LING 2058 Topics in Cantonese Linguistics (1st semester 2018-19)

Introduction: why study Cantonese?

A banned language? (Bruche-Schulz 1997)

Language or dialect? (Groves 2008)

Cantonese as dialect

An urban variety of the Yue 粵 dialect group, spoken in Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Macau; a de facto
standard variety (Groves 2008)

Other Yue 粵 dialects: Beihai 北海話 (Guangxi), Taishan(ese)台山話 (Chan 2007)

Taishanese: partially intelligible to HK Cantonese speakers (Szeto 2001); spoken in US Chinatowns

 Hong Kong Cantonese Taishanese

‘die’ sei3 ɬei3

‘stone’ sek8 siak8

‘early’ tsou3 tou3

‘vegetable’ tshoi5 thoi5

Cantonese as a distinct language

Not mutually intelligible with other dialect groups including Hakka, Min, Wu, Mandarin… (Szeto 2001)

Is the grammar the same?

‘Apart from some minor divergences, such as indirect object before direct in the Wu dialects and
Cantonese – for which English (like Mandarin) has the opposite order, and slight differences in the order
of the negative in potential complements in some of the southern dialects, and so on, and apart from
differences in suffixes for which, however, fairly close correspondences may be set up between dialects,
one can say that there is practically one universal Chinese grammar’. (Chao 1968: 13, emphasis added)

Grammatical features still not fully understood:

- The bare classifier construction [Cl N]

架車係邊阿? Gaa3 ce1 hai2 bin1 aa3? ‘where is the car?’

- The possessive classifier: 我架車 ngo5 gaa3 ce1 ‘my car’

- The sentence particles: wo3, wo4, wo5; laa3, laa1, lo1, lu1

Cantonese as ‘ancient’ language

唐人 Tong4 jan4 ‘Tang people’, 唐人街 ‘Chinatown’

Tang poetry: rhymes preserved when read in Cantonese

落帆逗淮鎮， 停舫臨孤驛。 浩浩風起波， 冥冥日沈夕。
人歸山郭暗， 雁下蘆洲白。 獨夜憶秦關， 聽鐘未眠客。 (韋應物, 夕次盱眙縣)

Cantonese: jik… zik; baak… haak

Mandarin: yi… xi; bai… ke

Conservative features of Cantonese phonology: final -p, -t, k; -m, -n, -ng
Cantonese and language contact

Origins of Cantonese: substrate influence from Tai and Miao-Yao languages (Matthews 2006)

 Place names: 薄扶林 Pokfulam: a Tai place name, ‘place of the falling water’ (Thai naam)?

 Syntax: 我走先 ngo5 zau2 sin1 as in Thai phom pay koon ‘I go first’

 Possessive classifiers : 我架車 ngo5 gaa3 ce1 ‘my car’ as in Miao-Yao languages

Contact languages influenced by Cantonese: Chinese Pidgin English, Hawaiian Pidgin

You got how muchee piece children? (Chinese Pidgin English)

I catch da bus go church. (Hawaiian Creole English, ‘Pidgin’)

Code-mixing: Cantonese defies constraints on mixing, e.g. the System Morpheme Principle

呢 D 衫系 for 翻 D 女仔去 clubbing 既 (code-mixed preposition)

我冇俾人 invited… which 我都唔想 (code-mixed relative pronoun)

Puzzles of written Cantonese

 How do speakers create non-standard characters? (Cheung & Bauer 2002)

 How do speakers learn to read and write Cantonese? (Snow 2004)

Cantonese as vehicle for culture

 Literature: children’s songs (Kwok & Chan 1990)

月光光, 照地塘, 年卅晚, 摘檳榔 . . .

 songs of love and emigration (Morris 1992, Hom 1999)

 popular novels: HK Golden’s 講故台 (Storytelling Channel) - 男人唔可以窮 (A man can’t

afford to be poor)

 Films: 香港製造 Made in Hong Kong

 粵劇 Cantonese opera: an art form not possible without Cantonese

 Canto-pop: complex matching of lexical tone and musical melody (Ho 2010, Chow 2012)

Cantonese as part of local identity

 點心 Dim sum
  潮語 Trendy language, 粗口 vulgar language

 本土主義 localism in politics

Cantonese as endangered language?

- 54 million speakers of Yue dialects, 16th in world by number of speakers (Ethnologue, 2005)

- Guangzhou: Putonghua as medium of instruction, inter-generational language shift in progress

- Hong Kong: Cantonese appears dominant, but growing numbers of children grow up not
speaking Cantonese; medium of instruction for Chinese literacy changing to Putonghua, with
effects on children’s language use (Sze 2010)

- Cantonese banned in some primary schools?

- Early stages of language shift?

- Recent books defending Cantonese《香港粵語頂硬上》(2014), 《香港粵語撐到底》 (2018),

published by 次文化堂

References
Bruche-Schulz, Gisela 1997. “'Fuzzy' Chinese: The Status of Cantonese in Hong Kong.” Journal of Pragmatics 27:
295-314.
Chao, Yuan Ren 1968. A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cheung, Kwan-hin & Robert Bauer. 2002. The representation of Cantonese with Chinese characters, Journal of
Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series 18.
Chow Man-Ying. 2012. Singing the right tones of the words: the principles and poetics of tone-melody mapping in
Cantopop. MPhil Thesis, HKU [available as e-thesis].
Groves, Julie M. 2008. Language or Dialect -- or Topolect? A Comparison of the Attitudes of Hong Kongers and
Mainland Chinese towards the Status of Cantonese. Sino-Platonic Papers, 179 (available at: http://www.sino-
platonic.org)
Ho Wing-See, Vincie. 2010. A phonological study of the tone-melody correspondence in Cantonese pop music. PhD
Thesis, HKU [available as e-thesis].
Hom, Marlon K. 1999. Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Kwok, Helen & Mimi Kwok. 1990. Fossils from a Rural Past: A study of extant Cantonese children’s songs. Hong
Kong University Press.
Matthews, Stephen. 2006. Cantonese grammar in areal perspective. In A.Y. Aikhenvald & R. M. W. Dixon (eds.),
Grammars in Contact. Oxford University Press, p. 220-236.
Morris, Peter. 1992. Cantonese love songs: an English translation of Jiu Ji-yung’s Cantonese songs of the early 19h
century. Hong Kong University Press.
Snow, Donald Bruce. 2004. Cantonese as Written Language: The Growth of a Written Chinese Vernacular. Hong
Kong University Press.
Sze Wah-Sun, Celia. 2010. The effects of using Putonghua as the medium of instruction for Chinese language on the
language use and language attitudes of Hong Kong local primary students. MA Thesis, HKU [available as e-thesis].
Szeto Lok-Yee. 2001. Between dialect and language: aspects of intelligibility and identity in Sinitic and Romance.
MPhil Thesis, HKU [available as e-thesis].