HK influence has made Macau a trilingual society, says academic

An academic at the University of Macau has argued that the cultural influence of Hong Kong has essentially turned Macau into a de facto trilingual society.

The argument was outlined in a May 2018 paper published in the International Journal of Arts and Commerce.

The paper’s author, Bruce Kwong, wrote that “English seems to be the third universally applicable [language] in this tiny enclave,” a consequence of the importance of Hong Kong to Macau, starting in the late-19th century.

“Due to the gradual infiltration of the pluralistic culture of Hong Kong, an ex-British colony in the Far East, English has been universally used by local Macau Chinese,” wrote Kwong. “Most of the local Chinese can write and speak English more [proficiently] than that of Portuguese making one query the official status of English.”

Chinese and Portuguese are both recognized as official languages in the Macau SAR, whereas English is not. It is treated as an official language in neighboring Hong Kong, alongside Chinese.

However, since the gaming liberalization at the start of the century, a tide of expats and non-Chinese speaking domestic workers has made the use of English in the city more common and more important.

“After the increase of gaming franchise in the early 2000’s, the applicability of English has become more explicit over time,” wrote Kwong. “It is claimed that Macau is a trilingual state in spite of the non-official status of English.”

But the roots of English use in Macau go further back than that, argues the academic. They begin with the policy of Portuguese language education under the pre-1999 administrations.

“[The] Portuguese Macau government [administration] had made no intention to promote Portuguese education to local Chinese, and therefore, the only choice of receiving second language education to the local Chinese was English instead of Portuguese,” he noted.

“Chinese and English then became the major language in Macau’s Chinese society whereas Portuguese, [irrespective] of its governing status, became a minority language basically used within the small-circle Portuguese community.”

The author contrasted the language experiences of Macau and Hong Kong under their respective colonial governments.

In the former, Portuguese remained a minority language spoken by only a handful of Chinese people, whereas “English was quite commonly used in Hong Kong, and many local Chinese could speak English and took English as their second language.”

Though there are technical aspects of Portuguese and English that make the former a more challenging language to learn, the prevalence of the latter is mostly due to the cultural and economic influences of Hong Kong, which include trade and commercial relations, as well as the city’s film and television.

Bruce Kwong is an assistant professor at the University of Macau’s department of government and public administration. His research interests include elections, policing and public ethic in the greater China region. He has also co-edited two volumes on socio-political affairs in Hong Kong and Macau following their handovers at the close of the 20th century.