Ong>> I find it hard to befriend with english educated people in malaysia , we chinese
Ong >> educated people find that their always think us as some kind of rude people
This response of Ong's from some time back prompted me - at the time - to think back to my childhood and early adulthood in the Malaysia and Singapore of the mid to late 20th century. I think there was quite a lot of mutual suspicion and antagonism between Chinese-educated and English-educated Chinese at the time. [Perhaps this has decreased since the 1990's, as the differences between the two groups have grown less.]
Specifically, I was reminded of two little incidents, on the face of it unrelated to one another, and years apart. One is a "Mandarin-English" incident, and happened when I was about ten years old, in Penang, in the late 60's - early 70's. The other is a "Hokkien-English" incident, and happened many years later. I was then in my mid- to late-twenties, and was on a holiday in Singapore, sometime in the mid 80's. The theme that the two stories share in common is that of being at the receiving end of negative feelings because of being English-educated, and because people think that they will not be understood when speaking Chinese (in the first story, Mandarin, and in the second story, Hokkien).
Story #1 - 1960/70's
===============
My parents were at the time in their late 30's early 40's. I was about 10-11, my two younger brothers about 4 and 5. We lived in Penang in those days. One weekend we were out relaxing at the Penang Botanical Gardens, walking around. My two brothers would have run around and played on the grass, I had probably been wading in the stream which flows through the Gardens - something which I really enjoyed doing whenever we were there.
Like most English-educated middle-class Chinese families of the time, we spoke to one another in English, both at home, and in public. This was something which was totally natural to us, of course. We could all speak some Hokkien, but I, my brothers, and my father - like most Penang Babas - couldn't understand (let alone speak) any Mandarin. However, my mother, though herself English-educated, was from a Chinese-educated Chinese immigrant family, so she most certainly could.
In any case, on that particular day, at that particular spot, there was a group of four Chinese-school schoolboys, in their mid teens*. They had been near us, and must have heard us speaking English. As they walked past us, one of them, in a flash of wit, remarked laughing to his friends (in Mandarin): "吃洋饭, 放洋屁!" His friends must have laughed too, but you can imagine how furious my mother was when she heard the remark. Perhaps you can also imagine how shocked the boys were when my mother turned around and blasted them verbally for their cheekiness! I can to this day remember the stunned look on their faces, and how speechless they were, as they were forced to listen to a loud and angry stream of scolding in Mandarin from my mother, ending with a warning to them "never to assume that Chinese can't understand Chinese!" [This was of course explained to me immediately after the incident, as I wouldn't have understood a word of it while it was happening.]
Of course, the boys' cultural expectations were in fact quite justified, particularly in Penang at that time. With most families like my own, they would have been able to say something funny and rude like that without any danger of being understood. (For example, *all* my paternal uncles and aunts had married Babas.) It was just unfortunate for those schoolboys that my mother had that slightly different background!
In any case, it's always rather amusing, when people make a remark in a language, expecting not to be understood, and it turns out that they are!
*: It was actually quite a revelation to check this story with my parents, when I sat down to write it up this weekend. In my memory the boys were in their late teens, perhaps 18 or 19, and seemed very "grown up", but my parents both confirmed one another's recollection that they were only 14 or 15. I guess to a 10-year-old, 14 or 15 seems quite grown up!
-----
Story #2 - 1980's
============
I was in my mid- (possibly late-) 20's, and was on holiday by myself in Singapore. Some time before that, I had bought myself a walkman, of one of the major brands. I'd also bought a battery-pack attachment, so that I could play the thing for longer without it running out of charge. Unfortunately, the attachment had got broken, and I needed to replace it.
I was living in Darwin at the time - a small city in the (then) remote Tropical North of Australia - and the shops in Darwin most certainly did not stock such a part. I hence took the opportunity of being on holiday in Singapore to go to the head office of this company, to try and buy a replacement.
So, there I was, in the head office, in the reception area, with two young Chinese women on duty. For some reason, I had shown them my passport or some other official document, so they were well aware of my surname and personal name. If it was a passport, it would have been an Australian passport. Now, in my opinion, there were two things in my name which should have indicated to them that I might have understood Hokkien. 1) My surname is Lee, spelled in the "English" way (i.e. rather than Li). This might have told them that I was from S.E. Asia rather than China. 2) My personal name is Hock Sim. [I should point out that this "Sim" is 森 rather than 心, so NOT a girl's name (which was something I was teased a lot about in primary school!)]. To me - with the word *"Hock"* of "Hokkien" in it even - this is a very Hokkien-sounding name. This might have warned them that I might be a Hokkien speaker.
In any case, they apparently didn't pick up on either of these "clues". When I explained (in English) the reason for my being there, the first thing they asked was: "What's the model number of your walkman?" I didn't have the walkman with me at the time, and I had to admit that I had no idea of its model number. In my innocence, I had assumed that the battery-pack attachment would be the same for all walkmans produced by that company. In fact, the opposite turned out to be the case: every single model had its own unique battery-pack, so, unless one knew one's model, one couldn't buy the appropriate pack. [I later learned that this company (irritatingly) does this consistently, for all its products: unique earphone jacks, unique re-chargers, etc, presumably to "force" people to buy more of their accessories.]
One of the women then hit upon the idea of allowing me to look through the catalogue, to see if I could recognize my particular model of walkman. She picked up the catalogue from the bookshelf, and walked over to hand it to me. However, her colleague apparently thought I was a very stupid customer, and didn't deserve to be helped particularly. She said in Hokkien to the colleague with the catalogue: "m thang ka i tau khuann, hoo i ka-ki khuann; a-ni _gong_ e lang, i ka-ki e model toh m cai!" ** (= "don't help him find it, let him look by himself; he's such a _stupid_ person, he doesn't even know his own model!").
Now, I'm afraid this story differs from the first story in that it doesn't have a similar funny punch line at the end. At this point, I could have turned around and told the woman off, as my mother had done to the boys - perhaps abusing her for being so unhelpful AND rude, or perhaps just smiling and embarrassing her by telling her not to assume that other people don't speak Hokkien. But, I'm quite a mild person, who avoids confrontation, so I just smiled quietly to myself, amused at her rudeness (and the fact that I had known about it), and continued looking through the catalogue. [I didn't in fact manage to identify my walkman with 100% certainty, so I didn't end up buying the battery-pack there.]
**: Actually, when I read this, the style (except for the "a-ni") sounds very much like Penang Hokkien to me (particularly the use of the borrowed English word "model"). I don't recall her exact words, but what she said was of course the same, but then in "Singaporean Hokkien".
-----
Well, those were the two stories! In fact, the second one might not have been because they were Chinese-educated and didn't like English-educated people. Perhaps it was more that they thought I was not Malaysian/Singaporean (e.g. perhaps an Australian of Japanese or Vietnamese extraction), and hence would not have understood Hokkien. So perhaps it's not strictly correct to group both these stories together, under the theme of "Antagonism between the Chinese-educated and the English-educated in Malaysia".
In any case, both are reasonably amusing stories, and both involve in some sense "Chinese language speakers vs. English language speakers", so I'll leave them grouped together here.
Oh, BTW, Ong: if - by some amazingly weird co-incidence - you were one of the Chinese schoolboys in Story #1, I would like to say that my mother is really a very nice, warm-hearted person, and once she had calmed down, she could see the humour of the incident too!
Cheers,
Sim.
Antagonism between Chinese- and English-educated Chinese
Very interesting anecdotes, Sim. For the second one, I thought up of an interesting thing. After you were done you could have said to the lady who was being helpful Kum Sia and make sure the other heard it!
By the way what does "吃洋饭, 放洋屁" mean?
What I find is that outside of main areas such as FuJian, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore you can bet that if you speak Hokkien, you can be pretty sure that no unwanted listeners will understand it making it a pretty handy language to know. On the other hand, more well known Chinese languages such as Mandarin and Cantonese are spoken by most overseas Chinese so they're not as good if you want to keep a conversation among yourselves without people listining in. Why are there more Cantonese than Hokkien overseas???
I know this topic is Chinese speaking Chinese clashing with English speaking Chinese but do you know of any conflicts of Mandarin speaking Chinese with Hokkien( or any other non-Mandarin Chinese language) speaking Chinese?
Why is it I can understand Hokkien spoken by Malaysian and Singaporeans whereas Hokkien spoken by Taiwanese (I just watch some taiwanese shows) is almost impossible to understand? Do Malaysians and Singaporeans have a particular way of speaking Hokkien (besides borrowed words)?
What are some clues you could use to know what Chinese languages a person speaks?
By the way what does "吃洋饭, 放洋屁" mean?
What I find is that outside of main areas such as FuJian, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore you can bet that if you speak Hokkien, you can be pretty sure that no unwanted listeners will understand it making it a pretty handy language to know. On the other hand, more well known Chinese languages such as Mandarin and Cantonese are spoken by most overseas Chinese so they're not as good if you want to keep a conversation among yourselves without people listining in. Why are there more Cantonese than Hokkien overseas???
I know this topic is Chinese speaking Chinese clashing with English speaking Chinese but do you know of any conflicts of Mandarin speaking Chinese with Hokkien( or any other non-Mandarin Chinese language) speaking Chinese?
Why is it I can understand Hokkien spoken by Malaysian and Singaporeans whereas Hokkien spoken by Taiwanese (I just watch some taiwanese shows) is almost impossible to understand? Do Malaysians and Singaporeans have a particular way of speaking Hokkien (besides borrowed words)?
What are some clues you could use to know what Chinese languages a person speaks?
>> By the way what does "吃洋饭, 放洋屁" mean?
Literally "eat foreign rice (=food), fart foreign gas"! In (Malaysian/Singaporean) Hokkien, that would have been "ciah8 ang5-moo5 png7, pang3 ang5-moo5 phui7". The implication is that my family were 'lackeys' to the Westerners, eating their food (=enjoying the benefits of their presence by offering our services to them); and because we ate their food, we farted their gas (the 'gas' being the English language). It's quite brutally mean, when one analyses it explicitly, but also, in its own way, bitingly funny. Perhaps the main source of the humour is how very compactly expressed the thought is.
>> outside of main areas such as FuJian, Taiwan, Malaysia and
>> Singapore you can bet that if you speak Hokkien, you can
>> be pretty sure that no unwanted listeners will understand
Absolutely correct. Growing up in Australia, it was a "secret language" for our family in public.
I'm told though that this is less true nowadays. I think a couple of years back on this Forum, someone posted that some Canadian city (as one of the examples) now had LOTS of speakers from Fujian - recent migrants, as a result of the opening up and increasing prosperity and entrepreneurship of the PRC.
In any case, I think it's always a risk, anywhere in the world, to assume that another Chinese can't speak Hokkien (as illustrated by my second story).
>> any conflicts of Mandarin speaking Chinese with Hokkien?
None that I know of on a "structural" level. Of course, I suppose there are always family anecdotes of individual conflicts of this sort (not that I can think of any at the moment).
>> What are some clues you could use to know what Chinese languages a person speaks?
I don't have very many. For Hockchews: 1) The presence of "d-" in a person's name. For example, the surname "Ding", and personal names beginning with "D-". 2) The surname "Ling". 3) Knowing that someone comes from Sitiawan! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitiawan, in Perak, Malaysia (see the short passage there on 'Fuzhou Heritage'). For north Mandarin speakers: the retroflex consonants zh-, ch-, sh- distinguished from z-, c-, s-. For Beijingers: the enclitic/suffix -er (儿).
Because I grew up in Penang, where all people with the surname 黄 pronounced it "uinn5" and spelled it (following the English convention) "Ooi", I used to use the "clue" that someone with the surname WRITTEN (in English) "Ng" would be Cantonese (I think that's 吴). Nowadays, with more experience in Hokkien, and knowing that 黄 is pronounced "ng5" in Amoy Hokkien anyway, I don't think this clue is valid. I suppose Hokkien 黄's in the south of the Malay peninsular / Singapore might very well have their surname spelled "Ng".
>> Why is it I can understand Hokkien spoken by Malaysian and Singaporeans
>> whereas Hokkien spoken by Taiwanese ... is almost impossible to understand?
I have exactly the same experience (same applies to the one CCTV broadcast in Hokkien which I saw, i.e. presumably modern Amoy Hokkien). Here's my explanation: 1) We have such a limited vocabulary anyway (e.g. no science, politics, or economics; nothing from tertiary education; no terms from "high culture"). 2) Even within this limited vocabulary, a significant percentage consists of borrowed Malay and English words, and many of these Malay and English words are crucial grammatical words and basic concepts*. This makes our working vocabulary of "pure" Hokkien words even smaller than we suspect. 3) Even within our "pure" Hokkien vocabulary, the words we use may be different from the ones used in Taiwan. This makes, in effect, the overlap between the words we use and those which Taiwanese speakers use INCREDIBLY small. We can then add 4) The vowels and tones are (slightly) different between our variants and the ones used in Taiwan, so that we even have (perhaps only momentary) difficulty* recognising those (few) words we DO have in common.
Viewed in this light, it would be a miracle if we understood any continuous passages of spoken Taiwanese at all, which of course, matches our experience!
[*: I seem to remember you saying that you find it difficult to avoid the English phrase "and then" when speaking Hokkien. The two equivalents for me are "al3-though2" (= English "although"), and "ba3-lu2" (= English "just, recently", from Malay "baharu" (= "new")), as in "i ba3-lu1-lai5" (= "he's _just_ arrived"). I am absolutely tongue-tied when speaking to Taiwanese people in Hokkien because I can hardly function without these two words, and I know they will not be understood if I use them. Also, although I'm vaguely aware of "tan si" for "but", I don't really know it 'actively', and always say "ta3-pi1", from Malay "tetapi" (= English ""but). This relates to point #4 above. If a Taiwanese says "tan si", then it takes me like half a second to work out that they said "but" - it's just not 'naturally' the word "but" to me.]
>> Why are there more Cantonese than Hokkien overseas?
I'm not sure there are. There certainly SEEM to be more, but for that I offer the following tentative explanation (asterisks refer so further 'explanations' at the end, in order not to interrupt the flow of the main argument).
1) The cities of Amoy and Canton/Hong Kong were ports, which is why Hokkien and Cantonese speakers (not just from these cities, but from their surrounding province(s)) flocked to them to migrate overseas.
This is why Hokkien and Cantonese speakers are the main groups of overseas Chinese (before the current economic boom of China)**.
2) In the whole of the 19th, and the early 20th century, the cities of Canton and Hong Kong were already (much?) bigger than Amoy. This meant that they had more, and larger, ships coming from and going to places which were further away from China.
This is why Cantonese speakers ended up in San Francisco, Toronto, London, Sydney etc (as well as S.E. Asia), whereas Hokkien speakers ended up (primarily) only in S.E. Asia.
3) There is a long tradition of written Cantonese. This was strengthened by the economic might and relative independence of Hong Kong from the Chinese mainland for most of the 20th century, so that newspapers and other written materials written in "formal colloquial (i.e. bai2-hua4) Cantonese" - with its own dialect (approx. "non-Han") characters quite well established - could be produced and read by the overseas Cantonese-speaking population (with those materials produced both locally, where they were living in their new countries, and shipped out from China itself). This was in contrast to Hokkien written in characters, which was - for the non-Han part of the vocabulary - non-standardized (and not familiar to many native Hokkien speakers).
This meant that the overseas Cantonese-speaking communities could much more easily preserve their language, compared to their counterparts in the overseas Hokkien-speaking communities***.
So, to sum up, even if the total number of the descendents of Cantonese migrants WERE smaller than their Hokkien equivalents, their spread over a greater area (and also into areas which, for most of the 20th century, had more "world attention", i.e. America, Australia, England vs. S.E. Asia), and their better preservation of their language, could easily make it SEEM that there are many more overseas Cantonese speakers than Hokkien speakers. At any rate, that's my own private theory.
I seem to remember a Wikipedia article which actually gave the break-up of overseas Chinese by dialect group, but I can't find it any more. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Chinese does give an overview, but unfortunately no hard figures broken up by dialect group.
--------------------------
**: The other smallish groups which did migrate were Teochews, Hakkas, Hainanese, Hockchews, etc, but point #1 applies to them too: they were all from the south-east of China, near the coast, and were drawn to these Chinese "treaty ports". [They - as Overseas Chinese - are much smaller groups than the Cantonese and Hokkien speakers simply because their population base is smaller to start with.] The salient fact is that there were lots of equally poor and desperate Chinese in north, central (and west?) China who didn't make it overseas, presumably because they weren't near the ports which had been opened up to the West and S.E. Asia.
***: Indeed we hear the frequent complaint all over Malaysia, in Taipei, and in Singapore, that more and more people from a Hokkien-speaking background are switching to Mandarin (or in the case of (Malaysia/)Singapore, to English), with perhaps the most advanced in this (sad) process Singapore, Taipei next, and then Malaysia. For that matter, I have cousins born (as far back as!) in the 1960's, with BOTH parents native Hokkien speakers (albeit English-educated), growing up in Singapore, who not only don't SPEAK any Hokkien, they don't even UNDERSTAND it. I know of no children from Cantonese-speaking families born before (as late as) 2000, for which this is the case!
Literally "eat foreign rice (=food), fart foreign gas"! In (Malaysian/Singaporean) Hokkien, that would have been "ciah8 ang5-moo5 png7, pang3 ang5-moo5 phui7". The implication is that my family were 'lackeys' to the Westerners, eating their food (=enjoying the benefits of their presence by offering our services to them); and because we ate their food, we farted their gas (the 'gas' being the English language). It's quite brutally mean, when one analyses it explicitly, but also, in its own way, bitingly funny. Perhaps the main source of the humour is how very compactly expressed the thought is.
>> outside of main areas such as FuJian, Taiwan, Malaysia and
>> Singapore you can bet that if you speak Hokkien, you can
>> be pretty sure that no unwanted listeners will understand
Absolutely correct. Growing up in Australia, it was a "secret language" for our family in public.
I'm told though that this is less true nowadays. I think a couple of years back on this Forum, someone posted that some Canadian city (as one of the examples) now had LOTS of speakers from Fujian - recent migrants, as a result of the opening up and increasing prosperity and entrepreneurship of the PRC.
In any case, I think it's always a risk, anywhere in the world, to assume that another Chinese can't speak Hokkien (as illustrated by my second story).
>> any conflicts of Mandarin speaking Chinese with Hokkien?
None that I know of on a "structural" level. Of course, I suppose there are always family anecdotes of individual conflicts of this sort (not that I can think of any at the moment).
>> What are some clues you could use to know what Chinese languages a person speaks?
I don't have very many. For Hockchews: 1) The presence of "d-" in a person's name. For example, the surname "Ding", and personal names beginning with "D-". 2) The surname "Ling". 3) Knowing that someone comes from Sitiawan! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitiawan, in Perak, Malaysia (see the short passage there on 'Fuzhou Heritage'). For north Mandarin speakers: the retroflex consonants zh-, ch-, sh- distinguished from z-, c-, s-. For Beijingers: the enclitic/suffix -er (儿).
Because I grew up in Penang, where all people with the surname 黄 pronounced it "uinn5" and spelled it (following the English convention) "Ooi", I used to use the "clue" that someone with the surname WRITTEN (in English) "Ng" would be Cantonese (I think that's 吴). Nowadays, with more experience in Hokkien, and knowing that 黄 is pronounced "ng5" in Amoy Hokkien anyway, I don't think this clue is valid. I suppose Hokkien 黄's in the south of the Malay peninsular / Singapore might very well have their surname spelled "Ng".
>> Why is it I can understand Hokkien spoken by Malaysian and Singaporeans
>> whereas Hokkien spoken by Taiwanese ... is almost impossible to understand?
I have exactly the same experience (same applies to the one CCTV broadcast in Hokkien which I saw, i.e. presumably modern Amoy Hokkien). Here's my explanation: 1) We have such a limited vocabulary anyway (e.g. no science, politics, or economics; nothing from tertiary education; no terms from "high culture"). 2) Even within this limited vocabulary, a significant percentage consists of borrowed Malay and English words, and many of these Malay and English words are crucial grammatical words and basic concepts*. This makes our working vocabulary of "pure" Hokkien words even smaller than we suspect. 3) Even within our "pure" Hokkien vocabulary, the words we use may be different from the ones used in Taiwan. This makes, in effect, the overlap between the words we use and those which Taiwanese speakers use INCREDIBLY small. We can then add 4) The vowels and tones are (slightly) different between our variants and the ones used in Taiwan, so that we even have (perhaps only momentary) difficulty* recognising those (few) words we DO have in common.
Viewed in this light, it would be a miracle if we understood any continuous passages of spoken Taiwanese at all, which of course, matches our experience!
[*: I seem to remember you saying that you find it difficult to avoid the English phrase "and then" when speaking Hokkien. The two equivalents for me are "al3-though2" (= English "although"), and "ba3-lu2" (= English "just, recently", from Malay "baharu" (= "new")), as in "i ba3-lu1-lai5" (= "he's _just_ arrived"). I am absolutely tongue-tied when speaking to Taiwanese people in Hokkien because I can hardly function without these two words, and I know they will not be understood if I use them. Also, although I'm vaguely aware of "tan si" for "but", I don't really know it 'actively', and always say "ta3-pi1", from Malay "tetapi" (= English ""but). This relates to point #4 above. If a Taiwanese says "tan si", then it takes me like half a second to work out that they said "but" - it's just not 'naturally' the word "but" to me.]
>> Why are there more Cantonese than Hokkien overseas?
I'm not sure there are. There certainly SEEM to be more, but for that I offer the following tentative explanation (asterisks refer so further 'explanations' at the end, in order not to interrupt the flow of the main argument).
1) The cities of Amoy and Canton/Hong Kong were ports, which is why Hokkien and Cantonese speakers (not just from these cities, but from their surrounding province(s)) flocked to them to migrate overseas.
This is why Hokkien and Cantonese speakers are the main groups of overseas Chinese (before the current economic boom of China)**.
2) In the whole of the 19th, and the early 20th century, the cities of Canton and Hong Kong were already (much?) bigger than Amoy. This meant that they had more, and larger, ships coming from and going to places which were further away from China.
This is why Cantonese speakers ended up in San Francisco, Toronto, London, Sydney etc (as well as S.E. Asia), whereas Hokkien speakers ended up (primarily) only in S.E. Asia.
3) There is a long tradition of written Cantonese. This was strengthened by the economic might and relative independence of Hong Kong from the Chinese mainland for most of the 20th century, so that newspapers and other written materials written in "formal colloquial (i.e. bai2-hua4) Cantonese" - with its own dialect (approx. "non-Han") characters quite well established - could be produced and read by the overseas Cantonese-speaking population (with those materials produced both locally, where they were living in their new countries, and shipped out from China itself). This was in contrast to Hokkien written in characters, which was - for the non-Han part of the vocabulary - non-standardized (and not familiar to many native Hokkien speakers).
This meant that the overseas Cantonese-speaking communities could much more easily preserve their language, compared to their counterparts in the overseas Hokkien-speaking communities***.
So, to sum up, even if the total number of the descendents of Cantonese migrants WERE smaller than their Hokkien equivalents, their spread over a greater area (and also into areas which, for most of the 20th century, had more "world attention", i.e. America, Australia, England vs. S.E. Asia), and their better preservation of their language, could easily make it SEEM that there are many more overseas Cantonese speakers than Hokkien speakers. At any rate, that's my own private theory.
I seem to remember a Wikipedia article which actually gave the break-up of overseas Chinese by dialect group, but I can't find it any more. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Chinese does give an overview, but unfortunately no hard figures broken up by dialect group.
--------------------------
**: The other smallish groups which did migrate were Teochews, Hakkas, Hainanese, Hockchews, etc, but point #1 applies to them too: they were all from the south-east of China, near the coast, and were drawn to these Chinese "treaty ports". [They - as Overseas Chinese - are much smaller groups than the Cantonese and Hokkien speakers simply because their population base is smaller to start with.] The salient fact is that there were lots of equally poor and desperate Chinese in north, central (and west?) China who didn't make it overseas, presumably because they weren't near the ports which had been opened up to the West and S.E. Asia.
***: Indeed we hear the frequent complaint all over Malaysia, in Taipei, and in Singapore, that more and more people from a Hokkien-speaking background are switching to Mandarin (or in the case of (Malaysia/)Singapore, to English), with perhaps the most advanced in this (sad) process Singapore, Taipei next, and then Malaysia. For that matter, I have cousins born (as far back as!) in the 1960's, with BOTH parents native Hokkien speakers (albeit English-educated), growing up in Singapore, who not only don't SPEAK any Hokkien, they don't even UNDERSTAND it. I know of no children from Cantonese-speaking families born before (as late as) 2000, for which this is the case!
-
Andrew
It is strange, my parents speak to to my grandparents in Hokkien with some English, to each other in English with some Hokkien, and to us in English. My aunt and uncle in Singapore were pretty much the same. However, while we in Penang can at understand Hokkien, even if we never spoke it, my Singapore cousins can't even understand Hokkien, and to them it was a language that their parents could use as a 'secret language'.SimL wrote:***: Indeed we hear the frequent complaint all over Malaysia, in Taipei, and in Singapore, that more and more people from a Hokkien-speaking background are switching to Mandarin (or in the case of (Malaysia/)Singapore, to English), with perhaps the most advanced in this (sad) process Singapore, Taipei next, and then Malaysia. For that matter, I have cousins born (as far back as!) in the 1960's, with BOTH parents native Hokkien speakers (albeit English-educated), growing up in Singapore, who not only don't SPEAK any Hokkien, they don't even UNDERSTAND it. I know of no children from Cantonese-speaking families born before (as late as) 2000, for which this is the case!
When I first joined this forum, there were discussions regarding Hokkien people losing their own language. I felt furious about that, especially on political suppression of Hokkien [and other Chinese "dialects"] in certain countries. Nowadays for better or for worse, I have toned down quite a bit - although still dislike the "unfair treatment". If those Hokkiens choose to despise their own heritage, they are free to do so. It's quite "natural" in the development [including extinction] of languages, I guess. Of course I am not saying that all Hokkiens who are not well-versed in Hokkien despise their own heritage. I think most do not, but they face practical problems in preserving the language.
It's true that Cantonese people do better in preserving their language, even in Mainland China's media (Guangzhou TV channels). I think mainly it's due to Hong Kong's influence. Nevertheless, some Cantonese feel that the language starts to diminish due to Mandarin's influence. Btw there are few Cantonese in Indonesia compared to Hokkien or Hakka or Teochew, and the language is barely heard there. Some say that many Cantonese speakers in Malaysia actually are Hakka, is it true?
It's true that Cantonese people do better in preserving their language, even in Mainland China's media (Guangzhou TV channels). I think mainly it's due to Hong Kong's influence. Nevertheless, some Cantonese feel that the language starts to diminish due to Mandarin's influence. Btw there are few Cantonese in Indonesia compared to Hokkien or Hakka or Teochew, and the language is barely heard there. Some say that many Cantonese speakers in Malaysia actually are Hakka, is it true?
Sim, I think the wikipedia topic you were referring is this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_dialects
As for using borrowed words in Hokkien, it is in a way similar to how in Hong Kong they use loan words, for example, bus as "ba si".
In Wikipedia I read that Teochew is used in China for up to primary school, does anbody know to what extent Hokkien is used in China?
Also, have any of you Malaysian/Singaporean Hokkiens gone to China and spoken Hokkien to a Hokkien person there? And if so did you understand each other?
As for using borrowed words in Hokkien, it is in a way similar to how in Hong Kong they use loan words, for example, bus as "ba si".
In Wikipedia I read that Teochew is used in China for up to primary school, does anbody know to what extent Hokkien is used in China?
Also, have any of you Malaysian/Singaporean Hokkiens gone to China and spoken Hokkien to a Hokkien person there? And if so did you understand each other?
I was so proud of the explanation I'd thought up for the state of affairs which we observe for the overseas Hokkiens and Cantonese, but I think I've found a flaw in it. Or at least, that it's only a partial explanation.
The flaw is this: Shanghai must have easily been a much bigger port than Canton, Hong Kong or Amoy (or if not much larger, at least as large as the first two), with even more foreign influences and contacts. Yet, Shanghainese/Wu speakers were practically unknown outside of China for the whole of the 20th century.
Perhaps other factors played a role in this, but it does weaken my explanation considerably, I fear.
The flaw is this: Shanghai must have easily been a much bigger port than Canton, Hong Kong or Amoy (or if not much larger, at least as large as the first two), with even more foreign influences and contacts. Yet, Shanghainese/Wu speakers were practically unknown outside of China for the whole of the 20th century.
Perhaps other factors played a role in this, but it does weaken my explanation considerably, I fear.
Yes, I think this perfectly illustrates the 3 main stages in the decline of a language.Andrew wrote:It is strange, my parents speak to my grandparents in Hokkien with some English, to each other in English with some Hokkien, and to us in English. ...
The same more of less applied to my family, with the qualification that as long as my (maternal) grandparents were alive, I was able to and needed to keep up some level of Hokkien, because they couldn't speak English.
In that sense I was extremely fortunate to have had maternal grandparents who didn't speak English. My parents told me that when I was born (I was the eldest of my parents' children), the topic of what language to bring me up in was considered, and they (my parents) actually wanted it to be just English, but realised that that would have cut me off from one set of grandparents. It was this realisation which made them consciously bring me up with primarily English, but with as much Hokkien as was necessary for me to communicate with these grandparents. Living in Penang, I was then able to build on this basic vocabulary, with a result that my Hokkien is *slightly* better than that required by a young child communicating with his/her grandparents.
I used to be so frustrated with the Singaporean "Speak Mandarin" policy. I saw it as "destroying" a whole Hokkien speaking city/country. On the other hand (I may have said this elsewhere on the Forum before), it did ensure that a whole lot of Chinese Singaporeans had access to the wider Mandarin-speaking world, which is (particularly now, with the rise of the PRC) of great importance, and which was something which would possibly have been much harder to achieve without such a determined effort. Furthermore, Andrew and I both appear to have Singaporean cousins who can't understand Hokkien, all (presumably) growing up at a time before the "Speak Mandarin" policy, so perhaps Hokkien was on the decline in Singapore even without the influence of government policy.
I don't know this from personal experience, but it sounds very plausible. I know of people of Hakka and Cantonese extraction in Penang, who don't speak any Hakka or Cantonese, but do speak fluent Hokkien, because it's the 'lingua franca' of Chinese in Penang. I can easily imagine the same thing happening to Chinese of non-Cantonese extraction living in the cities in the south of the Malay peninsular, where the lingua franca between Chinese is Cantonese.Niuc wrote:Some say that many Cantonese speakers in Malaysia actually are Hakka, is it true?
Thanks for this very interesting link. No, that wasn't the one I was thinking about, because, up to the time you posted it, I didn't know of its existence. The figures are good to know, but unfortunately don't distinguish between mainland Chinese and overseas Chinese, which is what we would need to know to answer your original question (which is something I have also wondered about).Jilang wrote:Sim, I think the wikipedia topic you were referring is this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_dialects
Sim, I enjoyed reading your poignantly written account of your two personal experiences. You hit it on the nail when your depicted the antagonism arising from misunderstanding and people of different backgrounds.
Personally, when I first came upon this forum last year, I thought..."Wow, what a great site." Honestly, I have picked up numerous useful resources and learned a lot from this forum. I even made some postings under the handle "Itaq." Shortly afterwards, however, I got turned off by the negativism expressed in the postings by some of the forum members and withdrew from contributing. From time to time, I still access the site to check up on new postings as a passive "onlooker" to avoid getting involved in the negativism, e.g. being lashed out for inadvertently asking a previously posted question, posing an "ignorant" question, etc. Besides speaking to my parents occasionally on the phone and listening to online radio stations' broadcast in Minnan from China and Taiwan, I don't have any contacts with Hokkien speakers now, so accessing this forum is still a nice way to touch base with Hokkien....a language which I hold very dear.
I too lament the fact that the Minnan dialect (which I have always known and referred to as Hokkien) is not actively promoted in SE Asia as it is in Taiwan (well, since the 90s anyhow). I really felt that Hokkien has fallen on the wayside when I was in Singapore and Malaysia in the 90s. Singapore's campaign to suppress speaking in dialects appalls me, especially when the majority of the population are of Hokkien descent and so are the policy-makers of the country.
Beyond the Malaysian peninsula, a large number of overseas Hokkien live in other SE Asian countries. Overall, I think there are more Hokkien settlers in SE Asia than any other dialect groups. However, Cantonese has the strongest prevalence in the region, for the various reasons mentioned in previous postings....i.e. affinity for preserving Cantonese by Cantonese speakers, infiltration and influence of Hong Kong pop culture, systemized writing for vernacular characters, etc. When I was growing up, Cantonese was considered the lingua franca outside the home, the common deminator language among speakers of various dialects. This was also true when I was in the US.
Anyway, thanks again for your insightful stories, which prompted to deactivate my "onlooker" status.
Personally, when I first came upon this forum last year, I thought..."Wow, what a great site." Honestly, I have picked up numerous useful resources and learned a lot from this forum. I even made some postings under the handle "Itaq." Shortly afterwards, however, I got turned off by the negativism expressed in the postings by some of the forum members and withdrew from contributing. From time to time, I still access the site to check up on new postings as a passive "onlooker" to avoid getting involved in the negativism, e.g. being lashed out for inadvertently asking a previously posted question, posing an "ignorant" question, etc. Besides speaking to my parents occasionally on the phone and listening to online radio stations' broadcast in Minnan from China and Taiwan, I don't have any contacts with Hokkien speakers now, so accessing this forum is still a nice way to touch base with Hokkien....a language which I hold very dear.
I too lament the fact that the Minnan dialect (which I have always known and referred to as Hokkien) is not actively promoted in SE Asia as it is in Taiwan (well, since the 90s anyhow). I really felt that Hokkien has fallen on the wayside when I was in Singapore and Malaysia in the 90s. Singapore's campaign to suppress speaking in dialects appalls me, especially when the majority of the population are of Hokkien descent and so are the policy-makers of the country.
Beyond the Malaysian peninsula, a large number of overseas Hokkien live in other SE Asian countries. Overall, I think there are more Hokkien settlers in SE Asia than any other dialect groups. However, Cantonese has the strongest prevalence in the region, for the various reasons mentioned in previous postings....i.e. affinity for preserving Cantonese by Cantonese speakers, infiltration and influence of Hong Kong pop culture, systemized writing for vernacular characters, etc. When I was growing up, Cantonese was considered the lingua franca outside the home, the common deminator language among speakers of various dialects. This was also true when I was in the US.
Anyway, thanks again for your insightful stories, which prompted to deactivate my "onlooker" status.
Hi Gilpin,
Thank you very much for your kind words
. I enjoy "writing" very much - attempting to capture the atmosphere of things, and I also enjoy "history", in the sense of knowing about things which happened in the past which are often very different from how they are nowadays. Those two pieces I wrote enabled me to combine both things I enjoy.
As for the negativism on this Forum, I too have to admit that I have sometimes refrained from posting a question because I've been afraid of being blasted for it. Still, there hasn't been much negativity lately. I suppose in any Forum, there will be a mix of personalities and approaches to things, and part of it might also be due to cultural differences.
Even at the most negative times, I have stuck with the Forum because (for me) it's a unique chance to communicate in English with other people about Hokkien. I get the impression there is lots of stuff out there on the net about Hokkien (for example, Ong posts lots of fascinating-looking links), but almost all of it is in Mandarin/Chinese/hanzi, and I (at the moment) have no access to it. Since about 2004 it has been my ambition to learn Mandarin - for its own sake, but also to give me a better understanding of Hokkien, and (specifically) to give me access to the discussions in Chinese about Hokkien. I fear (based on my experience so far, and that of my European friends) that it will be a long time before that goal is achieved, but I intend to keep trying!
Thank you for giving us an insight into your own background, and the reasons for your interest in Hokkien. It's great to have you on board again.
Warmest regards,
Sim.
Thank you very much for your kind words
. I enjoy "writing" very much - attempting to capture the atmosphere of things, and I also enjoy "history", in the sense of knowing about things which happened in the past which are often very different from how they are nowadays. Those two pieces I wrote enabled me to combine both things I enjoy.As for the negativism on this Forum, I too have to admit that I have sometimes refrained from posting a question because I've been afraid of being blasted for it. Still, there hasn't been much negativity lately. I suppose in any Forum, there will be a mix of personalities and approaches to things, and part of it might also be due to cultural differences.
Even at the most negative times, I have stuck with the Forum because (for me) it's a unique chance to communicate in English with other people about Hokkien. I get the impression there is lots of stuff out there on the net about Hokkien (for example, Ong posts lots of fascinating-looking links), but almost all of it is in Mandarin/Chinese/hanzi, and I (at the moment) have no access to it. Since about 2004 it has been my ambition to learn Mandarin - for its own sake, but also to give me a better understanding of Hokkien, and (specifically) to give me access to the discussions in Chinese about Hokkien. I fear (based on my experience so far, and that of my European friends) that it will be a long time before that goal is achieved, but I intend to keep trying!
Thank you for giving us an insight into your own background, and the reasons for your interest in Hokkien. It's great to have you on board again.
Warmest regards,
Sim.