The 2025/26 Yip So Man Wat Memorial Lecture
with guest speaker Professor Virginia Yip (CUHK) and Emeritus Professor Stephen Matthews (HKU)
Lecture: The Cantonese heritage and the heritage child
Cantonese speakers take pride in their linguistic and cultural heritage. They maintain that poetry from the Tang and Song Dynasties is best recited in Cantonese, because the sounds of Cantonese are relatively close to the language of the poets. The rich system of tones both enables and requires a uniquely complex matching between linguistic tone and musical melody, developed in Cantonese opera and reflected in contemporary Canto-pop. Cantonese films and dim sum inspire people around the world to learn the language. These aspects of the Cantonese heritage will be illustrated with examples from popular music and culture.
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.
Date & Time:
Thursday, March 26, 2026
Reception: 5:30pm-6:00pm (PDT)
Lecture: 6:00pm-8:00pm (PDT)
Location:
Asian Centre Auditorium, 1871 West Mall, Vancouver, BC
Map | Parking
Presented in English. This event is free and open to the public.
Light refreshments provided. Registration is required.
Events in Conjunction
Research Seminar: Puzzling patterns in bilingual children’s Cantonese
What, if anything, is special about bilingual children’s Cantonese? When we observe the Cantonese of bilingual children acquiring Cantonese and English, we find that they produce some ‘non-target’ forms. For example, children produce dative sentences with the order “give-recipient-object”, as in (1), which differs from the distinctive order (“give-object-recipient”) of adult Cantonese:
(1) 耶穌俾我錢呀
Je4sou1 bei2 ngo5 cin2 aa3 (“Jesus gives me money”)
Children also ‘misplace’ prepositional phrases (PPs) by putting them after the verb, as in (2) where hai2li1dou6 “here”) is misplaced:
(2) 又食喺呢度呀，你
Jau6 sik6 hai2 li1dou6 aa4, lei5? (“eating here again, are you?”)
In answering questions, bilingual children often use 係 hai6 (to be) inappropriately to mean “yes”, as in (3), where adult Cantonese requires the adjective 好食 hou2sik6 ‘tasty’ of the ‘A-not-A’ question to be repeated in the response:
(3) 好唔好食㗎
Adult: hou2 m4 hou2 sik6 gaa3? (“Is it tasty?”)
係呀
Child: hai6 aa3 (“yes”)
We may suspect that the children who produce these non-target forms are influenced by their English, which would be an instance of cross-linguistic influence or language transfer. But there are other plausible explanations to consider, such as over-generalization of patterns already present in Cantonese. Indeed, all three patterns — the “give-recipient-object” order in dative sentences, prepositional phrases after the verb, and answers using 係 hai6 to mean “yes” — exist in Cantonese.
In this seminar we will tackle the question of why bilingual children produce such patterns in their speech, and attempt to tease apart alternative explanations by comparing the language development of monolingual and bilingual children.
Date & Time:
Friday, March 27, 2026
2:00pm – 4:00pm (PDT)
Location:
xʷθəθiqətəm (Place of Many Trees), 6476 NW Marine Drive, Vancouver, BC
Map | Parking
Presented in English. This event is free and open to the public.
Light refreshments provided. Registration is required.
Speakers
Virginia Yip is Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her BA in linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin and PhD in linguistics from the University of Southern California. Her research interests include bilingualism, bilingual acquisition and Cantonese grammar. Her monograph The Bilingual Child: Early Development and Language Contact (co-authored with Stephen Matthews, Cambridge University Press, 2007) received the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award from the Linguistic Society of America (2019). She has also co-authored a series of books on Cantonese grammar.
Stephen Matthews is Emeritus Professor in Linguistics at the University of Hong Kong and Co-Director of the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre. He studied Modern and Medieval Languages at Trinity Hall, Cambridge before pursuing doctoral and postdoctoral work in Linguistics at the University of Southern California. His research focuses on Cantonese, the grammar of Chinese dialects, bilingualism and language contact. His publications co-authored with Virginia Yip include Cantonese: a Comprehensive Grammar, Basic Cantonese and Intermediate Cantonese, as well as The Bilingual Child: Early Development and Language Contact which received the Linguistic Society of America’s Leonard Bloomfield Book Award in 2009.
About the Yip So Man Wat Memorial Lecture
The Yip So Man Wat Memorial Lectures are made possible by the generous support of Messrs. Alex and Chi Shum Watt in honour of their mother, the late Mrs. Wat, and her passion for Chinese literature and culture.
