Filipino Domestic Helpers and
Multilingual Hong Kong
How Multilingual is Hong Kong?
A monolingual society?
The “monolingual myth” appeared true to many outsiders and sociolinguists for Hong Kong from the 1980s to the early 1990s. Fu (1987) comments that “English continues to remain more a foreign language than a second language to most people” (p. 28); the speech community is described by Yau (1989) as a “virtually monolingual Chinese society” (p. 179); So (1992) continues to assert that “Hong Kong is an essentially monolingual Cantonese-speaking community” (p. 79).
This perception has been challenged by sociolinguistics in the years after. The study on a variety of census and language survey study by Bacon-Shone and Bacon (1998), for instance, empirically indicates that there is a great expansion in the knowledge of English possessed by the general population across the two decades before the handover. The results displayed in the Figure 1 (Bacon-Shone & Bolton, 2008, p. 44) on the interviewees grouping themselves into five mutually-exclusively categories further affirm that Hong Kong has never been a monolingual society. What remains questionable is that how multilingual the Hong Kong society is.
Figure Language groupings 1, 1983-2003
From the eyes of Filipino workers…
To find out the answers, we take a closer look on the language patterns of Filipino domestic workers who are closely related to Hongkongers. An implicational scale has been employed in analyzing their language usage when interacting with the locals, including their employers, the employers’ kids, salespersons in boutiques, and owners in the wet market.
Five observations can be made from the implication scale:
1. English is used by all interviewees in all occasions except speaker 5 when she talks with her employer;
2. The tendency of speaking Cantonese corresponding to the interlocutors in ascending order is: the employer’s kid(s) < the employer < the salesperson in boutiques < the owners in wet market;
3. Mandarin is seldom used as the medium of instruction; both the two interviewers who speak Mandarin have working experiences in places where Mandarin is the official language;
4. Minority languages such as Tagalog and French are used in some occasions since the interlocutors are native speakers of such languages;
5. There is direct relation between
the lengths of stays and the tendency of speaking Cantonese, but workers staying for more than 10 years have greater tendency of using Cantonese
What come out?
In general, these observations are not far from the result of Figure 1 that 63% of people claim that they are Cantonese-English-Putonghua trilingual in 2003. The usual language for the interviewers at households and when they buy things is English, indicating that most Hong Kong families and salespersons are able to at least convey simple instructions and do the selling in English. This challenges the previous idea that English was a working language in formal settings such as government and law while Cantonese was used as the usual language in family (Pennington, 1998). In other words, while Cantonese is taking over some functions of English in formal institutions such as government, English is gaining its prominence in local daily lives.
Empirically speaking, Cantonese is losing ground to English in the interactions between the Filipino domestic helpers and the studied interlocutors, yet this dominant Chinese language is still found indispensable to working here. The fact that speaker 5 and 15 exclusively use Cantonese when communicating with her employer and the owners in the wet market respectively show that still not all people can speak English, even if they are wealthy enough to hire and accommodate a domestic helper. There is a notable yet fluctuating trend that the domains of using Cantonese by the Filipino interviewees are spreading with the increase of years of stay. All these echo with the urge by the Philippines’ top labour representative of Filipino domestic helpers learning Cantonese in order not to be replaced by their Indonesian counterparts (Benitez, 2012). The importance of knowing Cantonese to working here does not reduce even if the population of being able to speak English keeps growing over the past decades.
What does not match the claim of being a trilingual is that barely Mandarin is used. One possible explanation is that the language is employed by the locals to communicate with Mandarin speakers such as the incoming tourists. When it comes to interacting with speakers whose mother tongues are languages that they do not know, like Tagalog of Filipinos and those who possess basic knowledge of their vernacular, English and Cantonese are used respectively. This shows that even with the official status given by the “Biliterate and Trilingual” policy implemented in Hong Kong since the handover, Mandarin is still distant from the daily lives of people.
Conclusion:
Based upon their experiences, Hong Kong is a bilingual society where the boundary between the domains in English and Cantonese is blurred and a few minority languages including Mandarin exist. Limitations prevail in this research though, for instance, the easiness of Filipino interviewees communicating with the interlocutors has not been measured. We hope that our contribution will inspire more linguistic research on minorities in Hong Kong.
Find more at:
Bejitez, A. M. (2002, August 6). Learn Cantonese, envoy tells maids. South China Morning Post.
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