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Historical Contexts of Multilingualism: Chinese Languages of Macau (1500–1999)

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Macau’s Languages in Society and Education

Part of the book series: Multilingual Education ((MULT,volume 39))

Abstract

Chinese languages have dominated Macau’s linguistic ecology, especially in terms of the number of speakers of these languages and the social prestige encoded by them. The dominant Chinese variety in Macau, like its neighbours of Hong Kong and Canton (a.k.a. Guangzhou), is Cantonese. In many ways, the contemporary linguistic ecology of Macau closely resembles Hong Kong’s ecology, but similarities might mask more fundamental differences between the two Special Administrative Regions (SARs). In particular, there is a strong tradition of Hokkien use in Macau and good evidence that the earliest Chinese residents of territory were Hokkien fishers. In the years before the 1999 handover of Macau to Chinese administration, Cantonese, a standardising language, enjoyed greater degrees of codification to became a recognised lingua franca within the region. Although Putonghua (a.k.a. Mandarin) was not widely spoken in Macau before the 1999 handover, it has enjoyed significance influence on the teaching and learning of its related written standard language, Standard Written Chinese (SWC), and increasing numbers of speakers claim knowledge of Putonghua since the 1999 handover.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Ironically, it is this language policy that provided much of the original motivation to establish the University of East Asia in Macau in 1981 (Mellor 1988; University of Macau 2015). See discussion in 8.6.1 of the history of the University of East Asia, which later became the University of Macau.

  2. 2.

    Chapter 5 will discuss in greater detail the designation of official languages within the Basic Law, as this is more directly related to the development of Macau since the 1999 handover.

  3. 3.

    The 1981 census does not include questions on language use and has not been consulted in this survey. The by-census was not conducted between censuses until 1996.

  4. 4.

    Comparison of the proportions of Cantonese speakers for the two populations suggests that the difference is significant (z score = 27.9587, p <  0.00001).

  5. 5.

    Comparison of the proportions of Hokkien speakers in the two populations suggests that the difference is significant (z score = 125.8133, p  <  0.00001).

  6. 6.

    Unfortunately the current Chinese name of the territory, 澳門 Cantonese Oumun, Putonghua Aomen, does not share much, if any, phonetic similarity to the Portuguese/English name of the territory. The Chinese name, therefore, is not informative of what Chinese language may have served as a source or transmission language for the Portuguese name Macau. See further discussion in 2.2.1 about the naming of Macau.

  7. 7.

    Comparison of the proportions of speakers who use another Chinese language as a usual language for the two populations suggests that the difference is significant (z score = 62.8765, p < 0.00001).

  8. 8.

    Comparison of the proportions of all speakers who use another Chinese language as either a usual or additional language for the two populations suggests that the difference is significant (z score = 14.3118, p < 0.00001).

  9. 9.

    Comparison of the proportions of speakers who use Putonghua as an additional language for the two populations suggests that the difference is significant (z score = 126.4789, p < 0.00001).

  10. 10.

    Comparison of the proportions of speakers who use Putonghua as a usual language for the two populations suggests that the difference is significant (z score = 45.6769, p < 0.00001).

  11. 11.

    Comparison of the proportions of speakers who use Putonghua as a usual and additional language for the two populations suggests that the difference is significant (z score = 27.2532, p < 0.00001).

  12. 12.

    Wangdu (2012) notes that Article12 of the 1995 Chinese Education Law provides that ‘schools and other educational institutions primarily for “minority” nationalities may use the spoken or written language in common use among the ethnic group or in the locality as the language of instruction’. Members of the officially recognized ‘minority nationalities’ represent about 8.4% of the Chinese population. There are a number of complicated issues related to the ability to teach in these minority languages: Pei (2013) notes that only 60% of minorities can actually speak their languages; Ma (2006) observes that only 12 of the 55 minority groups have a written script for their language. Most importantly, however, is Tsung’s (2009) argument that the same social forces that threaten the Chinese dialects have also made minority language education less attractive to those groups who are eligible for it.

  13. 13.

    Wenyanwen is also sometimes called ‘Classical Chinese’ and it still has a limited place in the curricula of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.

  14. 14.

    There are increasingly frequent examples of written texts that attempt to use uniquely Cantonese terms and sentence structure. This use of Written Cantonese, however, only appears in a small number of highly specified domains and it may represent a kind of emerging digraphia (Moody and Hashim 2009).

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    Andrew J. Moody

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Moody, A.J. (2021). Historical Contexts of Multilingualism: Chinese Languages of Macau (1500–1999). In: Macau’s Languages in Society and Education. Multilingual Education, vol 39. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68265-1_3

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