At present, most of the elderly people in Hong Kong still use Hakka as the language of communication. (Ta Kung Pao profile photo)
Ming Pao recently reported that the "Kodrah Kristang" (Cristan language), which has existed in Southeast Asia for more than 500 years, has fewer than a thousand speakers. In Singapore, there are fewer than 100 people and they are on the verge of extinction. This news is not remarkable in Hong Kong, but as a scholar of Hakka culture, I am very sad.
Descendants of the Portuguese intermarriage with the Malays, the Cristans were one of the earliest inhabitants of Singapore, with 15,000 people, or 0.4% of the population. Joseph Schooling, who made a name for himself by beating the American "flying fish" Pheubys at the Men's 100m Butterfly At the Men's Olympics in Brazil last year, is a Christan from Singapore. Collectively known as Eurasia, this group includes the descendants of European colonists who arrived in Southeast Asia through the Strait of Malacca in the 16th and 18th centuries and were born to the local aborigines, similar to the Chinese-Portuguese mixed-race children we commonly find in Macau. The grammar of Christan is derived from Malay and the vocabulary is derived from Portuguese, combining dialect elements such as Hakka and Cantonese. Some volunteers hope to cooperate with the Government to preserve Sin Chew's history and culture through lectures on "Thirty Years of VolunteerIsm". Otherwise, "if the language dies, the cultural heritage of humanity associated with the language will disappear forever".
Mr. Chung Zhao-cheng (middle), a master of Hakka literature in Taiwan, and Jiang Jie'an, head of the Hakka Affairs Department of Taoyuan Municipal Government (right), take a group photo with this author
Globalization has accelerated the demise of minority languages
The demise of language is a global problem, especially in the Internet age when English was the "Mandarin of the Global Village". Aka-Bo is an extinct Greater Andaman language. It was once used on the midwest coast of the North Andaman Islands. An 85-year-old woman named Boa Sr. was the last speaker of Acapo on Earth. She died in 2010 along with the Acabo language.
Linguistically, there is no unified method of identifying the endangerment of languages, and the Manchu language in the interior is a typical endangered or even extinct state, which only less than 50 elderly people in the Heihe River Basin of Heilongjiang Province can speak. The Great Qing Dynasty, which is "under the whole world, can not be the land of the king", disappeared far faster than people imagined.
In February 2000, at the turn of the century, the international linguistic community gathered in Cologne, Germany, to hold a seminar to divide the current situation of the earth's language into seven levels, of which the definition of endangered languages is: all users are over 20 years old, and children in the ethnic group no longer learn the language. Hakka is clearly not in this category, but should be generalized in the category of "eroded languages": some members of the ethnic group have switched to other languages, but some members, including children, are still learning to use. Hakka dialect is in this state in Hong Kong.
The United Nations estimates that more than 750 languages have become extinct worldwide. Unless effective measures are taken, at least 3,000 languages will disappear from the planet like dinosaurs in a century.
Globalization is bound to accelerate the rapid rise of strong languages and the demise of weak languages. English is undoubtedly the biggest beneficiary of globalization. Taking Singapore as an example, in order to facilitate communication in the fields of commerce, teaching, scientific research and other fields, different ethnic groups in The local area attaches more importance to English than the mother tongue, and it is no wonder that the decline of weak languages has accelerated. Not long ago, the French government was also worried, and introduced a policy stipulating that French songs must account for a considerable proportion of the music program time on the radio, otherwise the Singers in France will go to the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Australia and other countries to develop, because the career development space is greater. This situation is a bit like a large number of Hong Kong singers and movie stars going to the mainland to explore the market, and Mandarin is an essential language. Among the Chinese dialects, due to the impact of the huge floating population after the 1980s, a considerable number of weak dialects in Sichuan, Hunan, eastern Guangdong and western Guangdong have been eroded and gradually replaced by Mandarin.
The author gave a speech on the history and current situation of Hakka culture in Hong Kong
Hakka dialect is an important part of Chinese culture and needs to be encouraged to inherit
Hakka dialect is the mother tongue of the Hakka people, derived from Old Chinese. According to ethinologue, the world's most authoritative research institute on human language. There are more than 7,000 languages on the planet, and Hakka ranks 34th in the world according to the user population. As of 2013, the number of Hakka speakers was about 47.82 million. Hakka was even once the official language of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, as the leader Hong Xiuquan and his main followers were Hakka. In the early days of British colonization, the number of Hakka speakers in Hong Kong was as high as one-third.
Unfortunately, Hakka is also one of the fastest disappearing languages in the world. In Hong Kong, for example, Hakka identity is rapidly disappearing. Many Hong Kong people, even if they are of Hakka descent, are inconvenient or "embarrassed" to speak Hakka, and most of them are elderly people who still use it as a language of communication. The author also notes that even if scholars from the two sides of the Taiwan Strait and Hong Kong and Macao hold Hakka culture seminars in Hong Kong, few scholars use the Hakka language to communicate.
In Taiwan, the inheritance of Hakka dialect is also a big problem. According to a 2004 survey by the "Hakka Committee" of the Taiwan authorities, only 30% of Hakka people born before 1974 could understand Hakka and only 10% could use it fluently. In Hakka family life, less than 10% of Hakka dialects are spoken.
The lecture on the theme of Hakka culture attracted many people to attend
For the sake of research, the author has visited many Hakka families living all over the world. In a very remote town in Victoria, Australia, I visited the local overseas Chinese. They drifted from East Timor across the sea decades ago to escape the war in Indonesia. Further back, it is from the mountains of eastern Guangdong in China to the "South Sea", that is, the Malay Peninsula. They still speak a very authentic Hakka dialect, which is almost indistinguishable from my hometown of Meixian. In Calcutta, India, I have also met fellow countrymen who have immigrated for five or six generations, but who still have not changed their hometowns. I was struck by the tenacious vitality of this culture and language. It can be seen that language must be used to have vitality and vitality.
Language is the carrier of culture and history. Taiwan's Hakka literature master Chung Zhao-cheng lamented: "Once the Hakka language disappears, the Hakka people disappear." As one of the most important ethnic groups of the Han people, the dialect used by the Hakka is soaked with the historical information and cultural code of Chinese civilization, and it must not be allowed to survive on its own. The most famous case in the history of Language Revitalization is the restoration of Hebrew from a dead language to a daily language used by Israelis. As an international metropolis, Hong Kong should have an international perspective to learn from in the conservation of language and traditional history and culture.
Author: Lin Wenying