Language or Dialect—or Topolect?
A Comparison of the Attitudes of Hong Kongers and Mainland
Chinese
towards the Status of Cantonese
Julie M. Groves Hong Kong Baptist University
ABSTRACT
Is Cantonese a language or a dialect? If linguistic factors were
the sole criterion, it would
most likely be thought a language, while political and cultural
considerations would determine it
to be a dialect, and Bell’s (1976) sociolinguistic typology would
place it somewhere in between.
The attitude of the speakers themselves is usually said to be the
deciding factor, but no direct
surveys of Cantonese speakers have ever been undertaken.
This study reports on a comparative survey of three groups of
Chinese: 53 Hong Kong
Cantonese speakers, 18 Mainland Chinese Cantonese speakers, and 72
Mainland Chinese
Putonghua speakers. It was found that the Putonghua speakers held
more ‘classic’ views, the
majority seeing Cantonese as a dialect. In contrast, only just over
half the Hong Kongers and
two-fifths the Mainland Cantonese speakers considered it clearly a
dialect, while one-third of all
respondents favoured a mid-point classification. The differing
perspectives held by the groups
can be traced to their different political and linguistic
situations, which touch issues of identity.
The uncertainties in classification also reflect a problem with
terminology. The Chinese
word usually translated dialect, fangyan (方言), does not accurately
match the English word
dialect. Victor Mair (1991) has proposed adoption of the more
neutral, mid-point term topolect
as a literal English translation of the word fangyan. This study
recommends adoption of topolect
to classify both the major groupings and the representative
varieties of each of the major
groupings of the Chinese dialects.
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