When What You Speak Is Not What You Write
by Nick Yee

While many dialects exist in China, there is only one written language. The oldest records of this written language date back to the Shang Dynasty (1400 B.C.). The classical literary writing style was officially replaced by a simplified, colloquial writing style, known as Bai-hua – “colloquial language”, in 1922 during the Chinese Revolution. Archaic words were removed from this simplified system, and the writing style became more speech-like, but by and large, most Chinese characters and their respective meanings remained intact. Modern Mandarin speakers can understand classical writing in the same way contemporary English speakers can understand Shakespeare’s writing.

In 1949, the Beijing dialect was chosen as a standard for the rest of the country, and became known as Putonghua (what Westerners call Mandarin) – “common language”. Because both Bai-hua and Putonghua originated from Beijing, they are very similar. The important distinction is that Bai-hua was created as a written language, not a spoken language, and is more formalized then Putonghua. The further south and east you move from Beijing, the less likely the local dialect resembles Bai-hua in vocabulary, and Putonghua in pronunciation. And thus, Cantonese spoken in the south-east of China sounds markedly different from Putonghua. In fact, speakers of Cantonese and Putonghua are not mutually intelligible to each other. But because there is one standardized writing system, they can communicate by writing.

These two individuals however, are not equally disadvantaged when they try to understand each other’s speech. Because the Cantonese speaker can write and read Bai-hua, he has the vocabulary of Putonghua, while the Putonghua speaker does not have the Cantonese vocabulary. There is a more important difference. Cantonese preserves many archaic features of spoken Chinese that date back to the Tang Dynasty (around 1000 A.D), such as extensive diphthongs and more numerous tones – which is one reason why Tang and Sung poetry sound better in Cantonese than Mandarin. And so the Cantonese speaker has both a vocabulary and phonetic advantage, because the Mandarin speaker is hearing words which don’t exist in his vocabulary and whose sounds don’t exist in his dialect, while the opposite is true for the Cantonese speaker. This is also the reason why it is easier for Cantonese speakers to learn Mandarin, than it is the other way around.

Since Bai-hua does not resemble Cantonese in vocabulary, Cantonese speakers are essentially learning a spoken language and a written language that don’t correspond to each other. In a sense, they pick up spoken Cantonese at home and learn written Bai-hua at school. But what is most interesting is that they are not supposed to write the former or speak the latter. They are not supposed to write Cantonese in the same way American kids who speak Ebonics at home do not write Ebonics at school. They are not supposed to speak Bai-hua in the same way Americans do not speak as if they were reading from graduate dissertations. But in the same way that Americans can read their dissertations out loud, Cantonese speakers can read Bai-hua out loud. The important thing is that neither would speak that way.

An interesting feature of the Chinese language is that because it is not phonetic it is impossible to know how a word is supposed to be pronounced when you see it for the first time. To get around this, the Taiwanese have used a pronunciation guide known as bopomofo and the mainland Chinese are using a pinyin system, both with the aim of bridging Bai-hua and the spoken Putonghua (known as Guo-Yu – “language of the country” in Taiwan). Ironically, Cantonese speakers in the modernized city of Hong Kong have not developed a phonetic system for the written Bai-hua. There is another reason why Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong learn the language the hard way. During the Cultural Revolution, Chinese characters were simplified so that they would be easier to learn and take less time to write. Because Hong Kong was still a British colony at that time, the writing system in Hong Kong remained intact, as it did in Taiwan because the Nationalists did not adopt the system from the Communists. So not only do Hong Kong children have to learn the traditional characters, they also have to learn the written language with no phonetic guide. Moreover, the written language does not correspond to their spoken Cantonese. And most of them are also learning English at the same time.

Recently, Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong have done something that no other Chinese dialect speaker has done. They have chosen to write out their spoken Cantonese, which is like writing in Ebonics but without the stigmatization because Cantonese is the dominant language in Hong Kong. In the process, many words that do not exist in Bai-hua were created specifically for written Cantonese. And many of the words in Bai-hua are used differently in this written language. Written Cantonese is very colloquial, full of slang and idiomatic speech. In short, it is utterly incomprehensible to Mandarin speakers, and speakers of other Chinese dialects, even though it is written with Chinese characters.

Language often gives people cultural identity, and written Cantonese could be seen as a way in which Hong Kong people forged a sense of identity, distinct and different from mainland China. The extensive use of written Cantonese began shortly before the Handover took place, with the creation of several written Cantonese newspapers (notably Apple Daily), and lends support to the idea that written Cantonese was created by a city that wanted to preserve its own identity.

Many people think of Hong Kong as the city where East meets West. And because Hong Kong is the most prosperous and modernized city of China, Hong Kong people have a sense of superiority over mainland Chinese. It is ironic that it is in this most modernized and cosmopolitan city of China where one can find a spoken language that retains archaic features and a traditional writing system that even mainland China has abandoned.