TNAG-2591-FCO40-3779-Appointment-of-Chris-Patten-as-new-Governor-of-Hong-Kong--Ap-1992 — Page 52

HONG KONG GOVERNMENT OFFICE

LONDON WIX 3 L B

G GRAFTON

STREET

Hong Kong is officially bi-lingual: English and Cantonese. Cantonese is one form or dialect of the Chinese language. It is spoken in Quangdong, the most South-Easterly province of China, of which Quangzhou

(known as Canton previously) is the Capital. province of Quangdong has a population of some forty million, most of whom speak Cantonese as their mother- tongue.

Outside China, Cantonese is by far the most widely spoken form of the Chinese language. It is the native speech of Hong Kong and Macao. In Britain, practically all the proprietors, waiters and cooks of the numerous Chinese restaurants are Cantonese speakers since the great majority of them have come from Hong Kong where the lingua franca is Cantonese, although the mother-tongue of many of them is Hakka or some other dialects.

The principal dialect of Chinese is Mandarin or Kuoyu (National Language). This is a form of Northern Chinese, particularly that spoken in the Capital, Peking. Mandarin, with regional variations, is spoken over a very wide area of China, embracing about three-quarters of the population. Mandarin is the official language for Government and education and modern Chinese is written in Mandarin. However, it is estimated that there are more than 150 million people who speak dialects other than the northern form, most of them in the coastal region of South-east China, from Shanghai to the Southern frontier, the provinces of Zhejiang, Fujian and Quangdong.

Chinese dialects all belong to the group of tone-languages, usually being referred to as part of the Sino-Tibetan family. Tone-languages are those in which a variation in the pitch of the voice gives a completely different meaning to an otherwise identical word. These languages are also normally monosyllabic. All the main tone-languages found today are in the Far East, apart from Chinese, they include Thai and Vietnamese.

TELEPHONI: 01.199 9821

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/In Chinese,

CABLES: HONGAID LONDONWI