2025/26 Yip So Man Wat Memorial Lecture: The Cantonese heritage and the heritage child

Although Cantonese has an estimated eighty million speakers, many Cantonese-speaking parents are concerned both about the future of the language and the transmission of their linguistic and cultural heritage to the next generation. The future of Cantonese depends on its acquisition by children who will necessarily be bilingual, if not trilingual. We will discuss the role of bilingual children in keeping Cantonese and other varieties of Chinese in heritage contexts, drawing on recent work of the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre.

Studying how children develop Cantonese as a heritage language reveals some surprising findings: for example, children in Canada preserve the six tones even better than those in the Hong Kong “homeland” of the language. The grammar of Cantonese is naturally influenced by that of English, in particular areas where the grammar overlaps with English. Finally, we show that the trend towards loss of Chinese as a heritage language can be reversed.