THE DIALECTS OF HONG KONG BOAT PEOPLE
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in order to collect the linguistic details for each group. These details will tell us something when used alone but will be much more useful when accompanied by the data from an anthropological study.
I view this article as the first of a series, but I am not in any way trying to stake a claim for myself on all future research in this field. I want to emphasize the fact that it is a multifaceted job with many Boat People communities yet to be studied; Hong Kong alone should offer material for a dozen distinctive efforts of this type. When time permits I will do more such research but the task will get done much more quickly if other linguists and anthropologists interest themselves.
For the purposes of this paper the important point about the Boat People is the fact that they have for centuries been assigned a unique and inferior social status and much speculation has arisen concerning the possibility that they were not Chinese, or were not pure Chinese, or were some strange combination of local and foreign blood and background. Miss Ward refers to still current stories that the Boat People are, for example, non-Han, speak a non-Chinese language, and have six toes. Her anthropological work in Hong Kong led her to the conclusions that the social structure of the Boat People is essentially traditional Chinese with only such minor variations as are necessitated by their occupation and shipboard residence. With her own research concentrated on anthropology in the broader sense, she suggested that a separate investigation be made of the linguistic problems involved to see if any details would develop which might be significant when added to her data. Her specific question was: 'How does the language of the Kau Sai Boat People compare with Standard Cantonese?'
The question is fundamentally a linguistic one but it has ramifications with significance in other fields. For example, linguistic evidence can give us information on the historical origins of a group, data which can be used in conjunction with written records or oral tradition, or in place of these when they are absent. Answering such a question is the task of the linguist, but utilizing the answer in a bigger picture is a problem for the anthropologist.