Recently, there is a documentary episode focusing on the conservation of the indigenous languages in Hong Kong. It has mentioned that Weitouhua is one of the endangered languages and there is an association aimed at conserving these endangered languages. Some students from The University of Hong Kong are carrying out projects to help the conservation work. All these have increased my interests to explore this topic. Therefore, in the following, I am going to focus on the reasons for Weitouhua to become endangered in Hong Kong.

The main reason for Weitouhua becoming endangered in Hong Kong is the geographical location of Weitouhua speakers, which formed a language island of Weitouhua with respect to Cantonese. Language island means a phenomenon that a language is surrounded by one or more different languages (Auer, Hinskens & Kerswill, 2005). It is mainly caused by immigration of population. Generally, the range of usage of the language in the language island is relatively narrower than the surrounded languages. Since being affected by the strong language, some of them might be assimilated eventually. According to the Hong Kong history, most villages were located in New Territories. People of the same family would live together and develop a walled village, for example, Kat Hing Wai (吉慶圍) is the walled village for Tang clan. As different villages are located in different areas, geographically every village stands alone by itself. Take Kat Hing Wai as an example. Although there are other five walled villages in Kam Tin, none of them are closed to Kat Hing Wai (see Figure 1).

Since people live in Kat Hing Wai speak Weitouhua as their native tongue, while other people who live outside speak another language, it is said that Weitouhua is located in a language island. If speakers of Weitouhua need to communicate with people outside the ‘island’, they have to learn the lingua franca which is Cantonese in this case. Soon, because of the following causes, they found that the function of Cantonese is far more boarder than that of Weitouhua, so they tended to stop speaking Weitouhua and use Cantonese instead.

There are two causes which makes Cantonese assimilate Weitouhua in a relatively short period (20-30 years).

First is the choice for the medium of instruction (MOI) for the implementation of free education since 1971. During 1950s to 1980s, 2.5 million of people had immigrated to Hong Kong legally or illegally (Chen, 2010). According to the record from Guangdong Province, there was nearly 800 thousand of people immigrated to Hong Kong from 1979 to 1980. This population boost has affected the decision of the Government to choose the Cantonese as MOI for free education because most of the Hong Kong population are originated from Guangdong. While schools in New Territories have to follow the free education policy, they have to change the MOI from Weitouhua or Hakka-ese to Cantonese. I take this action as the first step of the invasion to the language island. It is because whether a language can survive, it depends on the number of learners, especially young learners it has. According to the Chapter 279, Education Ordinance in Law of Hong Kong: “Every child in Hong Kong, without any reasonable excuse, is required by law to attend a primary school after the child has attained the age of 6 years. It is also required to attend a secondary school after primary education and is completed before he attains the age of 19 years. However, child who has completed Form 3 of secondary education and whose parent can produce evidence to the satisfaction of the Permanent Secretary for Education, shall not apply. Education in the public sector is free.” Therefore, as the MOI of primary schools and some secondary schools is decided as Cantonese and children must go to school, they have to learn under the Cantonese environment and inevitably speak Cantonese with their classmates in schools. As children are the core to decide whether a language can survive, if children do not use that language to play or to chat with friends, it is likely that the language will soon become endangered and eventually extinct. There are statistics from 2011 Population Census Office showed that in 2011, speakers of Cantonese have occupied 89.5% of the population aged 5 and above, while speakers of other Chinese dialects including Weitouhua have just 4.0%. This explained that why the MOI of free education distributed the most for the endangered situation of Weitouhua, as it changed the native tongue of children from Weitouhua to Cantonese.

Second invasion to the ‘island’ is the emergence of free-to-air television broadcast, which has brought Cantonese into every household in Hong Kong. In 19 November 1967, Hong Kong first wireless commercial television station, Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB), had commenced broadcasting. Initially, there were two free channels for the audience, TVB Jade and TVB Pearl. Since channel Jade is broadcasted in Cantonese and Pearl in English, people who watch the dramas can listen to Cantonese more frequently. This broadcasting company had made many notable shows throughout the years, such as, Enjoy Yourself Tonight (歡樂今宵) (1967-1994), The Legend of the Condor Heroes (射雕英雄傳) (1982), etc. Television is one of the factors to cause language change (Stuart-Smith, Pryce, Timmins, & Gunter, 2013). According to their research, they suggested that because of the accent difference between London and Glasgow, if people watch soap drama sets that made from London, they tend to have changes in pronouncing /th-/ and /l-/ in a more ‘London-like’ way which differs from the Glasgow accent. Therefore, they predicted that television broadcasting is likely to cause structural change and grammatical change of a language to another. This echoed with my assumption that the language used for mass entertainment can cause language shift in the language island. In this case, it is from Weitouhua to Cantonese. It is because when people watched the soap dramas, they are learning the language used in the dramas unconsciously. If they would like to chat with their friends or family members about the dramas, they have to use Cantonese in order to repeat the scripts of certain characters. Therefore, mass entertainment plays another important role in the invasion of the Weitouhua ‘island’, as it changed the daily language of speakers for the purpose of chatting.

According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, if the language is spoken by grandparents and older generations; while the parent generation may understand it, they do not speak it to children or among themselves, the language will be defined as ‘Severely endangered’. Obviously, Weitouhua is now under this situation. Although there is an association doing some language documentation, such as developing a phonetic system which recorded the pronunciation of different words in Weitouhua, it is just a passive method to conserve the language. In fact, there are some active methods for conserving the endangered language, for example, set up a Weitouhua television station which broadcasts shows in Weitouhua. By creating some cartoons and educational dramas, perhaps it can arise the interests of children to learn Weitouhua, thus increasing the number of Weitouhua speakers. Establishing a reversing language shift is another method to revitalize Weitouhua in Hong Kong by starting the acquisition of the language among adults first (Austin & Sallabank, 2011). For further conservation, I suggest to gain insights from Taiwan. In Taiwan, the broadcasts of mass transportation have to include Min-nan and Hakka. By including Weitouhua in mass transportation broadcasts, I believed that it can at least increase the range of the language use and bring Weitouhua into our daily life step by step.

References

Auer, Hinskens, F., & Kerswill, P. (2005). Dialect change : convergence and divergence in European languages. Cambridge University Press.

Austin, & Sallabank, J. (2011). The Cambridge handbook of endangered languages. Cambridge University Press.

Chen, B.A., (2010) Da Tao Gang [Immigrate to Hong Kong]. Hong Kong Open Page Publishing Company Limited.

Moseley, C. (2010). Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. UNESCO Publishing.

Population Aged 5 and Over by Usual Language, 2001, 2006 and 2011 (A107) (2012). Retrieved December 2, 2014 from The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, 2011 Population Census Office, Census and Statistics Department Web site: http://www.census2011.gov.hk/en/main-table/A107.html

Stuart-Smith, J., Pryce, G., Timmins, C., & Gunter, B. (2013). Television can also be a factor in language change: Evidence from an urban dialect. Language, 89(3), 501-536.