cantonese can be ignored or even denigrated.

Most speakers of non-Mandarin Chinese languages have no mechanism to put their spoken languages into writing. They write in MSWC and that's it. Their literate lives are entirely divorced from their spoken languages.

Most speakers of Jin in Shanxi, of Hui in Anhui, of Gan in Jiangxi, of Xiang in Hunan, of various Wu languages in Zhejiang and Jiangsu, of Hakka and Sichuanese, of Fuzhouhua and Hokkien, ... have no long-established, character-based, widely used written form of their vernaculars.

Sure, a handful of these languages have written traditions using characters. Many are now defunct, lost to the relentless encroachment of Standard Mandarin and Standard Written Chinese. Others have been romanized to varying degrees of success, starting with missionary bibles.

Still others have today communities of actively engaged speakers working hard to develop, maintain, and/or revive written forms of their spoken languages, whether character-based, Romanized, or mixed.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pe%CC%8Dh…

But there’s nothing else out there like Written Cantonese in terms of its cultural prominence. There’s no equivalent of McDull and McMug cartoons anywhere else in the Chinese cultural world, as far as I know.

This is special. It’s unique. It’s important. And it’s one reason Hong Kong culture is so vibrant.

So, even though I have outsider status only, it seems to me that its important *not* to conceive of Written Cantonese as simply a less formal register of MSWC.

We should see it as a distinct written language in its own right, which itself can (or could) have less and more formal registers. Written Cantonese should be valued on its own terms for the unique cultural treasure that it is.

Anyway, thanks again to those who engaged with my earlier thread, and for setting me straight on issues that are invisible to me as an outsider to the Cantonese-speaking communities.

/end
(I didn't number the tweets, so I'll just pretend this wasn't too long. 😉)

haha, I totally forgot to give that example I promised earlier in the thread. Here it is:

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1416985858431873026