The Yip So Man Wat Memorial Lecture remains an essential part of the department’s programming, with the 2025/26 iteration taking place this past March. These annual lectures are made possible through the generous support of Messrs. Alex and Chi Shum Watt, who established the series in memory of their mother, the late Mrs. Wat, to honour her lifelong passion for Chinese literature and culture.
As a part of the Cantonese Language Program’s 10th anniversary celebrations, the 2026 program featured two distinguished guests specializing in Cantonese Linguistics: Professor Virginia Yip, who serves as the Director of the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Emeritus Professor Stephen Matthews of the University of Hong Kong. The duo has published the most comprehensive Cantonese grammar books written in English, many of which are adopted as textbooks of Cantonese language courses at UBC and across the globe.
Professor Stephen Matthews and Professor Virginia Yip addressing an enthusiastic audience who filled the Asian Centre Auditorium
On March 26, the honourable speakers delivered a public lecture titled “The Cantonese heritage and the heritage child” at the Asian Centre Auditorium. During the presentation, Professor Stephen Matthews illustrated the cultural richness of Cantonese through its connections to classical poetry and modern Canto-pop. A highlight of the lecture was the discussion on how bilingual or trilingual children serve as the future of the language, including the surprising finding that heritage children in North America often preserve Cantonese tones more accurately than those in Hong Kong due to the input that they received.
Professor Virginia Yip showed snippets of the Child Heritage Chinese Corpus, in which a child of Cantonese heritage born and raised in the United States was able to converse in Cantonese, Mandarin, and English at ease. The impressive case shows that language loss of heritage languages can be reversed. This encouraging message left the audience with a renewed sense of hope and the assurance that, with the right strategies, our linguistic heritage can be successfully sustained for future generations.
Audience members, many from the Cantonese heritage community, participated in an interactive Q&A session to express their concerns about language maintenance.
On the following day, the two speakers led a research seminar titled “Puzzling patterns in bilingual children’s Cantonese” at the Place of Many Trees (xʷθəθiqətəm). This session provided a more technical look at language acquisition, specifically examining non-target grammatical forms in bilingual children’s utterances.
The seminar explored whether these unusual patterns should be attributed to language contact with English or the over-generalization of Cantonese grammar rules. Ultimately, the discussion inspired the audience to view children’s speech through a new lens, recognizing that what may appear to be “errors” are often meaningful patterns that reflect the complex and unique internal logic of the bilingual mind.
The audience lingered after the insightful research seminar to share their thoughts with the two distinguished speakers.
The Cantonese Language Program extends heartfelt thanks to the Wat family for their continuous support. We also thank Professor Virginia Yip and Professor Stephen Matthews for sharing their valuable expertise with our students, faculty, and community members. Their pioneering research has not only advanced our understanding of bilingualism on an academic level, but has also inspired families to implement multilingualism in everyday routines with confidence.
