17.1 Chinese Speakers in Britain: A Historical Sketch
Speakers of varieties of the Chinese language have been one of the largest and longest-established linguistic and ethnic minority communities in Britain. The first recorded Chinese person in Britain was Shen Fu Tsong, 沈福宗, a Mandarin-speaking polyglot and a Jesuit scholar in the court of King James II in the seventeenth century, who catalogued the Chinese books in the Bodleian Library. The first naturalised Briton, more precisely, naturalised Scotsman, from China was William Macao, an accountant who lived in Edinburgh from 1779, whose background was unknown except that he came to Scotland from Macao, hence his adopted name. The first Chinese community in Britain was the Chinese seamen employed by the East India Company in the early 1880s, who settled in London’s dock area, and later in other port cities such as Liverpool and Cardiff. The majority of these people were from the coastal areas of China, speaking Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka and Wu dialects. By the mid 1880s, small Chinatowns started to form in London and Liverpool, with grocery stores, eating houses and meeting places (later townsmen associations). By 1890, there were two distinct Chinese communities in east London. Chinese from Shanghai settled around Pennyfields, Amoy Place and Ming Street, and those from Guangzhou Canton and northern and southern China lived around Gill Street and Limehouse Causeway. Most of the settlers from China ran small laundries, eating places (later take-aways and restaurants) and barber shops. This occupational bias was mainly due to the Chinese settlers being blocked from seeking any other employment at the time but it had important implications on their settlement pattern and language socialisation. First of all, they did not have a great deal of opportunity to learn and speak English beyond interacting with relatives in family-run businesses. Secondly, in order to maximise their business opportunities, they lived apart from other Chinese people. Consequently, only one or two family members who learned limited English were dealing with customers and the others remained largely monolingual Chinese.
Over 100,000 Chinese were brought from China by the British to serve in the Chinese Labour Corp in France and Belgium during the First World War. But after the war ended, the Aliens Restriction Act was extended in 1919, and none of the Chinese servicemen were granted permission to settle in the country. The overall Chinese population in Britain declined drastically. By 1918, the number of Chinese people living in Pennyfields, Poplar, London totalled less than 200; all were men and nine of them had English wives.
The largest wave of Chinese immigration took place during the 1950s and 60s, consisting predominantly of male agricultural labourers from Hong Kong, which became a British colony in 1842, especially the rural villages of the New Territories, which was leased to Britain for ninety-nine years from 1898, but also migrants from the Guangdong province via Hong Kong. Most of them were Cantonese speakers. The 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act placed more restrictions on immigration from current and former British colonies, and the rules were tightened by successive governments. Chinese immigration was only possible if they were relatives of those already settled in the UK and had guaranteed employment. Consequently, the majority of Chinese immigrants in the 1960s and 70s were of this type, and worked in the family-owned catering trade. They followed the earliest settlement patterns of the Chinese immigrants and were dispersed in different parts of the country with no clear concentrated geographical area. Occasionally, Britain allowed special groups of people in; for example, in around 1976, 2,000 Chinese nurses were allowed in. They had to be able to speak and write English, as well as having professional training, to qualify. In anticipation of the return of sovereignty of Hong Kong to China in 1997, the 1981 British Nationality Act denied right of abode in the UK to Hong Kong’s British Overseas Territories citizens passport holders. It took a political event of 1989 for the British government to use the British Nationality Selection Scheme to allow 50,000 Hong Kong Chinese to enter Britain and they had to meet specific criteria of education, employment and language skills.
Since the 1980s, new immigrants of the Chinese community have been largely from mainland China, speaking a range of mutually unintelligible Chinese ‘dialects’. There are also many secondary immigrants who migrated from China first to Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Europe and elsewhere, and then migrated to the UK. The growth of the Chinese population is mainly due to second- and third-generation (i.e. British-born) Chinese. According to the 2021 census, the Chinese ethnic group in England and Wales numbered 445,646, or 0.7 per cent of the population. Approximately one-third are British-born. Britain has the largest Chinese population in western Europe, followed by France, the Netherlands and Germany. Further information about the history of Chinese migration to Britain can be found in Price (Reference Price2019).
17.2 The Linguistic Background of the Chinese in Britain
The Chinese language is an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan family. It is spoken, in various forms, by over one billion people as a native language, and its written form has an unbroken history since 1500 bce. It is important to distinguish between the spoken and written forms of Chinese. Spoken Chinese comprises a large number of related varieties, known to the Chinese as fangyan, or regional speech. Traditionally, the Chinese fangyan are classified into eight groups in terms of geographic distribution and linguistic-structural affiliation. They are:
1. Beifang (Northern), the native language of about 70 per cent of the Chinese population.
2. Yue, the majority of its speakers are in Guangdong province, the southernmost mainland province of China, with the capital city of Guangzhou (Canton) as its centre. Large numbers can also be found amongst the overseas Chinese diaspora.
3. Kejia (Hakka), whose speakers came from small agricultural areas and are now scattered throughout southeastern China.
4. Min Bei (Northern Min), spoken in the northern part of Fujian (Hokkien) province, the mainland province on the western side of the Taiwan Strait.
5. Min Nan (Southern Min), spoken in the southern part of Fujian, as well as in Taiwan and Hainan islands.
6. Wu, spoken in the lower Changjiang (the Yangtze River) region, including urban metropolitan centres such as Shanghai.
7. Xiang, mainly spoken in the south central region.
8. Gan, spoken chiefly in the southeastern inland provinces.
Within each fangyan group, there are sub-varieties with their own distinctive features. For example, Cantonese, as it is known in the West, is a sub-variety within the Yue fangyan group, Shanghainese a sub-variety of Wu, and Hokkien of Min Nan. It is in this sense (i.e. being a sub-variety of a fangyan group) that Chinese linguists talk about Cantonese, Shanghainese and Hokkien as ‘dialects’, an important point often misunderstood and misrepresented in the linguistics literature in the West.
One prominent feature of spoken Chinese is the unintelligibility between one fangyan and another. This unintelligibility is regarded by the Chinese as a social group boundary marker distinguishing people of different origins and used by some linguists to argue that fangyan are in fact different ‘languages’. Among the Hong Kong Chinese, for example, Cantonese is spoken by the Cantonese Punti (native) people as their first language; others speak Hakka, Chiuchow (variably spelt as Chiuchou, Teochiu, Teochew, Chaozhou), Hokkien, Shanghainese, and other dialects and sub-dialects.
In addition to these regional varieties, there is a spoken Chinese form known as Guoyu (literally: national speech), which has evolved from Guanhua, a hybrid, standardised spoken form used during the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) and which has been officially endorsed and promoted as the lingua franca in China since the 1920s. It is now widely used, in modified forms, in mainland China, where it is known as Putonghua (or common speech), in Taiwan, where it is known as Guoyu (national language), and in Singapore, where it is known as Huayu (the Chinese language). Phonologically, Guoyu, Putonghua and Huayu sound different. Guoyu is better known in the English-speaking world as Mandarin. As the story goes, Mandarin is the transliteration of Man daren, or Manchu officials, who ruled China for nearly three hundred years. Thus, it was used to refer to both the people and their language. Since the Manchu dynasty was overthrown by the republicans in 1911, the term has been used to refer to the official spoken language of China. As the official language of China is based on the structure and vocabulary of Beifang fangyan, Mandarin is also often used to refer to Beifang (Northern) varieties of Chinese.
The Chinese writing system is not alphabetic. Instead of letters, a system of written characters is used to represent words. The characters began as pictographs but evolved into complex symbols often combining semantic and phonetic radicals. The Chinese written characters were first standardised in about 200 bce, and the system of characters still in use today had taken shape by about 200 ce. The same system of written characters is shared by all literate Chinese, whatever fangyan they may speak. The Chinese traditionally place great emphasis on the written language and see it as a major cultural symbol distinguishing the Chinese from all other peoples. Chinese schools at all levels devote a considerable amount of time to literacy – in the Chinese context, the reading and writing of written characters.
One reason for such emphasis seems to be due to the unique and complex relationship between the Chinese phonological system and the written script. Chinese is a monosyllabic and tonal language. Every written Chinese character represents a syllable with a tone. There are over 48,000 written characters in the standard Chinese dictionary Zhonghua Da Zidian. Yet according to Putonghua pronunciation, there are only around 300 legal combinations of sounds, or syllables, with four different tones. Consequently, there are numerous homophones in Chinese, distinguishable primarily in written forms.
Since the 1950s, there have been a series of mass campaigns in mainland China and in Singapore to popularise the official forms of Chinese (Putonghua and Huayu respectively). The rationale behind these campaigns is to remedy communication difficulties caused by the differences in regional speech varieties, or fangyan. Two principal strategies have been used in the campaigns: simplification of some of the characters and the introduction of a phonetic spelling system. The latter is known as pinyin. It is designed to represent the written characters as they are pronounced in Putonghua, so that non-native Chinese speakers or speakers of non-standard Chinese dialects could learn a standard pronunciation. There are as yet no agreed phonetic spelling systems for the other spoken varieties of Chinese, and given the popular perception among the Chinese that there is only one Chinese language, it seems unlikely that efforts will be made to design such systems. However, since 1997, the Linguistics Society of Hong Kong has developed a Cantonese romanisation scheme, known as Jyut Ping and is trying to promote it in the region. More information on the history and sociolinguistics of Chinese can be found in Chen (Reference Chen1999).
With regard to the Chinese in Britain, it is estimated that up to 70 per cent speak Cantonese as their first language, some 25 per cent speak Hakka, and the rest speak Hokkien and other varieties of Chinese fangyan. Cantonese is used as the lingua franca of the Chinese communities, especially amongst the immigrant generations. Putonghua and Guoyu are increasingly taught in Chinese community schools and used in public spaces too.
17.3 Current Patterns of Language Use in the Chinese Communities in Britain
Like other immigrant communities in the country, the Chinese in Britain face the sociolinguistic dilemma of maintaining their ethnic language on the one hand and developing proficiency in English on the other. In terms of the status of the various languages involved, a complex pattern of polyglossia has emerged, with English as the socio-economically high variety, Cantonese the community high variety, Putonghua or Guoyu the politically high variety within the community context, and all the other Chinese fangyan and some regional forms of English as low varieties (see Figure 17.1).
Figure 17.1 Polyglossia of the Chinese communities in Britain.
With regard to language use, a three-generational language shift has taken place, with the grandparent generation remaining Chinese monolingual, the parent generation using Chinese as their primary language of communication but having some English for specific purposes, and the child generation becoming English-dominant.
17.3.1 Cantonese in Britain
In a study of thirty-four British-born children of Cantonese-speaking parents in Tyneside, Li and Lee (Reference Li and Lee2001) found that where the typological differences between Cantonese and English are the greatest, for instance in the use of noun classifiers and quantifiers, the children’s Cantonese speech was often influenced by English. Some of them would avoid the use of Cantonese altogether by code-switching to English. The following are some of the examples.
(1)
Boy, aged 7: ngo5 used-to fan3gaau3 hai5 dai6yi6 fong2 aa3 (gaan1) I used-to sleep in second room par ‘I used to sleep in another room.’
The classifier gaan1, which is normally used with nouns denoting buildings and rooms, should be placed before the noun.
(2)
Girl, aged 5: gan1zyu6 baai2 seoi2 go2 dou3 and then put water that place (di1) (hai5) ‘and then (they) put some water over there’
The classifier for non-count nouns di1 would normally be used before the noun ‘water’. A locative element hai5 should also be added.
In example (3), the boy was asked if he went swimming at all. In his response, a code-switch was made to English for the quantified phrase, which functions as an adverbial. It is placed clause-initially, preceding the verb phrase, which is a legitimate position in English and the only legitimate position in Cantonese. However, the clause-final position of the verb phrase following the prepositional phrase conforms to Cantonese word-order rules only.
(3)
Boy, aged 11: erm jau5 uhm, every Monday tung4 ngo5 hok6haau6 erm yes uhm, every Monday with my school heoi3 jau4seoi2 go swimming ‘every Monday, (I) go swimming with my school.’ (…mui5 go3 lai5baai3jat1 dou1 …heoi3 jau4seoi2) (…each cl Monday ‘dou1’ …go swimming)
In (4), the quantified phrase, together with a lexical item, is in English, while in (5) the only elements in English are the quantified phrase. In contrast to example (3) above, the children in (4) and (5) are not using the usual word order for Cantonese, since in every case their quantified expression follows rather than precedes the verb. This seems to suggest that the children are either using an underlying English word order or, in the case of (5), they might also be merely keeping to the default Cantonese (S)VO word order, not being aware of the need to move the verb phrase to clause-final position when expressing quantification.
(4)
Boy, aged 11: ngo5 jau5 jat1 go3 homework each day aa3 I have one cl homework each day prt ‘I have one piece of homework each day.’ (ngo5 mui5 jat6 dou1 jau5 jat1 joeng6 gung1fo3) (I each day ‘dou1’ have one cl homework)
(5)
Boy, aged 15: ngo5 zung1ji3 both I like both (ngo5 loeng5 dou6 dou1 zung1ji3) (I two cl ‘dou1’ like)
Findings such as these suggest that the structural characteristics of the Cantonese morphosyntax of the British-born Chinese children resemble patterns of Cantonese acquisition which are closer to those of L2 learners than those of L1 learners.
17.3.2 The Hakka Speakers in Britain
Most of the existing studies of the Chinese communities in Britain focus on the Cantonese group, as they are by far the largest Chinese group in the country. In a small survey of the Hakka-speaking families in Tyneside, we found that all of the fourteen Hakka L1-speaking women had acquired Cantonese, the lingua franca of the Chinese community in Britain, and used it regularly in social interaction, but only three of them claimed to be able to speak English. However, only three out of the nine Hakka L1-speaking men we studied had acquired Cantonese, yet all of them could speak English. Furthermore, all the children of the Hakka-speaking families that we studied had acquired Cantonese and English, although only six out of a total of twenty-two claimed to be able to speak Hakka (Li Reference Li2000).
If we consider language shift in the Chinese communities in Britain as a change of habitual language use from Chinese to English, it might appear that the Chinese men are leading the shift. However, the women in the community have also significantly changed their language choice patterns, although it is not to English but to Cantonese, the community lingua franca. Language shift in this case is not simply a matter of making a linguistic choice but part of a socio-cultural process of forming a community. The Hakka speakers see themselves first and foremost as part of the Chinese community and wish to acquire the appropriate language in order to function as members of the larger community. The Hakka women, who have taken on the role of bridging the family and the community, see Cantonese as particularly useful for this purpose. The Hakka men, on the other hand, have more opportunities to interact with English speakers and fewer with other Chinese, due partly to the catering trade. They therefore regard English more useful than Cantonese for their purposes.
17.3.3 Putonghua/Guoyu in Britain
As has been mentioned before, Putonghua and Guoyu have a relatively high socio-political and symbolic status in the Chinese communities in Britain. This is partly due to the fact that Putonghua and Guoyu are the official languages of mainland China and Taiwan respectively, to which the Chinese in Britain feel some sense of belonging. After the transition of sovereignty of Hong Kong from Britain to China, more and more Chinese people in the UK feel they should learn Putonghua. Putonghua is also being promoted by the British educational system, through formal examinations (GCSEs and A-Level) and the Mandarin Excellent Programme funded by the Department of Education. Although the number of Putonghua first-language speakers from mainland China living in the UK is relatively small, their interaction with other Chinese immigrants is increasing. Many of them occupy important business, academic and professional positions and their voices will be heard more in the future.
17.3.4 Literacy in Chinese
By far the biggest challenge to the Chinese communities in Britain in their language maintenance efforts is the maintenance of literacy in Chinese – the reading and writing of Chinese characters – especially amongst the British-born children. In the existing literature on language maintenance and language shift in linguistic minority communities, bilingual speakers’ ability to use written language(s) has not been subjected to the same rigorous and systematic examinations as their ability to use spoken language(s). Yet, bilinguals, especially young bilinguals, can very often speak two languages with a similar degree of fluency while being literate in only one – usually the language they learn in school. More importantly perhaps, members of bilingual communities do seem to regard the ability to read and write as an indicator of a speaker’s communicative competence. In communities such as the Chinese, where written language becomes a symbol of traditional culture, a reduction or loss of ability to read and write their ethnic language may take on particular social significance.
Chinese communities in Britain have set up weekend language schools – some 120 of them across the country – specifically for the purpose of teaching the British-born children to read and write Chinese. In the meantime, there are some elderly Chinese who do not read or write Chinese very well. The majority of Chinese adults read and write in full characters as opposed to the simplified version used in mainland China and Singapore. Nevertheless, for Chinese adults, the literacy problem is with English not Chinese.
17.3.5 English by the Chinese in Britain
It was mentioned earlier that the Chinese in Britain tend to live in geographically diverse parts of the country. They are usually surrounded with English speakers, so Chinese children are brought up in an English-dominant environment. The English language they are exposed to varies from highly localised vernacular forms, such as Geordie and Glaswegian, to standard British English through the media. There is no evidence of a Chinese English variety emerging from the community. Some of the adults speak English non-fluently and with distinct accents, similar to Hong Kong Chinese speakers of English. But these are signs of developing skills of the language rather than a new language variety.
17.3.6 Influences from Hong Kong, the Media and ICT
As the majority of the Chinese in Britain can trace their origins to Hong Kong, the Hong Kong influence can be seen in every aspect of their social life, including their language use. In the 1980s, a small number of words and phrases could be observed amongst Cantonese speakers in the UK, which seemed to suggest an emerging local variety of Cantonese. Most of them were obviously influenced by contact with English (e.g. bafong, derived from ‘ba(th)’ + fong ‘room’ as opposed to the Hong Kong Cantonese saisanfong ‘bathroom’, or toijau (literally: ‘table’ + ‘wine’) as opposed to jau ‘wine’). Yet, in the late 1990s, such words and phrases seemed to have given way to the Hong Kong version. The Cantonese spoken by the majority of the Chinese in Britain is largely indistinguishable from that spoken in Hong Kong today.
One of the reasons for the diminution of a British variety of Chinese, or indeed a variety of English spoken by the Chinese in Britain, is the rapid expansion of information and communication technology (ICT). Communication with East Asia, especially China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, has never been easier and faster. Ownership of satellite television and home computers is widespread in the Chinese families in Britain. Whatever happens in East Asia is immediately known by Chinese people over here. New words and phrases and special ways of speaking which appear in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan soon become popularly used amongst the Chinese in Britain. For example, the following newly coined phrases are frequently heard in the Chinese communities in Britain today:
(6)
din yau ‘email’ baan cool ‘pretend to be cool’ ngaam kii ‘to get along well’ jaai talking ‘talk only’ (esp. gay jargon)
Newspapers and magazines from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan are widely available in shops in Chinatowns, alongside the popular European Chinese newspaper Sing Tao Daily. Chinese language television can be received via satellite or cable. Public libraries in major cities such as London, Birmingham, Manchester and Newcastle have stocks of Chinese language books published in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
The Hong Kong influence extends to general attitudes towards language and language learning. Since 1997, there are growing numbers of Hong Kong-born Chinese learning Putonghua, in response to the political and social changes of the Special Administrative Region, the new status accorded to Hong Kong by the Chinese government. A similar trend is detectable in Britain, where the Chinese community schools have introduced Putonghua classes, and teaching material (textbooks and CD-ROM) for the simplified characters from mainland China is being imported and used.
The Chinese have been a significant linguistic and ethnic minority community in Britain for centuries. While it looks unlikely that there will be any sizeable Chinese immigration in the near future, the Chinese population in the UK will continue to grow with the British-born generations. To what extent the Chinese language can be maintained, and indeed which particular variety of Chinese will be maintained, remain interesting questions. The Chinese communities in Britain have certainly realised the importance of language maintenance and are trying to reverse the trend of language shift by setting up language schools where British-born Chinese can learn their community languages. Nevertheless, the use of the Chinese language will be confined to specific domains (e.g. family and in-community communication). A Chinese–English bilingual community has emerged, which will play an increasingly important role in the social, economic and cultural lives of Britain.
