At the beginning of the ASTU 100 course, we went over Tangled Memories by Sturken. In the part of Memory and Forgetting, Sturken mentioned big powers could utilize strategic/ organized forgetting to reduce the national consciousness of people from a region within the country that may see themselves as an independent nation (e.g., case of Catalonia in Spain) (7). One of the ways of strategic forgetting would be countries defining languages with different approaches that a linguist would define languages. By doing this, countries can either unite or divide people, stating that they are speaking the same language, so they are people from the same country or stating that they are speaking different languages, so they are people of different nations. This topic was explored both in our Political Science and Linguistics class.

By linguistics standard, two persons speaking different dialects of the same language should be able to communicate without having to learn the language the other person is speaking, which is called mutually intelligibility. For example, if a person speaking with a heavy Scottish accent English to a North American speaker, though the North American Speaker may not be able to comprehend a 100% of the Scottish English Speaker, he should still be able to understand most words in a sentence and have not much of a problem communicating with each other.

In Political Science, we talked about languages could be used for nation building and for unity within a nation. By promoting an official language in a country with multiple languages spoken and having schools teaching the official language sure does help promoting Nationalism and belonging to a country. For example, there are many branches such as Cantonese and Mandarin within “Chinese” that the branches are not mutually intelligible – a Mandarin speaker cannot communicate with a Cantonese speaker without learning Cantonese. If a Linguist has to determine whether Cantonese and Mandarin are dialects of the same language, the Linguist will probably say no. However, China would consider “Chinese” as one language in order to unify their people. China is a giant-sized country with a plethora of mutually intelligible languages being spoken, from the country’s viewpoint, having to many languages within a China may lead to parts of the country fighting for independence, especially the case of Hong Kong and Macau, Cantonese-speaking former Western colonies. Indeed, in recent year, there is a policy from by the Hong Kong Government (which its power came from the Mainland China Government) to slowly decrease the importance of Cantonese, such as teaching Chinese subject at schools with Mandarin instead of Cantonese. I myself came from an elementary school having Chinese subject conducted in Mandarin. Before I got into my Secondary School, I would say my ability and knowledge to Cantonese, my mother tongue, was much worse than many of my schoolmates in my secondary school.

There are many languages around the world that are in a similar situation with Cantonese, such as Catalan and Basque spoken in regions of Spain. Sometimes regimes assume speakers of a minority language have a higher tendence to cause “chaos” in the country and therefore they many choose to suppress certain languages in their own country. As a person who experienced the suppression myself, I would say suppression is never the best strategy since the rise localism of Hong Kong came after the suppression. Instead, why can’t we respect and appreciate differences between people?