An Interesting interview in Hokkien

[ransek]

Host spoke in Choan-chiu Hokkien and the interviewee 卓依婷 spoke Taiwan Hokkien
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HBFWHJ0Cb8

I'm still learning Hokkien so Choan-chiu dialect is a little hard for me to understand.

Can Taiwanese generally understand Choan-chiu Hokkien like 卓依婷 did?

[amhoanna]

The Coanciu "City dialect" is tough for me too. Sometimes it doesn't even sound like Hokkien to me. The "Coastal" dialect is easier.

My short answer to your question would be: no. The problem is mostly psychological, though -- inc. lack of motivation, etc. -- and also has to do with local knowledge. In this interview, Miss 卓 obviously had the motivation to understand Coanciu Hokkien. Also, there were no local knowledge issues. Beyond that, I'd say the interviewer didn't go deep with her Hokkien. It's also possible that Miss 卓 has had exposure to Coanciu City or similar dialects in her past, since she was a child star singing in Hokkien and also comes from a district where some of the old folks speak with Coanciu "inland" accents, if I'm not mistaken.

[ransek]

"Coastal" refers to Coan-ciu and "inland" is Ciang-ciu, right?

The Coanciu "City dialect" is tough for me too. Sometimes it doesn't even sound like Hokkien to me. The "Coastal" dialect is easier.

My short answer to your question would be: no. The problem is mostly psychological, though -- inc. lack of motivation, etc. -- and also has to do with local knowledge. In this interview, Miss 卓 obviously had the motivation to understand Coanciu Hokkien. Also, there were no local knowledge issues. Beyond that, I'd say the interviewer didn't go deep with her Hokkien. It's also possible that Miss 卓 has had exposure to Coanciu City or similar dialects in her past, since she was a child star singing in Hokkien and also comes from a district where some of the old folks speak with Coanciu "inland" accents, if I'm not mistaken.

[SimL]

Hi Ransek,

Thanks for posting this. A very interesting interview. At least here, I can catch some fragments of sentences. But even then, my comprehension is far from "understanding" the whole interview.

[ransek]

Hi Ransek,

Thanks for posting this. A very interesting interview. At least here, I can catch some fragments of sentences. But even then, my comprehension is far from "understanding" the whole interview.

Thanks for your reply SimL.
Are you Taiwanese? I'm guessing you have problem understanding Choan-chiu Hokkien as well?

[amhoanna]

No, I'm talking about the Coastal Coanciu dialect (the so-called 海口腔 Háikháu khiuⁿ) vs the others. The dialect of the City of Coanciu proper is a more conservative dialect. So are the dialects inland from there, inc. the Éngchun dialect(s) and the Ankhoe dialect(s). The Tâng'oaⁿ dialect is a transition between Coanciu and Ciangciu. Out of all these, only the Coastal dialect is easy for me to understand ... but Klang / Kuala Lumpur Hokkien (based on Éngchun) doesn't seem too hard.

[SimL]

Thanks for your reply SimL.
Are you Taiwanese? I'm guessing you have problem understanding Choan-chiu Hokkien as well?

Hi Ransek,

No, I'm not Taiwanese. I was born in Malaysia and lived in Penang until the age of 14. I then migrated with my parents to Australia and lived there until I was 29. Then I moved to the Netherlands, which is where I have lived for the past 25 years.

I speak Penang Hokkien, which is often said to be largely "Ciang-ciu derived". I'm English-educated in 1960's and 70's Malaysia (when this distinction was a very significant marker of a person's background). I'm also from a Baba family on my father's side. (My mother's side is Amoy-ish speaking, living in Southern Malaysia, but I grew up mostly surrounded by my paternal relatives.) Being English-educated and being from a Baba-family are the main reasons that I don't speak Mandarin at all, and that my Hokkien is quite limited. And leaving Penang at the age of 14 only added to the limitations of my already limited Hokkien.

Actually, I understood vastly more of the Cuan-ciu of the interviewer in the link you posted than I did of some other Cuan-ciu segments I stumbled across on YouTube. Those ones I could hardly understand even 1% of, and when I played them to my mother (who speaks an Amoy-ish variant, and whose Hokkien is much better than mine), she questioned whether it was a form of Hokkien at all!

I'll try and see if I can find the links for you in the coming period.

What's your background?

[ransek]

Thanks for the clarification. I didn't know there were so many variations within Coanciu Hokkien. I heard from some Taiwanese that 海口腔 equals 泉州口音 and I thought Coanciu Hokkien in general would be hard to understand.

Are you Taiwanese? I guess Coanciu immigrants in Taiwan mainly came from the coastal part and that's why coastal Coanciu dialect is easier for Taiwanese to understand...Am I right?

No, I'm talking about the Coastal Coanciu dialect (the so-called 海口腔 Háikháu khiuⁿ) vs the others. The dialect of the City of Coanciu proper is a more conservative dialect. So are the dialects inland from there, inc. the Éngchun dialect(s) and the Ankhoe dialect(s). The Tâng'oaⁿ dialect is a transition between Coanciu and Ciangciu. Out of all these, only the Coastal dialect is easy for me to understand ... but Klang / Kuala Lumpur Hokkien (based on Éngchun) doesn't seem too hard.

[ransek]

Thanks for sharing your story!
I'm always confused with the concept of "Baba". Does Baba refer to Chinese immigrants who moved to SEA very long time ago, or those who intermarried with Malays? And I heard Baba family speak Malay with some Hokkien vocabulary; but some sources claimed that the Baba tongue was more like a mixture of Hokkien and Malay, or simply something like Penang Hokkien....So if you could tell me a little bit more about the subject it would be great.

My background isn't that interesting. I was born in Northern China and raised in Suzhou, China. My family is 3/4 Wu and 1/4 Northern. Mandarin is my mother tongue, but I speak Suzhou Wu fluently (and a little bit of Changshu and Shanghai Wu). I went to college in Hong Kong so I have no problem conversing in Cantonese (Cantonese is fairly easy to pick up for Wu people). Then I moved to the states for more school and work.

I became interested in Hokkien when I was watching Taiwanese TV program. In fact I found Hokkien and Wu had some kind of deep connections despite the fact that the two languages are very different lexically. After a couple years' youtube watching, I can understand around 80% of Taiwanese Hokkien. I have little problem understanding news and political speeches. But casual conversations are much harder.

I also watched many Singapore/Malaysia Hokkien clips. (I became very interested in Singapore and Malaysia after I visited the region. In fact I'm going there again this winter). Singapore/Southern Malaysian Hokkien is easier to understand, but Penang Hokkien is very hard....

Thanks for your reply SimL.
Are you Taiwanese? I'm guessing you have problem understanding Choan-chiu Hokkien as well?

Hi Ransek,

No, I'm not Taiwanese. I was born in Malaysia and lived in Penang until the age of 14. I then migrated with my parents to Australia and lived there until I was 29. Then I moved to the Netherlands, which is where I have lived for the past 25 years.

I speak Penang Hokkien, which is often said to be largely "Ciang-ciu derived". I'm English-educated in 1960's and 70's Malaysia (when this distinction was a very significant marker of a person's background). I'm also from a Baba family on my father's side. (My mother's side is Amoy-ish speaking, living in Southern Malaysia, but I grew up mostly surrounded by my paternal relatives.) Being English-educated and being from a Baba-family are the main reasons that I don't speak Mandarin at all, and that my Hokkien is quite limited. And leaving Penang at the age of 14 only added to the limitations of my already limited Hokkien.

Actually, I understood vastly more of the Cuan-ciu of the interviewer in the link you posted than I did of some other Cuan-ciu segments I stumbled across on YouTube. Those ones I could hardly understand even 1% of, and when I played them to my mother (who speaks an Amoy-ish variant, and whose Hokkien is much better than mine), she questioned whether it was a form of Hokkien at all!

I'll try and see if I can find the links for you in the coming period.

What's your background?

[SimL]

Hi Ransek,

Thank you for sharing about your background.

>> Mandarin is my mother tongue, but I speak Suzhou Wu fluently [...]
>> I have no problem conversing in Cantonese

Wow, fabulous !

What a pleasure to have you on the Minnan Forum! I think it's particularly rare for someone without a "native" Hokkien background to become interested in Hokkien. But, in a very heart-warming way, there are 4 of you on this Forum: Mark, Ah-bin, amhoanna, and now you. (Mark: I do remember correctly that you only became exposed to Hokkien when you went to work in Penang, right?)

To be honest, I don't know what the "formal" or "ethnological/anthropological" definition of Baba would be. Perhaps there isn't one - perhaps it's fuzzy anyway, as are so many of these things connected with identity.

In broad outline, yes, Babas are "Chinese" who have lived in Malaya/Singapore for longer than the "sin-kheh" wave of migration in the late 1800's to the early 1900's. How far back is rather unclear to me too (perhaps Ah-bin, who is a real sinologist and scholar, can throw some light on this). It's sometimes claimed that the earliest Baba were formed by the delegation which accompanied a Ming Dynasty Chinese princess, when she came to Malacca to marry a Malay prince. IIFC, there is no Chinese documented evidence for this "princess" in the first place (she might have been the daughter of a senior noble, rather than a princess, and hence not considered important enough to document in official history). This community I
n Malacca is definitely known to have existed, irrespective of the historical existence or otherwise of the princess, but it's unclear to me to what extent there is a blood (or culturally-continuous) relationship between the members of this community and the group of individuals who identified as being Baba from the middle of the 19th century onwards. AFAIK, it's not "widely believed and claimed" among the Babas that this is the case.

In any case, Babas were certainly around in Penang, Malacca and Singapore by the mid-1800's. My grandparents' grandparents would have been born around then, and they lived in Penang.

As for whether they are "immigrants who moved to SEA very long time ago, or those who intermarried with Malays", again, I think the lines are very blurry. Certainly, a lot of them would have married with Malays, but a lot of them married Chinese (brides fetched from China, as in the case of some of my great-great-grandparents and their siblings).

That intermarrying with Malays did occur is - I think - practically indisputable. For one thing, it's a good explanation for why (some) Baba families spoke Malay natively (see below). For another, even in my family, there is variation in "darkness of complexion". Most members look "quite Chinese" (i.e. fair-skinned, yellow, whatever you want to call it!), whereas, every now and again, one or two members will be very dark, practically "Malay-looking". Having Malay blood in the family 4-5 generations prior to this would hence be a very good explanation for this phenomenon.

The 3 main centres of Baba settlement were Penang, Malacca, and Singapore. Only Malaccan Babas spoke (a form of) Malay as their native language though. Many Babas in Penang up to the early 1900's spoke Malay *fluently*, but not natively. Apparently, my great-grandmother (born around 1880) was linguistically gifted enough to be
much admired in "pantun contests", which is where people extemporize poetry in Malay during celebrations, on subjects which poked fun at people and current topics. So, my family in that generation (born late 1800's) could speak Malay, and some even spoke it very well, but they still continued to speak Hokkien as their native language. But in that Hokkien, there were many borrowed Malay words. In contrast, (many) Babas in Malacca didn't speak Hokkien natively - Baba Malay was the only language they spoke natively. [I'm less aware of the situation historically for Singapore Babas because there were fewer branches of my family in Singapore.]

Again, I'd like to emphasise that nothing is "black and white". There might well have been Penang Babas who spoke Malay natively, and there were undoubtedly Malaccan Babas who spoke Hokkien natively and Malay (only) fluently. But what I've tried to sketch is a general overall picture.

And again, everything was very fluid and subtle. Things changed over time, as well. By my grandmother's generation (born around 1900), there was considerable "re-sinification", undoubtedly because more and more sin-khehs were arriving. Not only would there have been more opportunities for young Baba men to marry sin-kheh women (resulting in the children becoming "more Chinese" again), but also the number of Chinese available to socialize, trade, compete, and quarrel with would have grown considerably. This would probably have led to more Chinese words being (re-)introduced into the vocabulary of the Babas. This would have produced some degree of "re-sinification" among the Babas, even without intermarriage with sin-khehs. So, by my grandmother's generation, nobody could do "pantun contests" any more, and their Malay was simply Bazaar Malay, part of it probably influenced by bits of broken Malay that they heard the sin-khehs speaking.

So, in my youth, there were 5 main "features" which distinguished a Penang Baba from a non-Baba. 1) The womenfolk all wore sarongs, rather than the "trousers" which the sin-kheh women wore. [That's just a simple way of stating it, of course - along with the sarong were all the other dress accoutrements of Baba women: a semi-transparent sort of top, hair done up in a tight bun, a special sort of brass belt for special occasions, covering their faces every morning with a fine white rice powder, etc.] 2) They ate with their hands. 3) They had a cuisine where curries based on coconut-milk formed a large component, and they used lots of Malay herbs and spices. [The "nyonya cakes" so popular in Malaysia and Singapore were largely derived from the Malay culinary tradition - lots of coconut, coconut milk, and pandan.] 4) They lived in matriarchal families. That is to say, the daughters remained in the family home with their parents, and the sons-in-law came to live with their wives. The sons of the household all "married out", and went to live in the homes of their wives and their wives' parents. 5) They sent their children to schools where the medium of instruction was English (run by the British colonial government or by Christian religious denominations), whereas the sin-khehs sent their children to schools where the medium of instruction was Mandarin (run by clan associations). [But particularly this last point is a very broad generalization. There were certainly sin-khehs who sent their children to English schools as well.]

Again, all the above is only an overall picture. And a picture which changed over time too. Because of re-sinization (and Westernization), many of these features slowly faded away (say) between the 1930's and the 1970's. For example, Baba menfolk switched very early to Western clothes, so that in my youth (1960's), only the women of my grandmothers' generation wore sarongs - all the men wore trousers and a shirt. In my parents' generation, none of the women wore sarongs anymore. Babas switched from eating with their hands to eating with a fork and spoon, so that in my youth, only my grandparents' generation ate with their hands - and even here, it was all of the women eating with their hands, but only about one quarter of the men. And in my parents' generation, almost all of the women, and all the men, ate with a fork and spoon. Similarly, the large matriarchal families also faded away. Partly because of re-sinization - if a Baba girl married a sin-kheh man, then the man's family might expect that she come and live with them; but largely also due to Westernization - couples just started to live in their own homes anyway, in a nuclear family with just their own children. Similarly, with Malay becoming the language of instruction in government schools in Malaysia (from 1970 onwards), the old Baba/English vs. sin-kheh/Mandarin split also disappeared.

In this way, by the late 1900's / early 2000's, there would probably have been very little left to distinguish a Chinese of Baba descent from a Chinese from sin-kheh descent: no (young) Baba women wore sarongs anymore; nobody ate with their hands; the descendents of sin-khehs were just as fond of curries; matriarchal households had disappeared. As for the old English vs. Mandarin distinction in language - many of the children of my second or third cousins (in the 1980's and 90's) were sent to Chinese school, and could all speak Mandarin (even if not natively). This would have been unthinkable for a Baba family of my generation.

So, that's my attempt to describe "Baba" to you. I should emphasize that this is purely a "layman's" perception of the situation, described from personal experience. Another Baba might have a quite different opinion, and a historian or anthropologist might have a different view again.

If you can be bothered, then the following Wikipedia links might be of interest:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peranakan (written mostly from an Indonesian point of view, which I didn't cover above at all)
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bukit_Cina

Once again, great to have you here. Hopefully, you'll also tell us things about Wu languages which are relevant to or throw light on Hokkien issues.