Filipino Domestic Helpers and
Multilingual Hong Kong
Feature Interview
The featured interview is conducted at Luzmedy Arnarez’s workplace. Luz is now 51 years old. This is her seventh year in Hong Kong staying with the Li’s family. Before coming to Hong Kong, she worked in Taiwan for 8 years. She is a speaker of 5 languages: IIonggo, Tagalog, English, Mandarin and Cantonese. In this interview, she shared about her reasons of coming to work in Hong Kong, the languages use in different domains,her attitudes towards different languages and her views about her language identity.
“But I’m so sorry. My grammar is so bad.”
In the first part of interview, she reveals the different languages used in the family domain. She will switch the language to Mandarin, Cantonese and English depends on who she is talking to. When talking to Mr Li, she usually uses a mix of Cantonese and Mandarin. As for Mrs Li, she also handles it by using a bit English and a bit of Mandarin. The last resort will be showing objects and keep asking until she figures out the meaning. For the children, the language she used is mainly English. She discloses that she felt sorry to the kids because of not having perfect grammar and she has improved her English through the process of taking care of the kids.
“Before I am interested to learn Mandarin than Cantonese, because I need to work and maybe use that language if I could go back to Taiwan.”
When talking about the ranking of preferred languages, we could find that Luz places a higher rank for Mandarin than Cantonese. The reason behind that is she thinks Mandarin has a higher language power because it is feasible to apply Mandarin in multiple places including Hong Kong and Taiwan and other Asian countries. Unlike Mandarin, Cantonese could only be used in Hong Kong itself. She sees herself no point of acquiring Cantonese.
“I prefer to speak in Tagalog because that is our own language.”
Ranking her preferred languages among 5, the most preferred one is Tagalog, and English, and Illonggo, and Mandarin and Cantonese at the end. Even though, IIonggo considered as one of her mother tongue, she put it on the third because she would only use it when she is in her mother’s town. Since spending all of her time working in Hong Kong, she has no time to visit her mother and use Ilonggo.
“So if you don’t speak Tagalog, I think you are a bad citizen of the Philippines.”
Speaking about is it a must to speak Tagalog to be a Filipino, Luz answers with a strong “Yes”. Believing that parents bear the responsibility to teach their children about their national language, it is right thing to do as a citizen.