The Minority Of Minority
where you can take a journey to a GuangXi Hakka village in HK
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Demographic implication & village composition
Linguists often relate demographic information of subjects to their language use. In order to preserve a minority language of a community, it is important for the speakers of a particular minor language to stay in a close group geographically, i.e. to live near one another. According to the official website of the Tuen Mun Rural Committee and our interviews, we found that the demography of the villagers in Tsing Shan Tsuen has changed drastically over the years. Originally, most of the villagers belonged to the Tam family. (Chart 1) Years and decades having slipped by, the current residents of the village, with different family names, came from different parts of Hong Kong or China. They are no longer the indigenous habitants (families from Guangxi who have lived in Tsing Shan Tsuen since 1920s). (Chart 2) It is also observed that there were no ancestral halls exist in Tsing Shan Tsuen. People live dispersedly over the hill, which obstructs their constant contact and communication. The villagers’ places of origin range from Chinese Tibetan (雲平 yún ping) to Guangdong Jiangmen (鶴山 hè shān). Even when only Guangxi comers are concerned, not all of them are speakers of Hakka (Chart 3), which further reduces their sense of commonality, and thus belonging. Therefore, Hakka language does not bear a significant role as a solidarity or identity marker as a Tsing Shan Tsuen villager.
Given that the composition of the villagers of Tsing Shan Tsuen is highly diverse, the Guangxi residents who speak Hakka in the village do not use Hakka in their first encounter with the rest of the residents. With speakers of other language have gradually outnumbered the speakers of Hakka in the village, speakers of Hakka no longer talk to each other in Hakka because very often speakers of other languages are present. (Chart 3) Hakka is no longer the dominant language spoken in the village. Lily reported that they speak Hakka only when they meet people from the same origin. They barely speak Hakka because there is no one they can talk to in Hakka (見到鄉里親人先講囉，好少講，好少講……無呀，成日講邊有成日講，無對像講). The people in the village do not share the same origin and perhaps identity, therefore lingua franca in Tsing Shan Tsuen has been Cantonese for communication between villagers regardless of which language is the native language of the interlocutors in a conversation since the beginning in 1960s.
Chart 1
Chart 3
Chart 2