Cantonese as written language in Hong Kong
Authors: Bauer Robert S. ,   包睿舜
Published: April 2018

A unique potpourri of historical, political, social, cultural, and linguistic factors have all influenced the development of the Hong Kong Cantonese language so that it has emerged into a distinctive, independent form of Chinese; while it most certainly shares features with other Chinese languages, nonetheless, it can be described as separate, different, and special. Hong Kong Cantonese and Putonghua are two mutually-unintelligible languages. The Cantonese language is not simply the standard Chinese characters plus their Cantonese pronunciations. One of the most distinctive characteristics of Hong Kong Cantonese that sets it apart from all other regional Chinese languages is its highly conventionalized written form that is being widely used throughout this speech community. What we clearly observe is that Hong Kong Cantonese-speakers are transcribing with Chinese characters and even English letters the lexicon and grammar of their Cantonese speech; this practice was precisely expressed by Huang Zunxian 黃遵憲 of the late Qing dynasty in his phrase《我手寫我口》(ngo5 sau2 se2 ngo5 hau2)

The Cantonese romanization employed here is called Jyutping, i.e., 粵語拼音 jyut6 jyu5 ping3 jam1 which was devised by the Linguistics Society of Hong Kong (2002). Appendix 1 below has compared this romanization system with the corresponding IPA symbols. Mandarin pronunciation is romanized in Pīnyīn.

, literally, ‘my hand writes my mouth’, i.e. I write the way I speak. This must be appreciated as no mean feat, given the lack of formal standardization, along with the fact that Cantonese-speaking schoolchildren are not explicitly taught to read and write Cantonese but learn to do so informally and indirectly through exposure to its pervasive use. In other words, in Hong Kong Cantonese-speaking children have acquired their Cantonese speech in the usual way from their parents and peers but without ever learning how to read or write its written form; and, up until relatively recently, they went to school to learn how to read and write a language, that is, standard Chinese/Putonghua, which they did not speak (this situation has been changing as an increasing number of schools have switched over to using Putonghua as their medium of instruction over the past 15 years or so). Not surprisingly, the combination of standard Chinese characters used in non-standard ways with uniquely Cantonese (nonstandard, dialectal) characters and English letters in a text of written Cantonese renders it almost unintelligible to Putonghua speakers from mainland China and Taiwan.

Five processes can be observed operating in written Cantonese: viz., traditional usage of the standard Chinese characters, as well as their phoneticization, indigenization, semanticization, and alphabeticization (through intimate contact with English). Related to these five processes are 12 basic principles that underlie written Cantonese. In combination together these processes and principles provide us with the means for systematically analyzing written Cantonese. In order to promote the eventual standardization of written Cantonese, this study has identified two main problems of variation in the transcription of Cantonese lexical items that still require appropriate resolution.