overgenomen uit Financial Times, 30 januari 2002 (http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/article.html?id=020130002229#)
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Beijing winning in battle of tongues

New Zealand Herald; Jan 30, 2002
BY VAUGHAN YARWOOD

30.01.2002 Language may be the indispensable tool of international business, but the shape and characteristics of the tool are rapidly changing. Nowhere is this more evident than in Asia.

Take the case of Hong Kong. For many years both English and "Chinese" - the variant was not specified - were official languages in the colony, although English dominated.

After the handover to mainland China in 1997, the Hong Kong Government lost no time in establishing Cantonese as the main language of instruction in schools.

As a result, for the first time in China a regional tongue was elevated to become the pre-eminent language of Government and the arts.

But just as in the 1950s Cantonese swamped Hakka, the language of rural northern Hong Kong, so Cantonese is likely to be crushed under the wheel of Putonghua (Mandarin).

Called by linguists "standard northern Chinese", Putonghua is the tongue of that part of China and is the one favoured as the lingua franca by officialdom. Given the country's increasing economic weight, the vast number of Putonghua speakers and the influx of mainlanders into Hong Kong, Beijing's preference is likely to prevail and over the next quarter-century the bright star of Cantonese, the language of 90 per cent of Hong Kong, will likely flare and fade.

Complicating matters is the fact that Cantonese is not merely a dialect. Though using the same script and vocabulary as Putonghua, Cantonese and China's seven other language groups are said to be mutually unintelligible. For one thing, pronunciation differs. And Cantonese draws on archaic words which have long since vanished from Putonghua. Cantonese has also adapted English words and coined hundreds of others for which new characters have been created.

The more than 60 million independent-minded Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong and on the mainland - mostly in Guangdong province - are likely to strongly resist the encroachment of Putonghua.

They may have a more powerful ally in the internet.

At present 90 per cent of computers on the net are in English-speaking countries and eight in 10 web pages are written in English. But technology research company IDC says English dominance is rapidly eroding. Last year it estimated that non-English speakers on the web outnumbered English speakers by 211 million to 192 million.

By next year the company forecasts that non-English speakers in cyberspace will soar to 560 million, vastly outpacing English speakers, who will climb to 230 million.

Already, 13 per cent of internet users speak an Asian language at home - mostly Japanese.

In the real world, according to research house The English Company, native speakers of Chinese languages will total 1.4 billion by 2050, with 560 million Urdu and Hindi speakers and 510 million English speakers. Though by then more than half the world will be competent in English, it will be a form of limited hybrid world-speak rather than standard English used in Britain, the United States and New Zealand.

The proliferation of non-English speakers on the internet has encouraged the refinement of machine translation (MT), so people can quickly and economically make sense of whatever comes through the wire.

Understandably, MT is a big hit in Asia. Hong Kong software developer iSilk offers translation between Cantonese and English. Singapore MT startup EWGate is more ambitious, its declared goal being to bridge and unify the East-West cyberworld.

Japanese companies including Nippon Telegraph & Telephone, NEC and Fujitsu have been at pains to make web page translations available to staff. And Paris-based Systran, whose software handles the vast bulk of global online translation, has added Putonghua/English, Korean/English and Japanese/English to its repertoire.

IBM Voice Systems also offers Putonghua, Korean and Japanese translations and, underscoring the importance it places on communication in Asia, has set up a research lab in Beijing.

But speaking one of the Chinese languages, or even communicating via MT, may not be enough to do business successfully in China.

Singaporean businesspeople have started taking courses in Chinese history, philosophy, politics, and even Tang and Song poetry in order to better their chances. Cantonese speakers beware: the language of instruction is standard northern Chinese.

- Vaughan Yarwood can be contacted at hiero@ihug.co.nz

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