The Minority Of Minority
where you can take a journey to a GuangXi Hakka village in HK
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Small number of speakers, alienation and loosening solidarity
One Hakka speaker which came from Guangdong was interviewed by us. His views towards the language were very different from that of the rest of our respondents, who came from Guangxi.
As the previous analyses have pointed out, the number of Hakka speakers from Guangxi in the village decreased substantially with more and more people moving in from other parts of Hong Kong, China and even the world. (Chart 3) From the interviews and other literary reviews that we did, we found that the number of Guangdong Hakka speakers were much larger than that of Guangxi Hakka speakers. While most of the Guangdong Hakka speakers who aged 50 or above generally held a positive attitude towards their native language, the Guangxi Hakka people expressed negative attitude towards Hakka. Lily also explicitly said twice that she does not like Hakka (我都唔鍾意講客家話) and she thinks Hakka is unimportant for her. As it is suggested earlier, given that the number of Guangxi Hakka speakers is limited in Tsing Shan Tsuen, speakers reported that they feel like a group of minority outcast when they use Hakka to communicate among themselves. They do not want the rest of the village residents to label them as “country bumpkins” if they talk to one another in Hakka in front of others.
Also, shared religious beliefs, especially folk religion, often serve to strengthen group identities (Hann, 2010). The infrequence of common religious practices in Tsing Shan Tsuen is proposed to be one of the factors that weaken the social affiliation of the villagers. Data collection of this study happened in April, 2013 around the Chinese Ching Ming festival when people went to temples and monasteries to worship the gods and offer sacrifice to their ancestors. In other New Territories villages which are lager in size, temples there serve only the villagers; visits from outsiders are strictly forbidden by dogs and villagers. There were many people, who are not residents in the village, visiting Tsing Shan Monastery. The visits of the outsiders are not unlikely to render the monastery a place not exclusively owned by the villagers, weakening their sense of commonality manifested in religious practices.
Lastly, from our interviews with people in Siu Hang Tsuen, a neighboring village where its main inhabitants are Guangdong Hakka speakers, we noticed that the domains in which people use Hakka are the same for both Guangdong and Guangxi comers. However, the interviewee who came from Guangdong reported that the Guangdong Hakka speakers have a strong social bond while Hakka can served as an indicator to identify the in-group members. On the other hand, the Guangxi Hakka speakers in Tsing Sha Tsuen only occasionally attend traditional Hakka festivities during which they spend time together and socialize, such as, according to Lily, weddings and funeral services (客家嘅嫁女呀，娶新抱呀，老人家過身呀，喪禮). Due to the fact that Guangdong Hakka speakers outnumbered the Guangxi Hakka people and the former have a stronger in-group bond, Guangxi people felt isolated when they speak in their native language. Therefore, the loosening solidarity of the Guangxi Hakka speakers has made these speakers less committed to pick up their own native language again and pass on the language to the next generation in the mostly-Cantonese-speaking city than the Guangdong Hakka speakers.
Chart 3