Daily Use of Hakka-WHO? WHAT? WHEN?
Hong Kong is transformed into a developed city where every single part get slinked. The Hakka are no longer isolated in the village but get connected, so as their language use- Cantonese and Hakka. As Fishman (1964) suggested, language choice is all about “WHO speaks WHAT language to WHOM and WHEN”, which depends on different domains of language use. We have carried out a site-visit to a Hakka Village in Sheung Shui and spent an afternoon with the Hakka. By interviewing them and observing their conversation, it is interesting to find that the language varies between generation, education, living environment and topics. Sometimes surprisingly code-switching will happened in between.
We interviewed 3 of the Hakka- Fat, Yau and Apple. Fat and Yau migrated to Scotland in 1970s and temporarily returned to Hong Kong for vacation. They are both aged 60 above, who are the uncles of Apple (who is aged around 45 years old, permanently living in Hong Kong). Three of them are the relatives of one of our groupmates, Vanessa. Thus, generally speaking there are 3 generations during the interview. |
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