10
REVIEW
How many Hakka speakers were required? How many Hoklo? How many Shanghai? How should they be deployed? Should the wording of each question be worked out separately for each language? Could use be made of the 'national language' called Kuoyu, which successive governments of China had been trying to popularize since 1927 and which is taught as a subject in most vernacular schools in the Colony: would it be safe to rely on this as a means of communication with all who did not understand the major languages Cantonese, English, Hakka, Hoklo? All these questions can be easily answered now we have the Census results; but the answers had to be guessed at in 1959, when the plans were made, and some of the guesses were bound to be wrong.
It was decided to require spoken Cantonese as a basic qualifica- tion for the ordinary enumerators, who must also be familiar with either written Chinese or written English. Spoken English was a requirement for chief enumerators, but for enumerators knowledge of spoken English and other languages was a bonus. In districts where Hakka was known to predominate, the enumerators had to speak Hakka and Cantonese or Hakka and English. Virtually no use was made of Kuoyu, but to cope with linguistic minorities a small flying squad was organized of qualified enumerators able to speak various dialects of China, besides Japanese, Malay, Tagalog and the more likely languages of India, Pakistan, Ceylon and Europe. The services of this flying squad were, in fact, seldom required.
The training manuals were published separately in English and Chinese, and the census schedule was so designed that by folding down the top edge column headings in Chinese became visible instead of those in English. The arm-band worn by each enumerator was in English and Chinese, and so was the census officer's identity card which had to be carried by everyone doing census work.
The final results tended to confirm the appropriateness of these arrangements. Of all persons aged five and over (the language of children under five was not recorded) 79% gave their usual language as Cantonese, but an additional 16% were able to speak Cantonese, making 95% of the whole population aged five and over who either use this language habitually or can use it on occasion.