Heritage Language: Cantonese
Fun Facts
Newspaper Article: A Cantonese Language Odyssey
An interesting article was published in the Toronto Star in 2006 about a Canadian Cantonese speaker’s experience of losing her heritage language. Both parents of the author were Cantonese speakers, but due to her young departure from Hong Kong to Canada the author lost most of her ability to speak the language.The author recalled “Cantonese quickly took second place to the more useful English that all my friends spoke”. As a young girl the author's parents continually tried to maintain the author’s Chinese identity, but at the time the author longed to be more Canadian like her friends. It was not until she entered university when she was drawn to learning more about her heritage and to embracing it. Once she entered adulthood and began working in Hong Kong she wrote the article. She describes that it was humiliating for her to have almost completely lost her verbal skills. Reading this article is important for many Cantonese speaking individuals living in Canada and other countries overseas as it shows that it is unnecessary to give up your roots in order to be part of another culture.
The Influence of Linguistic and Musical Experience on Cantonese Word Learning
Research has been conducted to explore the relationship between linguistic and musical experience and the acquisition of Cantonese. In the article “The influence of linguistic and musical experience on Cantonese word learning” by Angela Cooper and Yue Wang, the two authors used performed experiments to compare and contrast how musical and linguistic experience can be beneficial for adults when trying to learn a second language. Participants were separated into two categories: tone language listeners and non-tone language listeners. Tone languages refer to the type of language in which the pitch or tone of a word can have influence or even completely alter the meaning of the word. Cantonese is a tone language. Experimenters used Thai speakers as examples of tone language listeners and English speakers to represent non-tone language listeners. Result shows that either of the variables make it significantly advantageous for adults to learn Cantonese, in particular at the tone identification and word learning stages. However, having both of the skills does not provide extra advantage when learning Cantonese as a second language. Read this article for more detail on methods, process, stimuli used when conducting the experiment. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.4714355
Slangs
Cantonese is known for having lots of slangs. Many of them incorporate words that seemingly make no sense and some use English words or phrases. The slangs might sound quite funny for people who do not speak Cantonese, but because of common use sound completely normal for those who do. Below is a short video with some examples of common Cantonese slangs.
The Learning Experience of Koreans Learning Cantonese as a Second Language
In this article written by a master student of the University of Hong Kong
You-Kyong Kim, the author discusses what it is like to learn Cantonese as a
second language.The article includes her discoveries from experimental
interviews as well as some of the personal challenges she faces when
she tries to learn the language. This article explores whether or not
knowing an East-Asian language can help to learn another East-Asian
language and if so, what aspects does it help with.
The following is the link to the paper:
http://hdl.handle.net/10722/29084
Authors: Angie Chung, Hu Zhen, Yuyang Wu.