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Hokkien on its last legs, warns linguist
Predeep Nambiar
-
August 4, 2020 10:10 AM
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Sim Tze Wei showing a tree denoting the common descent of the Chinese people.
GEORGE TOWN: A linguist has warned of the impending extinction of Hokkien, popularly regarded as one of Penang’s official languages along with Malay and English.
Sim Tze Wei, an academic with the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, alleged that the language had been endangered by blind loyalty to Han Chinese nationalism, which advocates the use of Mandarin above other Chinese tongues.
He told FMT the nationalism had spread to Malaysia and young people in the country would hardly ever use Hokkien nowadays.
Sim, an expert in the study of endangered languages and the president of the Penang Hokkien Language Association, is currently hosting an exhibition billed as The Death and Life of Hokkien: How an Ideology Wiped Out Your Language.
Sim and some of his exhibits.
The exhibition, held at the Cheah Kongsi on Beach Street here, is open to the public from 9am to 5pm. It ends on Oct 25.
He said Mandarin, a language with origins in Beijing, was being pushed to be used as a medium of instruction in schools and day-to-day interactions.
“It’s as good as denying one’s right to speak in one’s mother tongue,” he said. “Schools in Malaysia and even Chinese language clubs in universities discourage the use of anything besides Mandarin.
“Propagandists see Hokkien and other Chinese-based languages as dialects and corrupted versions of Mandarin.”
Sim explaining Hokkien’s roots.
He was vehement in his disagreement with such a view. “Hokkien is not a dialect of Mandarin,” he said. “This is a big fallacy that needs to be corrected.”
He said Hokkien had roots in the Fujian province and noted that it is the lingua franca in many places in Southeast Asia and has its own written script, which is a modified version of the Sinitic script, the same source that written Mandarin is derived from.
A page from the oldest book written in Hokkien, Tale of the Lychee Mirror.
The oldest book written in Hokkien, Tale of the Lychee Mirror, was published in 1566. According to Sim, at least six of every 10 words used in the book are unrecognisable by Mandarin readers.
He described Sinitic as the mother script which communities in China, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam had adapted in producing their own scripts.
He said Han nationalists had falsely claimed that all Chinese people descended from one common ancestor who spoke Mandarin.
“The narrative is that Mandarin was the mother of all other Chinese languages. That is simply not true.
“In fact, if you look at the words ‘Han yu pinyin’, the term for romanised Chinese, you’ll see a clear admission that it is the language of the Han people, not the language of all the Chinese.” He pointed out that “Han yu” simply means “Han language”.
A tree of Chinese languages divided into seven branches, all with roots in Sinitic.
He added: “In essence, we have all the while had Mandarin forced down our throats. It is time for us to do some soul searching, to connect ourselves to our mother tongues and pick them up again.”
He accused Dong Zong and similar organisations of propagating Chinese nationalism though their push for Mandarin.
He said there was a concerted effort in Malaysia and Singapore in the 1980s to discourage the use of Hokkien through the Speak Mandarin campaign and things became worse when China made it known that it regarded Mandarin speakers as civilised, implying that others were not.
Speaking of ways to save Hokkien from extinction, he said parents should speak the the language to their children and efforts must be made to restart the Hokkien school system, which thrived in Penang in the 1920s.
But Sim knows that this would be a tough battle as most Chinese have been indoctrinated to believe that Mandarin is the only Chinese language to use.
But he is not daunted. “We have close to 40,000 supporters on Facebook and have been running this awareness campaign since 2014. We are confident that we can prevent a complete wipe-out of our culture.”
Predeep Nambiar
-
August 4, 2020 10:10 AM
350Shares
GEORGE TOWN: A linguist has warned of the impending extinction of Hokkien, popularly regarded as one of Penang’s official languages along with Malay and English.
Sim Tze Wei, an academic with the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, alleged that the language had been endangered by blind loyalty to Han Chinese nationalism, which advocates the use of Mandarin above other Chinese tongues.
He told FMT the nationalism had spread to Malaysia and young people in the country would hardly ever use Hokkien nowadays.
Sim, an expert in the study of endangered languages and the president of the Penang Hokkien Language Association, is currently hosting an exhibition billed as The Death and Life of Hokkien: How an Ideology Wiped Out Your Language.
The exhibition, held at the Cheah Kongsi on Beach Street here, is open to the public from 9am to 5pm. It ends on Oct 25.
He said Mandarin, a language with origins in Beijing, was being pushed to be used as a medium of instruction in schools and day-to-day interactions.
“It’s as good as denying one’s right to speak in one’s mother tongue,” he said. “Schools in Malaysia and even Chinese language clubs in universities discourage the use of anything besides Mandarin.
“Propagandists see Hokkien and other Chinese-based languages as dialects and corrupted versions of Mandarin.”
He was vehement in his disagreement with such a view. “Hokkien is not a dialect of Mandarin,” he said. “This is a big fallacy that needs to be corrected.”
He said Hokkien had roots in the Fujian province and noted that it is the lingua franca in many places in Southeast Asia and has its own written script, which is a modified version of the Sinitic script, the same source that written Mandarin is derived from.
The oldest book written in Hokkien, Tale of the Lychee Mirror, was published in 1566. According to Sim, at least six of every 10 words used in the book are unrecognisable by Mandarin readers.
He described Sinitic as the mother script which communities in China, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam had adapted in producing their own scripts.
He said Han nationalists had falsely claimed that all Chinese people descended from one common ancestor who spoke Mandarin.
“The narrative is that Mandarin was the mother of all other Chinese languages. That is simply not true.
“In fact, if you look at the words ‘Han yu pinyin’, the term for romanised Chinese, you’ll see a clear admission that it is the language of the Han people, not the language of all the Chinese.” He pointed out that “Han yu” simply means “Han language”.
He added: “In essence, we have all the while had Mandarin forced down our throats. It is time for us to do some soul searching, to connect ourselves to our mother tongues and pick them up again.”
He accused Dong Zong and similar organisations of propagating Chinese nationalism though their push for Mandarin.
He said there was a concerted effort in Malaysia and Singapore in the 1980s to discourage the use of Hokkien through the Speak Mandarin campaign and things became worse when China made it known that it regarded Mandarin speakers as civilised, implying that others were not.
Speaking of ways to save Hokkien from extinction, he said parents should speak the the language to their children and efforts must be made to restart the Hokkien school system, which thrived in Penang in the 1920s.
But Sim knows that this would be a tough battle as most Chinese have been indoctrinated to believe that Mandarin is the only Chinese language to use.
But he is not daunted. “We have close to 40,000 supporters on Facebook and have been running this awareness campaign since 2014. We are confident that we can prevent a complete wipe-out of our culture.”
