Review | Will Cantonese struggle to survive like Welsh, Hawaiian and Tibetan languages? Author predicts a rough road ahead
- Repression of language was at the forefront of the cultural intolerance shown to native populations in Wales and the Hawaiian islands, James Griffiths writes
- Chinese rulers in Beijing have long promoted Putonghua over minority tongues, he notes, and the fight to save Cantonese could come sooner than many foresee
Speak Not by James Griffiths, pub. Zed Books
One recent study suggests that just over 3,000 languages are currently endangered – nearly half of those in use today globally. What causes language death? The process is, generally, gradual: an accelerating shift from an old linguistic system towards one with greater perceived utility or status. But, as journalist James Griffiths argues in Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language, this process is often driven by malign forces.
“Languages are not lost, they are taken,” he argues. “They are uprooted by malice or neglect, their speakers assimilated into a new tongue, or left to struggle in the space between the fading old and the out of reach new.”
Griffiths sets out to explore this thesis in three geographically diverse places: Wales, Hawaii and Hong Kong. Though thousands of miles apart, they are united by their experience of colonialism. Wales was “the first colony” of the English, Griffiths writes, while Hawaii moved from colony, to territory, to state.
Hong Kong’s history is more complex; a former British colony it has now been, in Griffiths’ words, “subsumed by the People’s Republic of China, which inherited and shored up the territorial reaches of the Qing Empire and has advanced an assimilatory language policy that previous Chinese rulers could only have dreamed of”.
