Protecting the Great Wall of Penang Hokkien

Every now and then, a campaign rears its head on the need to preserve Penang Hokkien. There is a burst of enthusiasm followed by silence, before later on, another campaign manifests itself. In this articfle, I want to explain to you why I usually take no interest in such campaigns.

To start, let me take you back into history, to the year 1644. Yes, a long, long time ago. All of you would know about the Great Wall of China. You know that it was built over hundreds, even thousands of years, to serve the purpose of protecting China against invaders. The Chinese people know that if the wall is breached, the invaders from the north will come down and take over their country.

Twice in the long history of China, northern invaders caused the fall of a Chinese empire to non-Chinese rulers. The first was in 1279, when Genghis Khan's raids in Western Xia ushered in the Yuan dynasty.

The second time happened in 1644, when rebel leader Li Zicheng breached the walls of Beijing, and the subsequent upheavals allowed the Manchus to overrun China and establish the Qing dynasty. The last Ming emperor, who had earlier likened the Manchus as a mere "skin rash", committed suicide, putting an end to the dynasty.

Having done our detour into history, let's return to 21st century Penang, where those who are aware will know that something is under siege. But it's not a wall that you can see. Today, what is under siege is Penang Hokkien itself.

It's easier to fight invaders that you can see. It's harder to fight those that you can't, who enter your gates like wolves in sheep's clothing. Like termites behind your furniture, or weeds in your garden, they creep in unannounced.

I am not talking about Mandarin. Yes, Mandarin is a threat to Penang Hokkien, but in this case, I am talking about Taiwanese Hokkien.

I do not discourage people from learning Taiwanese Hokkien, but I treat Taiwanese Hokkien the same way I treat Japanese, Korean and Thai. To me, it is a foreign language. Although it sounds a lot like Penang Hokkien, it traces its history to a different part of Fujian Province from Penang Hokkien. And Taiwanese isn't even native to Taiwan. Just like Mandarin, it crossed the straits into Taiwan from mainland China, at around the same time that the Hokkien language spread throughout Southeast Asia. A truly indigenous Taiwanese language would be one of the Formosan languages like Yami and Atayal. Taiwanese is as native to Taiwan as Penang Hokkien is, to Penang.

In the efforts to save Penang Hokkien, there are language champions who are leaning towards leveraging on initiatives taken to spearhead the spread of Taiwanese. In particular, they are attempting to introduce writing Penang Hokkien using a writing system based on Taiwanese Romanisation, which itself is based on Church Romanisation, established by Presbyterian missionaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I am one of the few champions of Penang Hokkien to resist such an effort, not that I am not interested to save Penang Hokkien, but rather, I view such efforts as opening the gates for invaders to enter.

To preserve the unique attributes of Penang Hokkien, I do not accept the infiltration of non-local elements, particular the writing system. Some may say that I do so, in order to prop up my own writing system, to which, my response is that, if a local can create a superior writing system that takes into account our cultural and educational attributes, I would consider it. But so far, none has come forward.

There are also those who say that leveraging on Taiwanese Hokkien is our only hope to preserve Penang Hokkien. I beg to differ. To me, it's a sell out. If we want to preserve and develop Penang Hokkien, it has to be entirely homegrown, with ingredients plucked from our mainstream education system, in other words, elements of English, Malay and Mandarin, not a foreign language such as Taiwanese, no matter how closely it resembles Penang Hokkien.

One final argument from proponents of using a Taiwanese Romanisation-based system is that the Christian missionaries worked in Malaya and created the prototype of the writing system here, before they brought it over to China. While that may be true, that writing system has always remained in the peripheries of the mainstream; the mainstream for Penang Hokkien has always been an oral language spoken not only by the Hokkien, but also the Cantonese, Hakka, Teochew and Hainanese as the lingua franca among various Chinese communities in Penang.

How about writing Penang Hokkien using Chinese characters? That too is off-mainstream. There has always been a diglossia. Today, people speak Penang Hokkien but write using Mandarin or English. In the past, they wrote using Literary Chinese or English. English, Malay and Hokkien have always been around from the first day that Penang was established, Mandarin hasn't. Writing vernacular Penang Hokkien with Chinese characters is not how people in the past do things, and doing so in the present is a modern thing that mimics the introduction of Standard Mandarin.

How then could YOU protect Penang Hokkien. There is only one effective weapon: knowledge. You need knowledge of Penang Hokkien and knowledge of Penang Hokkien's history. Only with knowledge can you remain steadfast, and be able to recognise the wolves at the gates.

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Hello and thanks for reading this page. My name is Timothy and my hobby is in describing places so that I can share the information with the general public. My website has become the go to site for a lot of people including students, teachers, journalists, etc. whenever they seek information on places, particularly those in Malaysia and Singapore. I have been doing this since 5 January 2003, for over twenty years already. You can read about me at Discover Timothy. By now I have compiled information on thousands of places, mostly in Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore, and I continue to add more almost every day. My goal is to describe every street in every town in Malaysia and Singapore.