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    <h1 class="gmail-title" id="gmail-page-title">Mandarin and Cantonese can both be mother tongues for Hong Kong people</h1>  </div>

  
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    <div class="gmail-node-published" datetime="2018-05-12T13:03:28+08:00">PUBLISHED : Saturday, 12 May, 2018, 1:03pm</div><div class="gmail-node-updated"><span class="gmail-node-updated-date gmail-node-updated-date-hl">UPDATED : Saturday, 12 May, 2018, 1:03pm</span></div>  </div>

  
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<h3 class="gmail-node-title gmail-lvl_44-title"><a href="http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/2145373/asian-university-women-helping-rohingya-refugees-higher-education-it-marks" title="The university helping Rohingya refugees into higher education">The university helping Rohingya refugees into higher education</a></h3>
<time class="gmail-updated gmail-local-time-processed" datetime="2018-05-11T08:32:10+08:00" title="HKT: 11 May 2018">10 May 2018</time>
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  <p class="gmail-v2-processed">I refer to the recent dispute over whether our mother tongue in Hong Kong is Cantonese or Mandarin (“<a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/2144578/should-mandarin-replace-cantonese-hong-kong-says-no" shape="rect" title="www.scmp.com">Carrie Lam refuses to be drawn into debate on ‘mother tongue’</a>”, May 4). </p><div class="gmail-scmp-inline-newsletter-subscription" style="height:83px"><form class="gmail-scmp-newsletter-subscription-form element-processed-processed gmail-newsletter-323850 gmail-ajax-form-processed" action="https://www.scmp.com/api/rest/public/v2/newsletter/subscribe.json" method="POST" id="gmail-scmp-newsletter-subscription-form-323850">
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<p class="gmail-v2-processed">The issue arises from a 2013 article by Song 
Xinqiao, a professional consultant at the Chinese University of Hong 
Kong’s Mandarin education research centre. He wrote that calling 
Cantonese a mother tongue does not fit with the strict definition of the
 term, which refers to a language but not a dialect, or the local 
version of a language.</p>
<p class="gmail-v2-processed">The Chinese version of Hong Kong's official 
language policy of “two written forms of words and three spoken forms” 
has often been misunderstood to mean three written forms of words – 
English, Mandarin and Cantonese. The aim is to produce secondary school 
graduates proficient in writing Chinese and English and able to 
communicate confidently in Cantonese, English and Mandarin.</p>
<h4 class="gmail-v2-processed gmail-link"><em><a href="http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2144681/debate-over-cantonese-and-handover-highlight-hongkongers" title="www.scmp.com">Debate over Cantonese and the handover highlight Hongkongers’ feeling of political helplessness</a></em></h4>
<p class="gmail-v2-processed">In fact, Mandarin and Cantonese are but two 
dialects of the same written form of words. Mandarin has been chosen to 
be the UN standard written and spoken form of words for Chinese, with 
Hanyu pinyin, from the beginning. Thus Chinese is a form of written 
words that can be taught through both the mother tongues of Cantonese 
and Mandarin.</p>
<p class="gmail-v2-processed"><em>Peter Lok, Heng Fa Chuen </em></p>

<br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies                     <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone:  (215) 898-7475<br>Fax:  (215) 573-2138                                      <br><br>Email:  <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com" target="_blank">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/" target="_blank">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a>    <br><br>-------------------------------------------------</div>
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