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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