The rise and fall of languages and dialects

THE Sunday Star on Dec 3 had two interesting articles on one page - “Fearing the death of a dialect” and “Sway of the Chinese language”. Wong Chun Wai said in his column that he was troubled the Hokkien dialect in Penang is no more spoken as much as it was.

I remember the days when I studied at Universiti Sains Malaysia at Minden a few decades ago. My wife and I lived at the students’ hostel on campus and we used to ride a bike to Jelutong for our shopping.

But the vendors and traders there all spoke in Hokkien and we had trouble understanding them so we had no choice but to speak in Mandarin to communicate.

It is not surprising that after so many years of cultural and traditional changes, fewer and fewer Penangites are speaking in Hokkien now. In Perak, however, I believe that most of the Chinese community - Hokkiens, Hainanese, Hakkas and Teowchews - are not able to speak their own dialect now as Cantonese has fast become the lingua franca among them.

It seems that with the Hong Kong TV serials getting popular, many Chinese feel proud to pick up Cantonese as a sign of identification with the well-known actors and actresses.

The second article talks of the increasing number of foreigners who made an effort to learn and now speak flawless Mandarin. This may be due to the influence of China as a major international trading partner. The beauty of the language also draws people’s interest.

Back in Malaysia, the great majority of Chinese speak Mandarin but their pronunciation and intonation are below that in China. We simply cannot help it! Almost all languages spoken in Malaysia are a kind of rojak.

The other day, in Hong Kong, I ordered milk tea in Cantonese asking for “teh tarik.” The waitress looked at me for a few seconds and asked me again what my order was. Even my Cantonese has been polluted without my being aware of it.

There are two main aspects of a language or a dialect - cultural heritage and communication usage.

Linguists emphasise maintaining the pure form while business people just use language as a tool to get their message across. They don’t mind so much whether the language is broken or not.

A.Y.YONG Ipoh