Large protests over attempt to 'push aside' Cantonese

Photos: China Droll

There have been reports that thousands of people in the Cantonese-speaking southern Chinese city of Guangzhou staged a peaceful protest when the government announced it would switch most local television programming to Mandarin, the official national language of China.

Beijing has promoted Mandarin for decades to unite a nation with thousands of dialects and numerous minority languages.

Cantonese is still widely spoken in the booming southern province of Guangdong, thanks in part to the spillover influence of Hong Kong's wildly successful and racy vernacular pop culture, but some people fear for its future.

Chinese newspapers and Internet sites have reported on companies where employees are fined for speaking Cantonese at work, prompting anger.

"I support Cantonese. If we don't speak it, we are shaming our ancestors," wrote "Bright Star" on the popular Chinese internet portal Sina.com.

I have to say, even as a rubbish Canto speaker living in England, I feel quite proud that people are willing to stand up for our language like this.

Language preservation is a contentious issue; The Communist party and its supporters see language adoption as an important tool in promoting homogeneity and unity in China. But for those whose native dialect is not Mandarin, language is a vital part of their identity and heritage.

How can China protect and - dare I say - promote local diversity in language without conflicting with its goal of homogeneity? Is that even possible?

Source: Reuters via SkyscraperCity

Related: The Changing Sound of Chinatown

The Changing Sound of Chinatown

I read an interesting report in the New York Times that could equally apply to the UK Chinese community.

Most bbcs are descended from a generation that migrated from Hong Kong in the 1960s and 70s, and many Chinatowns around the world were founded by migrants from Cantonese-speaking regions of South China as well as Hong Kong. Cantonese can therefore be regarded as the main language of the world's dispersed Chinese population.

But all that could be about to change as Chinese migration is now predominantly made up of Mandarin speakers and they naturally gravitate towards existing Chinese community hubs rather than generating their own. So bit by bit, Chinatowns around the world are becoming Mandarin-ized. This effect is already well under way in London's Chinatown as I'm sure many readers will have noticed.

For those of us who are Cantonese Chinese, there is a real and strange prospect of going to Chinatown one day and not understanding what half the Chinese people there are saying! Weird, huh?

Immigration reform in 1965 opened the door to a huge influx of Cantonese speakers from Hong Kong, and Cantonese became the dominant tongue. But since the 1990s, the vast majority of new Chinese immigrants have come from mainland China, especially Fujian Province, and tend to speak Mandarin along with their regional dialects.

“I can’t even order food on East Broadway,” said Jan Lee, 44, a furniture designer who has lived all his life in Chinatown and speaks Cantonese. “They don’t speak English; I don’t speak Mandarin. I’m just as lost as everyone else.”

Story: New York Times

Related: Memories fading, places changing

Cantonese - The Movie continues apace

The inventiveness in these little movies, as well as the effort that goes into them never ceases to amaze. If Ah-Mok and friends aren't nominated for an Oscar, it will be an outrage (Best Foreign Moustache, maybe?)!



The last part of this vid is funny. I think if you asked that question in real life, a lot of Hong Kongers would give you a non-verbal response! ;)

Remember, all the installments of this epic production can be viewed on Cecilie Gamst Berg's blog Chinadroll

Related: 'Cantonese - The Movie' (cont'd)
Related: Learning Canto with Ah-Mok and ah-Wai

'Cantonese - The Movie' (cont'd)

These little learn Cantonese movies by Cecilie Gamst Berg (aka Chinadroll) are just too good not to post.

This time she deals with Cantonese noun qualifiers, using the classic sentence "that brother is taller than that brother" to illustrate a point (say it in Canto to see what she means).



Catch up with all the episodes of 'Cantonese The Movie' at Cecilie's blog

Related: Learning Canto with Ah-Mok and ah-Wai

Learning Canto with ah-Mok and ah-Wai

Possibly the only learn Cantonese videos to feature false moustaches. Funny stuff.

Will we ever be able to use the word 'hilarious' again?

Yes, it's Thai-born Kathreya on the UK reality show Big Brother...

Chinglish

'Chinglish' used to be a phrase used (occasionally by bbcs) to describe the haphazard and sometimes clumsy mixing up of Chinese and English in conversation.

Recently the phrase has been used more to refer to funny signs and notices that include comically bad translations of Chinese into English and, just in time for Christmas, it's even become a book title.

I had a flick through the book while I was Christmas shopping and some of the examples are quite funny but they do become tiresome after a while. The whole book would probably only give someone about 20mins of amusement.

Seeing as there is probably an inexhaustible supply of these funny signs, the 'Chinglish' phenomenon looks set to run for a while before everyone gets bored of it. Here's my tip of the day: You can save yourself the cost of the book simply by looking up Chinglish on Google Images. ;)

The false story about the Chinese 'Coca Cola' tattoo

Here in the UK, a story was reported in The Sun newspaper about a Watford man, Vince Mattingley, who asked staff in a Chinese restaurant to translate his name into Chinese and got the words tattooed on his chest.

It was not until 26 years later that he learned, whilst on a trip to Thailand, that the characters etched on his skin were not his name but in fact spelled 'Coca Cola'.

Source: The Sun

The report quoted his obvious annoyance about this and the fact that he intends to cover up the tattoo with a new one - in Japanese this time.

Now, Mr. Mattingley comes out of the story looking a bit of a fool but the story also paints a negative picture of the Chinese restaurant staff who advised him. Clearly, they must have been quite malicious and inconsiderate to deceive Mr. Mattingley in this way.

The only problem is... the tattoo does NOT say Coca Cola in Chinese.

This is one of those quirky, funny, viral stories that gets emailed and forwarded around and sure enough, it soon went all around the world but the story is false.

What the tattoo spells is a close but not perfect phonetic translation of the man's name - Vincent. The characters are actually the same as those used by the Chinese drug and cosmetics chain 'Watsons' which has branches throughout Hong Kong.

This is a close up of Vince Mattingley's tattoo:


This is a charity appeal ad by the Watsons chain in which you can see the same two characters:


This is an ad for Coca Cola in Shanghai where you can clearly see that the logo is totally different:

Pic: China Daily

There is no direct Chinese translation for 'Vincent' so the Chinese restaurant staff must have come up with the best character combination they could that both sounded like his name and made sense as a phrase (that wasn't obscene or odd-sounding etc.).

So far from being a cruel trick played by sneaky Chinese people, the tattoo on Mr. Mattingley's chest is probably the best match possible to his name in Chinese.

It's not clear why someone in Thailand told Mr. Mattingley that his tattoo said 'Coca Cola'. It might have been a simple wind-up, or they may have been referring to the Watson's brand of water and cold drinks. In any case, that's not what the tattoo says.

A urban myth involving Chinese people that turns out to be false? Who would have thought it?

Related: Stupid rumours about Chinese restaurants. Will they never end?

2 Youtube language lessons

A couple of slightly different approaches to teaching Chinese via the medium of Youtube...

I stumbled across this Youtuber today and thought the vids might be of interest to any fellow Chinese school drop-outs out there ;) ashunbuggie's lessons are at 'basic' level at the moment but maybe later on they will become more advanced:



And here's a slightly, um, different approach. You may not learn very much but it was funny anyway :)

Has anyone seen this book on Canto slang?

If there is anything that marks us out bbcs as not native Hong Kongers (besides our haircuts, facial expressions, laughing at British sitcoms and other 'gwai sing'), it's not knowing or using Cantonese slang words.

And Hong Kongers are so damn good at slang, too. The phrases are inventive, clever and often hilarious. And, of course, they can also be a little intimidating if you don't understand any of them.

A short primer on Canto slang can be found here (Warning: There's some rude stuff in the 'Swearing' section!) but this is just the tip of the (damn) iceberg.

If you want to really, learn some cocky, Hong Kong street talk, you might want to try and track down a copy of A Dictionary of Cantonese Slang.



As one reviewer puts it:

I must inform everyone that Cantonese has the most vivid descriptions and usages of slang of the entire Chinese language (yet, being the least awful sounding). How do I know, because I was born in that wonderful city of Hong Kong! It's my native tongue, so trust me, we know how to slang in style.

Amazon only seems to have used copies available at the time of writing, so I'm going to have to keep on searching...

Source.

Cantonese speaker required for voice-over work

"I have an ad-hoc project that require a professional Cantonese male voice over to do a recording. It's product instruction for a lifestyle brand. The tone I need is not news reader type but more lifestyle."

http://www.dimsum.co.uk/forum//viewtopic.php?p=4174

Avril Lavigne sings Mandarin

Caught this on another blog 8asians.com.

Avril Lavigne's new single 'Girlfriend' will be released in several different languages (the chorus only, the verses are in English): Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German and most intriguingly, Mandarin and Japanese.

No doubt it's a commercial move but kudos to Avril for actually learning to sing in Mando:

Podcast: 'Two Voices'

Here's a fun podcast from Yang-May Ooi, a British Malaysian author whose blog 'FusionView' is linked in the side bar.

She talks about something you may have thought about before - British Chinese (or British Malaysian in her case) accents, how they can affect your interaction with others and how hers has changed over time.

I always thought I had a fairly neutral, nondescript accent but after listening to other b.b.c's speak, I'm starting to think there is a subtle, distinctive b.b.c accent - a kind of hybrid of the local, English accent 'pulled' in a certain direction by knowing and speaking Chinese (Cantonese in my case).

Maybe it's something to do with the fact that the two languages are so phonetically different, that speaking one subtley affects the way you speak another?

You can also catch the rest on Yang-May's podcasts here.