ABSTRACT
Language policy in education for Macau seeks to maintain the balance between three languages and develop a distinct identity for the 21st century. Macau is frequently regarded as the first and the last European colony in China. Portuguese explorers, traders and missionaries established a trade colony on the western bank of the Pearl River in 1557 and the settlement soon thrived from a growing trade in silk and tea with Japan. The Chinese language that has shown the greatest growth and development within the Macau census data is ‘Mandarin’. There are also a number of ‘minority Chinese languages’ that are spoken in Macau and these are accounted within Macau censuses with varying degrees of accuracy. Chinese is by far the most widely used medium of instruction (MoI) in both government and subsidised schools in all levels of non-tertiary education. Whereas Macau schools have traditionally used Cantonese as the MoI, students have also normally used traditional characters to write in Chinese.
