ABSTRACT
The term ‘Cantonese’ originally designated the speech of ᔓᐎ kwɔŋ 3 -tsɐw 1 Guangzhou, or Canton, the name by which the capital of Guangdong province has been known in the West. Since the 1950s, following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, regional Chinese varieties such as Cantonese in Guangdong began to fall into decline there in the face of the heavy-handed promotion of Putonghua/Mandarin; as a result, the center of Cantonese language and culture shifted away from Guangzhou to Hong Kong (which borders southern Guangdong) where it is now spoken by 90 percent of the ethnic Chinese population of over six and a half million as their usual, daily language (if those who speak it as an additional variety are also included, then the number rises to 96 percent) (Bauer 2015: 31). In addition, Cantonese has historically dominated many overseas Chinese communities in Europe, North America, and Australasia. The Cantonese associated with the Guangzhou district of 㾯䰌 sɐj 1 -kwan 1 (literally, ‘west mountain pass’) has been regarded traditionally as the prestige form. Although both the Hong Kong and Guangzhou varieties are relatively similar, some differences in their pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar are found. In 1997 after 155 years as a British Crown Colony Hong Kong returned to Chinese sovereignty as a Special Administrative Region of China, and it still retains its status as “the Cantonesespeaking capital of the world” (Bolton 2011: 64). Not only do the vast majority of Hong Kong’s seven million residents speak Cantonese as their usual language variety or as another dialect/language, but it is also spoken as the ordinary, regular, default language in offi cial government settings, the law courts, business offi ces, radio and television broadcasts, and as the medium of instruction in some schools (where it is on the decline, as about 70 percent of primary schools have switched over to using Putonghua as MoI, according to Tam and Cummins 2015: 23). Today, simply on the basis of its intensive usage across a wide range of social domains, Cantonese-speakers can feel fully justifi ed in regarding Cantonese as Hong Kong’s de facto offi cial spoken language (Bauer 2000, 2014, 2015). However, over the past two decades of Hong Kong’s reunifi cation with China, the dramatic yet unsurprising increase in the community’s use of Putonghua-it has become the tourism industry’s lingua franca and the medium of instruction in many schools-has left some observers so alarmed about the future of Cantonese that they have called for its legal preservation (Gallagher 2014) and even predicted its death (Tam and Cummins 2015).
