When Lau Chaak-ming was casting around for a kindergarten for his daughter, he had trouble finding one that used Cantonese. It was a strange, if not ridiculous, situation for a city made up primarily ...

The goals of the authorities to promote Putonghua by issuing the new policy are fundamentally good. The popularity of Putonghua is due to its convenience for communication, which clears up the ...

All is well with the Cantonese dialect in Hong Kong. Despite the rapid social and economic integration with the mainland, Hong Kong's people have obstinately clung to their native tongue. Of course, ...

For most students, it's tough enough trying to learn one foreign language. But under the Hong Kong government's policy of bilingualism and trilingualism, local students are expected to master two ...

A culture war has erupted in South China over a subject that has already been banned in one public school and may someday be banned on television: Cantonese Some residents in Guangzhou, Guangdong ...

While "democracy" is doubtless the subject that generates the most anguished commentary in our local press, "language" surely runs a close second. Most commentators, at least in the English-language ...

Pro-Beijing political veteran and former president of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, Rita Fan Hsu Lai-tai, has said that the tense relations between the mainland and Hong Kong are partly due to ...

Protests have erupted in Hong Kong and Guangzhou over a plan by Guangzhou officials to ban Cantonese – the language of southern China – from prime-time television. Some Cantonese speakers say the move ...

While puns and wordplay are technically not allowed in mainland China, Hong Kong creatives find them to be irresistible and effective—most of the time. However, spoken language is a different matter. ...

The Cantonese language could disappear within a couple of generations because of social pressures and the actions of the Chinese government, according to a UBC linguistics researcher. Zoe Lam says ...

The State Working Committee of Chinese Language has conducted a nationwide survey on the prevalence of putonghua, or standard spoken Chinese, on the mainland. Results of the six-year study were ...

More and more Chinese nowadays are able to communicate using Chinese Mandarin, says a survey that indicates that 53 per cent of the population can communicate with the standard spoken language also ...