Academic literature on the topic 'Cantonese dialects – Macau'

The study of evidentiality, which has become an indispensable part of linguistic studies, has had a rapid development in the past few decades. However, studies of evidentiality in Cantonese, one of the major dialects spoken by some 70 million people in Hong Kong, Macau and most of the Guangdong province of China, are relatively few. This paper will firstly introduce evidentiality and its derived concept, mirativity, and subjectivity. Then the features of the Cantonese evidential particles wo3 (mid-level tone), which indicates unexpectedness and noteworthiness, and wo5 (low rising tone), which expresses hearsay information, will be analyzed, and a discussion on how a speaker expresses his or her understanding of the objective world through language will be given.

China with its dozens of languages of national minorities and numerous Chinese dialects is still a linguistically very diverse country, and this diversity regularly finds its reflection during the events in various regions. In 2020, medical teams sent to Wuhan during the coronavirus outbreak faced difficulties with understanding the patients speaking local Mandarin dialects. Later on, language problems in Wuhan were urgently solved by the local administration. Starting from 2019, language confrontation became more visible during the protests in Hong Kong. Already in 2021, a volume devoted to the complicated language situation in the recently created economic cluster of the Greater Bay Area, which is to combine Hong Kong and Macau with nine cities across the Pearl River Delta, was published in the series of the annual reports of the State Language Commission. According to the model proposed by the linguists, Standard Chinese is to become the main spoken language both within the Greater Bay area and in contacts with other regions of China. Cantonese is to be used only as an additional local means of communication, while English and partially Portuguese in Macao are to be preserved as the languages of contacts with foreign countries. To solve various problems of the economic cluster, new structures are to be created with the help of the latest information technologies and participation of the linguists. Language unity as a whole is considered to be a key guarantee of the national security of China.

AbstractMacau is geographically small but it has a large and complex population with various sub-groups from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Against a backdrop of multilingualism and multiculturalism, questions arise as to whether there is a local Macau Chinese identity and, if yes, how this identity is constructed via language. From a set of language data collected from an internet forum, where university students and their peers have been expressing themselves under minimal censorship, a vernacular “voice” does seem to emerge with the pervasiveness of Traditional Characters and Written Cantonese, demarcating local students and mainland students. Whereas Written Cantonese, often interspersed with English words and phrases, has long been in use in Hong Kong and Macau, the data do show many creative expressions or literacy practices that depart further from the more (quasi-)standard Written Cantonese characters. This creativity is appropriately described as “translanguaging”, and yet “translanguaging” is nothing new in Cantonese-speaking communities; that is, at its outset, Written Cantonese is a “translanguaging” practice in the sense that it challenges the literary norm that “Chinese should always be written in Modern Standard Chinese” and problematizes the language ideology that “a dialect, such as Cantonese, cannot be written”. In addition, these literacy practices, though fluid and creative, are largely based on spoken Cantonese, and hence they can be seen as a way of making the forum even more exclusive to mainland students.

At the very heart of variationist Sociolinguistics is the notion that language has an underlying structure, and that this structure varies according to external linguistic variables such as age, gender, social class, community membership, nationality, and so on. Specifically, this study examines variation in initial and final segments, as well as sentence final particles in Cantonese in Macau Special Administrative Region (SAR). Results of this study indicate that external linguistic constraint categories play a role in the realization of how and when initial and final segments, as well as sentence final particles are used in Macau Cantonese. Finally, this dissertation illustrates that pragmatic functions in the systematic use of linguistic variables requires explanations that draw from variationist sociolinguistic research that has an ethnographic and interpretive basis.
Linguistics
M.A. (Sociolinguistics)