Most of my first words were Cantonese, but as time went on, I spoke it increasingly less. My parents spoke to me in Cantonese (and in my mother’s case, in a mix of Cantonese and Hakka), but I stubbornly replied in English.
There were many times during my childhood where in the throes of an escalating argument, I shouted at my parents, "It's not my fault you can't speak English!" I was so resentful that they didn’t understand me. I never considered that I had deliberately discarded the language needed to understand them. I had constructed a language barrier within our home and blamed my parents for something that was entirely of my own doing.
My parents came to the UK in the early nineties believing it to be a land of opportunity, a chance for financial and social mobility. What they discovered was that success was elusive and only apportioned to those fluent in English, and that the social hierarchy was unshakeable.
Growing up, I saw how a lack of English resulted in a lack of autonomy. My grandmother travelled only if her journey was written down on a piece of paper, the words “single ticket to Norwich” perpetually tucked into her pocket. My father was unable to order repeat medical prescriptions on the phone, and important doctor’s appointments were delayed until a translator could be present. My mother’s only close friends were in Hong Kong because despite moving here in her youth, she could never overcome the linguistic and cultural barriers she had with her local peers.
Subconsciously or not, these struggles imprinted themselves in my mind and for a long time, I believed that fluency in English was the key to a smoother path through life. I almost entirely abandoned my heritage languages, deciding that English was infinitely more valuable. My childhood was spent voraciously devouring English-language books, accumulating English vocabulary, and attaining the highest grades possible in English class, ignoring everything I lost in doing so. The filial side of me hoped that my fluency in English would benefit my parents too. That I would be able to navigate paths for them more easily. Instead, by abandoning our common language, I inadvertently cut off the path to my parents.
Whilst attending university, I realised that my Chinese was almost non-existent. It was slipping away from me like dry rice through splayed fingers. Keeping hold of it by myself had become impossible. So I decided to call my parents every day, speaking only in Cantonese and Hakka. I had finally noticed how disconnected I was from my heritage, from them, and I was desperate to change that, no matter how difficult. I’m proud to say that I’ve now reclaimed a majority of the language I lost in my childhood.
Still, there is one stark shortcoming. Despite years of trying and years of (admittedly patchy) attendance at Chinese school, I am still unable to read or write much Traditional Chinese. This is the shared reality of much of the Hong Kong diaspora. To my credit, I can express myself fairly fluently in spoken Cantonese, which I know is more than most of my generation who grew up abroad. I can also participate fully in conversations with family. But as I’ve grown older and have begun wanting to communicate thoughts my parents never instilled in me, I run into problems.
Coloniser tongue(s) and mass extinction events
I am currently learning Korean, a language that used the Chinese writing system until the invention of its alphabet in the 15th century. It is my ninth language, being added to the core group of Eurocentric languages I typically work with: French, Spanish, Russian, German, Latin, and English. With every new language I learn, I experience a cocktail of euphoria and guilt. On the one hand, I am proud of myself for learning a new skill; on the other, I am dismayed that I have devoted time to creating yet more distance between my heritage languages and me.
For a long time, I thought fluency was the goal of language learning. I thought that my affinity for some languages was from establishing a wealth of vocabulary and an inherent understanding of the culture, while my discomfort in others was due to the opposite. These days, I think differently.
These days, I think the goal of language learning is simply to tell our truth, whether collective or personal. Our languages hold our stories. Perhaps the human need for self-expression is grounded in a desire to have ownership of our narratives, to decide who tells them and how they are consumed. I think it is for that very reason that I am so invested in the preservation of heritage languages. Without them, how many stories, how much history, will be lost?
In the wake of Brexit, the UK has realised it is disappointingly monolingual and on a fast track to becoming even more so. This has led to a marked push for language education, from both governmental and grassroots organisations. But their priorities are warped. Of the languages traditionally taught here, German is the most endangered so there has been a massive drive to increase German uptake in schools. Most of my work as a linguist and translator is with young people, and I myself have worked on a few German-related projects. Although I see the value in them, I cannot help but feel that in the grand scheme of things, we have misdirected our attention.
As I visit schools and speak to students from various cultural backgrounds, I see that many of them have more advanced language skills in French, German, and/or Spanish than in their community languages. Global majorities have consistently been taught to abandon our heritage languages, or to devalue them, in favour of learning and perfecting languages that have long been used as tools for colonisation and cultural eradication. Despite an ostensible desire to encourage multiculturalism, what I actually encounter in schools is increasingly more children who are disconnected from their heritage languages. Children who can barely converse with their elders. In truth, it is heart-breaking. I cannot help but wonder if we’re hurtling towards a point of no return, a moment when our heritage languages will be lost forever.
Language extinction haunts me constantly. One language dies roughly every month, and the most conservative estimates show that half of the world’s languages will be completely extinct by the end of the century. To put it into perspective, only around 400 languages went extinct last century (although I do wonder if some languages disappeared without ever being documented). By investing so many resources into colonial languages, are we not encouraging yet more Indigenous language extinction?
I am a Cantonese and Hakka speaker. Although there is still a substantial amount of people that speak both of these (an estimated 70-80 million), the true number of Hakka speakers is likely to be far less. Hakka is only considered an official language in Taiwan, but Taiwanese Hakka is not the variation my family speaks. Our Hakka runs the risk of disappearing without a trace. does not have its own official writing system and although you could theoretically use either Traditional or Simplified Chinese, there is a lot of Hakka vocabulary that doesn’t exist in either language. There are many cultures that, like Hakka, are built on strong oral traditions, that communicate using languages and dialects that cannot be transcribed into text. I was once in a museum in Belgium that spotlighted a Congolese tribe that had dozens of words to describe the curve of a bull’s horns. When the Belgians arrived, these adjectives could not be translated, and so they were never documented. As indigenous languages die out in favour of lingua francas, these types of culture-specific words will disappear entirely. I then wonder if there’s any way of permanently preserving languages that can’t be written?
I am the youngest person in my family who can speak Hakka. To me, Hakka is so much more than just another Chinese dialect spoken by rural communities. It is a piece of my heritage, a reminder of my Hong Kong, and a precious connection to my maternal grandmother. My elder cousins who speak Hakka have chosen not to pass it onto their children. In my family, I hold the last set of keys to this language, and there are a lot of families in a similar situation. Within a generation or two, our Hakka could be extinct.
The fact that so much of my professional practice focuses on promoting and preserving modern foreign languages while I devote so little of my time to doing the same for my heritage languages has long been a source of personal conflict. I don’t have an easy solution, but perhaps the simple things I can do now are to continue speaking them, valuing them, and hoping that even if the languages themselves cannot stand the test of time, my love for them
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Sophie Lau is a freelance writer, educator, and generally vibing polyglot who can be found in the UK, Hong Kong, or almost anywhere else in between! Her journalistic work has appeared in publications such as gal-dem, The Independent, Ori Magazine, and Mental Floss, and she has completed poetry and creative non-fiction residencies with Metal New Artist Network, Studio 459, Bothy Project, and now Amplify Bookstore! Her current labours of love are a collection of travel essays and a fun-filled YA romcom! Whenever her slightly chaotic schedule permits, she designs and delivers creative translation and poetry workshops. In her free time, she enjoys learning languages (she’s just started her tenth!); hanging out with her dogs, Doughnut and Tiny; and capturing her solo travels on film (and binge-watching Korean variety shows but we don’t talk about that…). You can find her at sophieyanyeelau.com.
