Tie to Fab Thai ภาษาไทยดี
Language and Identity of the Thai Community in Hong Kong
- ภาษาและอัตลักษณ์ของชุมชนไทยในฮ่องกง
According to our research, many Thais come to Hong Kong for job or business opportunities; therefore, many of them, if not all, learn or improve their Cantonese mainly for work. We visited different types of workplace of the Thais, such as restaurant, grocery stores and massage house. Those workplaces usually consist of a mix of of Chinese and Thai employees. In this special situation, the Thais creates their linguistic repetoire. Linguistic repetoire refers to a speech community, such as Thai in Hong Kong, choose to use different
Workplace
codes (languages) based on different social contexts. We found out that Thais in Hong Kong will choose to speak Thai to their Thai colleagues even though they spend most of their time speaking Cantonese with the customers in the workplace. When they talk to Hong Kong customers or their Hong Kong boss, they will use Cantonese. We can notice the flexibility of Thais' language skills.
It is not surprising that some Thais who are already working in Hong Kong do not speak very fluent Cantonese. Interestingly, we did not find such linguistic incapability worsen their communication with the client. Thais in Hong Kong are very smart and they found a way to deal with the problem. To communicate the idea of price, they write numbers since it is a relatively universal convention. For more complicated ideas, pictures will be used. Take the restaurant business as an example, the server can show pictures to the customers if they do not know how to explain the concept in Cantonese. All these are great ways they have used to avoid miscommunication.
Another common phenomenon we noticed is code-mixing. For Thais in Hong Kong that we interviewed and noticed, they use both Cantonese and Thai in the same sentence or turn (Cantonese- Thai code-mix). This is a situation similar to the English- Cantonese code-mix that most Hong Kongers do. The difference is just the langauges. For Thais in Hong Kong, they usually insert Thai words or phrases into a sentence based on the Cantonese sentence structure. It is interesting that they said they will not do it the other way round.