Ethnic Minorities' identity recognition

 

       A population census conducted in 2011 reviewed that there are a total of 451 183 ethnic minorities, making up 6.4% of the whole population in Hong Kong. Among these ethnic minorities, most of them are Indonesians (29.6%) and Filipinos (29.5%). Whites, Indians, Pakistanis and Japanese are some other examples of ethnic minorities in Hong Kong. 1

 

      As ethnic minorities in Hong Kong, they face problems when trying to incorporate into the locals and the Hong Kong culture. One of the reasons behind this phenomenon is that they are not capable of speaking Cantonese or not native speakers of Cantonese. This causes them to have confusion in self-recognition of identity. A study done on the case of Hakka 2 showed that Hakka speakers do not see Hakka as a part of Hong Kong culture as they perceives Hong Kong culture as Cantonese language and culture. Hence, to Hakka, speaking Hakka is a barrier for recognizing themselves as Hong Kong people.

 

      This case also applies to other ethnic minorities in Hong Kong. Another study3 which targets at Filipinos, Indians, Nepalese and Pakistanis students in Hong Kong showed that most of their friends are non-Chinese people.4 The biggest difficulty of ethnic minorities faced in making friends with Chinese is that they cannot speak Cantonese.5 Without the knowledge of Cantonese, they have problems in communicating with locals especially those who cannot speak English with the ethnic minorities. When the students were asked to identify their ethnic identity, most of them regard themselves as “both their ethnic origin and Hong Kong person”, followed by “only their ethnic origin” and lastly “only Hong Kong person”.6 This showed that ethnic minorities cannot fully integrate into the Hong Kong society. Being non-Cantonese speakers may be one of the reasons attributing to this result.

 

        In this study, we conducted interviews with two ethnic minorities in Hong Kong in order to investigate deeply their lives in Hong Kong. In the following sections, we will see how they recognize their identity and discuss whether speakers of dominant language in the world will have different view towards their identity when compared to speakers of non-dominant language in the world.