Help the Cantonese diaspora pass on their heritage language: The Ham-baang-laang project

Cantonese is probably the most widely spoken language that lacks children’s books.

This is a description about a project that I co-founded, which aims to preserve and promote Cantonese by creating storybooks. Click this link to view if you are blocked.

Cantonese used to be the most widely spoken vernacular in many Chinatowns around the world, and the language is said to be on the decline. Mandarin (also known as Putonghua), the lingua franca of both the Mainland China and Taiwan, has become the lingua franca among ethnic Chinese around the world, and it is to no one’s surprise that it will be embraced by the overseas community as the one way to connect with their homeland. Many Chinese schools did not seem to have struggled at all, and happily switched the medium of instruction to Mandarin.

I can’t blame these schools. Mandarin was chosen as the standard language, and written Chinese has been developed in the most Mandarin-centric way you can imagine. Even in Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong, students have been instructed to replace all words to the “book language”, so that every sentence can be understood by all Chinese. This means Cantonese speakers have no autonomy in what words they can write, but Mandarin speakers can use whatever words they want to add vitality to the written language. It is even said that only by suppressing one’s mother tongue can a…