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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4384 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

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The official language of Hong Kong is still Cantonese and the language policy of Hong Kong hasn't changed at all since the protests. Surprisingly few things have as Kong Hong was never actually a democracy. In Guangdong everything official, local governments, school and business is all in Mandarin. The only special status Cantonese has is that broadcasts are allowed to be in Cantonese likely this was allowed because of the previous status of Hong Kong as well as the amount of media produced.

The official languages of Hong Kong per the Basic Law agreed between Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping are English and "Chinese" with no version specified. Government documents are issued bilingually in English and standard written Chinese. This is supposed to be equally legible to speakers of any Chinese language because written Chinese is non-alphabetic, and is similar but different to the "written Cantonese" used by Hong Kongers for ordinary written communication or the Putonghua (written Mandarin) now taught in mainland schools. The government will conduct spoken business in English, Mandarin or Cantonese and all three spoken languages are taught in schools, although "written Cantonese" is not.

Yeah they’re not committed to aggressively stamping out Cantonese, if anything I think over the last decade there has been more of a vaguely nationalist drive to preserve Chinese culture including regional languages in a way that, in fifty years, might actually lead to the kind of thing you see in parts of Europe with declining regional languages. But for now Hong Kong is fine to keep using it.

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