Cantonese under threat in Vancouver
Petti Fong in Vancouver
In 1957, Jim Wong Chu - then nine years old - was sent from Vancouver to Hong Kong. When he returned to Canada four years later, speaking what he called "Hongkongese", Wong says he failed to connect.
"I tried to speak to people on the street and they ignored me," he says. "There was a chauvinism about Cantonese and everyone else was speaking their village dialect [such as Taishanese or Hakka]. So for 10 years, I didn't speak any Cantonese."
It was only when the next wave of Hong Kong migrants began arriving in Vancouver, in the 1970s, that Wong felt he could return to the language.
As these Cantonese-speaking immigrants opened businesses, shopped and made Vancouver's Chinatown a destination, Wong noticed a shift in the kinds of foods served in restaurants and, more importantly, the language spoken on the street.
Last month, an exhibition titled "Transgression/Cantosphere" was held at a Chinatown art gallery to discuss the history - and future - of Cantonese in Vancouver. Organised by linguist Zoe Wai-Man Lam and a group of artists and academics, the exhibition saw Cantonese words projected onto a wall, then scrambled to make phrases such as "I want genuine universal suffrage."
Lam claims the loss of Cantonese has become a real possibility in Hong Kong, Guangdong and Vancouver's Chinatown, the three regions she studied as part of her PhD research at the University of British Columbia.
"Yes, there are still 70 to 100 million Cantonese speakers around the world, which is close to the number of Italian speakers," says Lam, "but endangerment is not black or white; it's a scale."
Last July, for example, Guangdong TV decided to switch from broadcasting in Cantonese to Putonghua. That language is also becoming more prominent in the Hong Kong school system.
Lam points to a textbook from the mainland as an example of the pressure Beijing is exerting on its citizens to speak Putonghua.
"The textbook cites as being uncivilised behaviour: wearing pyjamas when you go out, jaywalking, spitting on the street and speaking Cantonese."
In Vancouver's Chinatown, mainlandisation is also present at the construction site of a condo . Westbank, the developer, has used " " on its greeting sign, rather than " " in this Cantonese-speaking district.
For Lam, it's not the greeting itself that is problematic, it's the potential goodbye to an entire language without, at least, a fight to keep it alive.
