Mela
A burst of blog posts blew into Educational Sociolinguistics in the brief time it took technology to blow me westward to the far East for a week of encounters with extraordinary scholars at the Education University of Hong Kong. A brief time by the calendar, but long in subjective time, measured by the innumerable back-and-forth fractions of an inch that make up all the movement possible in the cramped quarters one is confined to when flying for fifteen hours over the wide Pacific.
While I was uncramping over the weekend, the contributors to this blog were writing about sexism in Chinese and racism in English (the term “bootlicking bilingualism” particularly stood out for me as deserving of a wide public) and applying their knowledge of pragmatics across a range of tricky situations from snack ordering to sales pitching. The blog has been busy. Posts about poetry and how untranslatable it is—along with most of the really interesting language out there—have been flooding in.
Meanwhile, in an upscale Hong Kong hotel (I gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the WYNG foundation for the sybaritically spacious quarters), spared because it was Sunday from having to set out into the steady downpour of a southern spring, the local sociolinguistic landscape unfolded before my eyes and ears in microcosm. It started at the airport—the linguistic landscape that presents itself to the eyeis of course Chinese-English bilingual here. I don’t know what the signs guiding one to Immigration and Baggage Reclaim looked like before 1997 (when the 99-year British lease on Hong Kong’s New Territories expired and The Handover back to Beijing happened), but at present Chinese is first, English second. What the earhears, however, is not bi- but trilingual. Cantonese is first, then Mandarin, then English, in all public announcements. Hong Kong presents an officially biliterate, trilingual face to the world.
The hotel staff were kindness itself to this jetlagged Canadian—but not quite in as officially trilingual a way. As far as the non-Chinese-speaking tourist can discern, fluency in English seems to be a ticket to more highly placed, highly paid jobs in this hotel. The personnel at the service desks are all extremely trilingual; the servers at the restaurants, perfectly bilingual in Cantonese and Mandarin, with quite serviceable English; the clearers of tables and cleaners of rooms, more or less unilingual in Cantonese with a little Mandarin. And so on down the line.
A week is of course not nearly long enough to get a handle on this sociolinguistically fascinating place, nexus of so much that is Chinese and so much that was British. But so far, my distinct impression has been that the prestige and pay scale associated with any given service job is directly proportional to the number of languages and fluency in each that would reasonably be required, and vice versa.
There is also the fact that the less multilingual jobs seem to be disproportionately occupied by women—but that, presumably, is another story, and not one I will be here long enough to find out much about, alas!
