新潟弁：ごめんください

ごめんくださいの使われ方が新潟では特徴的です。

新潟では、誰かと会ったときの挨拶や、電話の会話の冒頭で相手が名乗ったときの挨拶として、ごめんくださいといいます。

私が育った東京では、そのような使い方はしなかった記憶があります。

誰かの家を訪れたとき、昔はドアベルがあまりなかったので、大声でごめんくださーいと言ったものです。

また、近畿で育った祖母は、さようなら、もう切りますよという別れの挨拶として、電話などでごめんくださいと言っていました。新潟とちょうど逆ですね。こっちから電話をかけたのに、いきなり相手からごめんくださいと言われて、キレそうになったものでした。

この使い方は、新潟で生活してしばらくしてから気づきました。新潟弁本にあまり登場しないところを見ると、おそらく、新潟人が方言だとあまり認識していないのかもしれません。他地方にもあるが意味が違う言葉でよくあることです。

ただ、多くの「透明な新潟弁」（方言だと気が付かれない言葉）とは違い、使用者は割りと年配者か、市外出身者が多いような気がします。そのうち滅びる言葉かもしれません。

Language policy at our home

Mixing languages is a most natural human linguistic behavior. Most languages are mixed. When languages come into contact with each other, they are bound to blend together. There's no such thing as a pure language.

In my family, I make it a point to code-mix when I speak to my children. As a result, they freely switch from Mandarin to Japanese to English. At any given moment, they may happen to be speaking in Japanese, and there's something they want to express which happens to be simpler to say in Mandarin, then they would just insert that part in Mandarin into a Japanese utterance.

Some people are afraid that mixing languages may confuse children. But mine never seems to find any problems in figuring out what situations or which people called for straight Japanese or straight Mandarin with no code-mixing.

That all changed when they started going to an "English-only" eikaiwa school where Japanese is strictly prohibited.

Whenever they came across something they wanted to express but didn't know how in English, they paused and asked me: "Uh... How do you say ... in English"? This happened frequently enough for them to get tired of speaking English and give up speaking English altogether.

I wasn't worried, though. I was sure they would figure out very soon that even though it was not OK to mix languages while they were in the eikaiwa school, it's OK when they were at home. And sure enough, they did.

Trinidad and Tobago going rhotic?

This video provides a rare opportunity to hear Trinidad and Tobago's TV ads.

You can here it in the background.

Instead of a typical Caribbean accent, you hear something similar to a standard Singapore accent.

Both Singaporean and Trinidadian Englishes are influenced by the presence of a large Indian community, so that's to be expected.

What's interesting is that there is also a commercial that has a rhotic accent in, presumably, an attempt to sound American.

Again, the situation seems similar to those of Singapore and Malaysia.

Malaysians becoming rhotic

It's been ages since I last updated my blog.

I've decided to update it since both my parents and my brother are updating their blogs regularly.

So here's my post today. I've been noticing more and more younger generation Singaporeans, Malaysians and Hongkongers are starting to sound rhotic.

People say it's the influence of American media, but I don't buy it. Back then when I was there, all those places had lots of American programs on TV, but nobody was sounding rhotic.

I suspect one factor is the presence of Filipino domestic helpers in their households. But I noticed that  Hong Kong specialists are not very willing to admit the Philippine influence. But if you are brought up by a Filipina since young, it's inevitable that you end up having a rhotic accent, even if your local English teacher at school is non-rhotic.

So, anyway, I was talking to a Malaysian today, and noticed something interesting.

Malaysians who use English at home and in their social lives all the time since young, many of whom are Chinese and Indians, tend to be more non-rhotic. They sound very similar to Singaporeans to me.

But those Malaysians who speak from non-English speaking backgrounds (Bornean ethnic groups, Chinese-educated Chinese, etc.) who learn English later on in their lives as a foreign language, tend to have more American-like accents and therefore more rhotic.

A similar thing can perhaps be said about Hong Kong. When I went to a university in Hong Kong several years ago to attend a conference, many students proficient in English are mainlanders, and they had American-oriented accents.

In Singapore, socially-upward people, especially females, tend to be more rhotic. (I read an academic article before that said a rhotic accent is considered to be the proper pronunciation in Singapore despite the fact that Standard Singapore English is supposed to be RP-based.)

I wonder if this spread of rhoticity and formerly non-rhotic Southeast Asia is somehow related to the worldwide spread of Philippine English!

Teochew people in Taiwan?

Teochew is not spoken, at least locally in Taiwan. Wikipedia says that Teochew people in Taiwan has been Hokkienized, and speak Hokkien. It also says that some of them speak Hakka.

I know for a fact that some Hokkien people claim that they trace their ancestry to Shantou-Chaozhou area. Take my mother-in-law for example. All her family members live in northern Taipei, and speak Hokkien with a marked Tong'an accent. Yet they claim that they are Teochew people. Or at least that's what their family tree chart "claims". In this post, I will talk about three kinds of people who are thought to be Teochew. And I will question if they can really be considered Teochew.

Teochew people are speakers of the language, whose center is Shantou-Chaozhou area. It is a branch of Southern Min family. Most Chinese people in Thailand and Cambodia are Teochew. Hong Kong also has lots of Teochew people, including Mr. Li Ka-Shing, the richest tycoon. They are quite powerful in Singapore and southern peninsular Malaysia as well.

Type A "Teochew" people in Taiwan are not really Teochew people at all. They are Pepo tribal people. Pepo tribes are Malayo-Polynesian people people who became Sinicized. They had to pretend to be Han-Chinese so they could own land. In order to prove that they were Han, they had to produce a family tree. But All their Hokkien neighbors knew that they are really different from them. They even spoke Hokkien with an accent. Therefore, they claimed in their family tree that their ancestors are Teochew. They thought the neighbors wouldn't know. But it's easy to tell they really have nothing to do with Teochews. Like my mother-in-law, they speak Hokkien with a Tong'an accent, which is Quanzhou-leaning. If they are really Teochew, they should sound more Zhangzhou.

Type B "Teochew" people maybe Hokkienized Hakka people that originated from western Zhangzhou areas in Fujian Province. There are many such people in Zhanghua and Yunlin Counties. The funny thing that most of those people don't recognize themselves as Hakka. They regard themselves as Zhangzhou Hokkiens. But Older generation people still remember some Hakka words. And some have admitted that they are Hakkas recently, and are engaged in reviving their Hakka culture.

Type C "Teochew" people are actually related to Chaozhou, but are not ethnically Teochew. They are mainstream Hakka people who migrated to Taiwan from Shantou-Chaozhou region. In this region of Guangdong, as in neighboring western Zhangzhou of Fujian, Hakkas and Southern Min people are coexisting alongside each other. Among the mainstream Hakka people who migrated to Taiwan en masse, some originated from this Teochew-speaking region. So their ancestry tree rightly indicate that their ancestral origin is Chaozhou. But that doesn't mean that they are ethnically Chaozhou.

By the way, in Tainan, there is a dish called Chaozhou noodles. I wrote a blog post about it in the past. I don't know if this delicacy is related to Type A or Type C psuedo-Teochews. Or maybe it's related to Chaozhou Township in Pindong.

A final word of caution: Be careful when you discuss this topic with the people concerned themselves. As I said, they may well perceive themselves as otherwise. And we must respect that. They don't particularly like being told who they are by a foreigner. The same principle applies to talking to people who might have Pepo ancestry.

Taiwanese Hokkien is an appropriate term

I think Taiwanese Hokkien is an appropriate name for the language spoken as a heritage language by the majority of people in Taiwan.

It has been called many different names, including: Taiwanese, Southern Min, Hoklo, Holo, etc.

But I think Taiwanese Hokkien is the most appropriate one.

Hokkien is the term used by the British colonial authority in East and Southeast Asia to refer to the language of the vicinity of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou. The center of this area is Amoy. So the accent of Amoy has traditionally considered to be the standard. It is into Amoy accent that the Hokkien Bible has been translated. (This might change in the future, as Amoy has accepted huge migrant population and become largely a Mandarin speaking city.) Even though the accents of Quanzhou, Zhangzhou and Amoy are a quite different from each other, they are still mutually intelligible.

Southern Min is a broader term. Even Teochew (the language of Swatow or Shantou) and Hainanese are parts of Southern Min. They are mostly mutually unintelligible with the Quanzhou-Zhangzhou. (The Teochew of Malaysia and Singapore is a different story because it has been greatly influenced by Hokkien.) So it is inappropriate to call Hokkien Southern Min. Hokkien is just one part of the Southern Min group of languages that are mutually unintelligible. This was not a problem in Taiwan, though, because there were extremely few Teochew speakers in Taiwan.

Hoklo and Holo have been used often in Taiwan in recent years. These are traditional terms. But they were seldom used by the people who spoke it themselves until after the Taiwan independence ideology became widespread. Holo is the preferred term by people from such backgrounds, understandably because it contains no word that suggests it originated from mainland China. But the use of this term is not very widespread in Taiwan. The popular term, instead, is Taiwanese, to which I shall turn later.

Hoklo, although shares the same roots with Holo, is not preferred by people who ascribe to Taiwan independence. This is presumably because the "hok" refers to Fujian Province of China.

Also, it has been suggested that "lo" is a word which means a person or a man, which has a derogatory connotation. It has been known that both Hoklo and Holo are terms used by Hakka people in Zhangzhou and Chaozhou areas to refer to Hokkien-speaking people, likely with a derogatory connotation.

When I visited the Museum of History in Hong Kong, I learned that people there refer to Teochew people as "Fuklo". If this is true, it would be totally inappropriate to call Hokkien people in Taiwan as Hoklo or its variation Holo, since they are not ethnic Teochew.

This leaves the discussion to Taiwanese. This is a popular term in widespread use. But it seems odd to me to call a language by the name of the place where only a minority of its speakers reside. (Well, you may use English as a counterargument. Only a minority of all English speakers in the world live in England. But we still call it English. But the thing is: English did originate from there, while Hokkien did not originate from Taiwan.) Another reason why this might be an inappropriate term is that it disrespects other ethnic groups who consider themselves to be "native" to Taiwan. For example, a Hakka person or an aborigine might question why their languages are excluded from being called "Taiwanese".

Even though Taiwanese Hokkien is an appropriate term, it is not without its shortcomings. It seems to be less problematic in southern part of Taiwan, namely, Jiayi, Tainan, Kaohsiung, Pindong and Taidong. In these areas, the accent of Hokkien is quite unitary. And the extent to amd ways in which Zhangzhou and Quanzhou accents are merged are very uniquely Taiwanese.

However, it is more problematic for nothern accents. For example, the accent of downtown Taipei is closer to Amoy than anything else, that of Tamsui closer to Tong'an and anything else, and that of Muzha closer to Anxi than anything else, etc. Each retains its proximity to its place of origin in China.

This being said, both southern and northern accents have large borrowed lexis from Japanese. This is uniquely Taiwanese, stemming from its colonial experience. Therefore, even northern accents, which are more closely related to their ancestral accents in China than their southern counterparts, can still legitimately be called Taiwanese Hokkien.

Mandarin as a Taiwan Language (MTL)

Mandarin used to be considered an outsider language in Taiwan. It was forced down people's throat with a high-handed "anti-dialect" campaign. But now it's become a Taiwan's language. The Taiwanese have adopted and appropriated it. So it can now carry the weight of the Taiwan identity. It's become the Language of the Heart" for the Taiwanese. They can use it unapologetically to express their Taiwanese-ness.

In the past, people were forced to feel "less than" because of their strong Taiwan accent in their Mandarin. Now, it's become an identity marker. Politicians even use it to their advantage. Many Waishengrens sometimes put on a stronger Taiwan accent when they want to emphasize their fraternity.

Well-educated urban Taiwanese think that their Mandarin is "biaozhun", just like newscasters. But that's being biaozhun in the Taiwansese standard. Mandarin speakers from outside of Taiwan recognize their so-called "biaozhun" speech as distinctly Taiwanese. Once I traveled to Japan with three of Taiwan's top news anchors. And we interviewed some scholars from mainland China. They all commented on the Taiwanese-ness of the news anchors' Mandarin. To Taiwanese ears, they just sound ""biaozhun", that's all. Taiwan Mandarin has become "transparent" to Taiwanese people. They don't notice anything special.

As you may well know, there are many "Taiwanisms" in Taiwan Mandarin. It's not my job to enumerate them here. But the Taiwanese speakers of Mandarin have invented enough new Mandarin words that can convey distinctly Taiwanese meaning. Just one example: Northern China Mandarin lacks words regarding rice. They don't eat it often. They prefer noodles. So the innovative Taiwanese borrowed words from Hokkien. So we say things like: "This mochi is very Q!"

I would go as far as to say that Mandarin is the new "Taiyu". Hokkien originated from Fujian Province in China. But nobody in Taiwan identify themselves with Fujian when they speak in it. The Taiwanese even call it "Taiyu". This is strange, come to think of it. There are more speakers of Hokkien outside of Taiwan, that is, in China and Southeast Asia, than there are in Taiwan. Yet, we still call it Taiyu. Maybe this is because the Taiwanese feel that they have already adopted and appropriated Hokkien enough to now call it a "local language".

Applying the same logic, why not call Mandarin "Taiwanese"? I know some foreigners who already do this.

Because of the historical accidents and  government educational policy, Hokkien has been in decline in Taiwan, other "dialects" even more so. But Mandarin has become the new Taiyu. This is a more powerful Taiyu, because it is shared by all who live in Taiwan. It is powerful also because it keeps creating new words and expressions to express Taiwanese minds and hearts.