語: Yu, Gi, or Jyu?

Browsing around YouTube landed me on this program produced by Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK), in which the ever-so-contentious issue of which language—Mandarin or Cantonese—to teach as the dominant one in primary education is examined.

This is a rather particular issue to both Hong Kong and China at large. Since 1918, the Chinese governments have continued to define non-Mandarin languages as "dialects" of Mandarin Chinese (國語/普通話), something akin to Japan's early language policies during the Meiji Restoration. The problem, as I perceive it, is that two speakers of two different dialects should be able to communicate with one another, such as speakers in the Mandarin language group (which itself is further divided into three groups), and this definition of intelligibility is what differentiates between language and dialect, to a large extent. However, with different Chinese "dialects", one will find that a Cantonese speaker talking to a Mandarin speaker will hardly find any intelligibility with each other, or a Hokkien (A Min language) speaker talking to a Shanghainese (A Wu language) speaker. Granted, there are many more nuances in distinguishing between dialects and languages, especially in classifying Chinese languages, but that I will reserve that for a later time.

Why is it that then? Why have both the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC) classified non-Mandarin languages as dialects? I see two reasons: the promotion of a common language and the politics of unity.

子所雅言：「詩、書、執禮，皆雅言也。」--『論語：述而第七』

"Confucius on Elegant Speech, "Poetry, history, and the maintenance of the Rules of Propriety, all of which to be conducted in Elegant Speech." - Analects, Part 7

"Elegant Speech" is a direct translation of the term 雅言 (yǎ yán), but throughout early to middle Chinese history, the term, at least widely speculated, referred to an official language, or more importantly, a common language. Finding a common language in China is hardly a modern one, but one tracing its roots back to more than 2000 years ago.

In more recent times, the Qing dynasty's Yongzheng (雍正) Emperor repeatedly made complaints to his court officials that he couldn't understand the bureaucrats of Fujian when they came to Beijing, leading him to issue an edict to instruct officials across the country to study Mandarin. Could this be one of the first modern instances of official policy regarding a common language's implementation in China? Perhaps.

A people is not a people if it cannot communicate with one another, and a nation is not a nation if its men and women couldn't even communicate with one another in the most basic way. To demote other Chinese languages into dialects would effectively raise the common language—Mandarin—to a superior status. And that leads to my second speculation, that the dialect classification is a politically motivated one.

Since the 19th century, successive Chinese governments have more or less been forced to confront regionalism, whether it be the factions in the Qing army, or the warlords of the ROC, or even the ethnic minorities of the PRC. And a key part to this regionalism has been the varieties in the use of local languages and their accompanied local identities. To construct a broader "Chinese" identity, to the governments and rulers, meant diminishing the status of local languages. Thus, we have come to having a Chinese society where speaking a local language could be equated to being "uncivilized".

Here's where my plight comes. Yes, having a common language is crucial to both daily life and governance, but to squeeze the living spaces out of the various non-Mandarin languages is a different matter. Languages from Tibetan to Hokkien to Cantonese have become increasingly less spoken, not to mention Beijing Mandarin dialect, which only a small aging population inside the hutongs of Beijing are capable of speaking. The same phenomenon is happening in Taiwan too, where children from Hokkien and Hakka speaking families are less and less acquainted with their own mother tongues because of the Mandarin education.

This isn't just about losing languages. To me and to many speakers of these tongues, this represents a huge cultural loss and one that creates a generational gap between us and the generations before us. Dare I say, to a certain extent, this gradual loss of local language speakers is destructing identities and creating information losses.

I think language by its own is a nest of information: the structure and the lexicon of language reflect aspects of a people's way of living and concepts specific to that people. Many Mandarin speakers have probably gone through the ordeal of trying to explain what 面子 (miàn zǐ) is to a non-native speaker, or an English speaker trying to explain "serendipity", or a Hokkien speaker trying to explain ㄎㄧㄤ (kiang). Each language contains its own set of unique phrases and cultural marks, and to try to suppress and erase languages is, to me, no different than conducting a cultural genocide.

I suppose there's a personal facet to this all. I grew up on a Hokkien speaking island with a Taiwanese mom, logically, I should've acquired the language. But no, I didn't. All my classmates spoke Mandarin, they only spoke Mandarin in school, we only spoke Mandarin at home...Mandarin was spoken virtually everywhere. I keep looking back, wondering why I didn't actively seek out opportunities to learn Hokkien. But why would I have? I was just a kid. I didn't bother with such laborious tasks as learning languages or continuing the study of piano, and that has only left me with regret all these years later.

And maybe that's why these languages diminish in usage on such a wide-spread scale. Most people of my generation will grow up in Mandarin dominated environments no matter where they are from, even places like Malaysia and Singapore have put a strong hand on promoting Mandarin. Naturally, kids will not look for things that aren't in front of them for them to learn.

So, 語, is it yu, gi, jyu, or the countless other readings it has? They are all right, and I suppose, to some extent, it doesn't matter. As long as we all agree that it means language, then what we speak shouldn't be an issue.