Home Gudgeon and gist Language Log Sinitic topolects in a Canadian courtroom

Sinitic topolects in a Canadian courtroom

Language Log 2025-03-09

Is Taishanese Cantonese?

Legally, in Canada, no.

[Preface:  This is one of the eeriest posts I've ever written, where thoughts I had about a student two decades ago while I was teaching her in my classes at Penn have become reality today, in a conspicuous, public way.  The realization of mental projection into the future.]

The material for this post came to me by a curious path.  From Bruce Rusk:

My father is a retired journalist in Toronto and one of his hobbies is tracking Ontario appeal court decisions. He came across a case that is of potential relevance to those interested in the status of Sinitic languages and the nature of fangyan. I thought that you (and perhaps Language Log readers) would find it interesting.

Because it was about Sinitic languages and fangyan ("topolects"), I was moderately interested, but because the written decision, like most judicial documents, was long and tediously detailed, I thought I'd just skim through it quickly.

Dated 3/6/25, the document is a record of the decision of the Court of Appeals for Ontario:

CITATION: R. v. Chen, 2025 ONCA 168 DATE: 20250306 DOCKET: C68462

 

As soon as I got to the second paragraph, I perked up:

[2] The appellant was charged with second degree murder. It is uncontested that he does not understand or speak English, the language of his criminal proceedings. A Taishanese interpreter was requested for the appellant. He had one interpreter for the first half of the trial and another interpreter for the second half. Two audits of the interpretation of the first half of the trial requested by the Ministry of the Attorney General (“MAG”) reported that the portions reviewed revealed an interpretation that was not Taishanese but 100 percent Cantonese.

Oh, this is juicy.  The court is aware that Taishanese and Cantonese are two separate entities.

[7] The appellant speaks Taishanese. He was born to a farming family in a rural village in the Guangdong province of China and immigrated to Canada in 2000. In China, he was a farmer and after moving to Canada, he worked making fortune cookies until he was 65. His education consists of a few years of elementary school “on and off” in the 1940s and 1950s. His instruction was in Taishanese and the language of the appellant’s village was Taishanese. He does not read or write in any language and is functionally illiterate. The appellant maintained that he can understand Cantonese “a little here, and a little there”. It is undisputed that the appellant has no English language capability. He does not speak nor understand English.

[8] At the time of the offence, the appellant was 70 years old. The Crown’s expert forensic psychiatrist, Dr. A. Iosif, described him as mild-mannered, pro-social, and rule-abiding. In the morning of October 15, 2014, he was riding his bicycle and crossed paths with an acquaintance, Xian Xu Liu, age 63. There was no evidence of any pre-existing animosity between the two. Both were born in the Taishan region of China.

[9] Video surveillance showed the appellant getting off of his bicycle, engaging in a conversation with Ms. Liu, and then suddenly lunging and attacking her. After the attack, the appellant placed his bike against a wall and departed on foot. A passerby found Ms. Liu lying in the grass bleeding. Ms. Liu subsequently died and an autopsy revealed that she had sustained multiple blunt force injuries. Police recovered a metal bar with blood on it near Ms. Liu’s body that appeared to be from the appellant’s bicycle.

[10] The appellant was arrested and charged with second degree murder. Dr. Mark Pearce, his attending psychiatrist, diagnosed him as suffering from late-stage onset schizophrenia and could not rule out a cognitive disorder. The appellant also claimed to be directed by ghosts at the time of his attack on Ms. Liu.

During the second half of the trial, a Taishanese interpreter, a Ms. Chong, who was accredited to the court, was assigned to the case and interpreted for the appellant.  She testified that the appellant did not understand Cantonese except for simple expressions such as getting coffee or saying hello to people.

[18] …She stated that the appellant speaks a dialect of Taishanese that is very distinct from Cantonese and that a Cantonese speaker would be unable to fully understand him. She describes Taishanese as a group of languages distinct from Cantonese. She and the appellant speak the same dialect of Taishanese because they came from the same region of Taishan.

Now, the account of the trial is very interesting, and it reveals many subtleties of linguistic interactions among individuals who do not speak the same language, but whose languages may be partially related.  I believe that the record shows the court was trying its level best to facilitate communication among all parties involved, but that there were some insuperable difficulties inherent in the realities of the case which made that not fully possible and, at times, completely impossible.

Because what happened in this trial is so vital for us as linguists who wish to understand the nature of language interactions, I will quote lengthy sections of the account.

[19] Ms. Chong was unavailable for the commencement of the appellant’s trial which started on April 1, 2019. Anna Auyang was the interpreter provided by MAG [Ministry of the Attorney General] for the trial before Ms. Chong was able to attend. She was one of only two conditionally accredited Taishanese interpreters on MAG’s registry at the time of trial, and there was only one fully accredited Taishanese interpreter. She interpreted from the second to the ninth day of the trial. This covered the Crown’s opening address and the proceedings relating to 12 witnesses.

[20] Ms. Auyang filed an affidavit as part of the fresh evidence and was cross-examined. She swore that she had been conditionally accredited by MAG to interpret Taishanese since 2016. However, the MAG test was for her English capability, not her Taishanese ability. She admitted that she was never tested in the Taishanese language by MAG. She was unsuccessful in being accredited by MAG to interpret Cantonese but had been accredited for Cantonese by the Immigration and Refugee Board since 2013. Cantonese is her first language and was the language of instruction at her high school in Hong Kong where she grew up. She maintained that Taishanese is a dialect of Cantonese and, in her experience, people who speak Taishanese also speak Cantonese. The two “are very intertwined” and “[m]any of the common expressions are the same.” She described her own interpretation as “a mixture of Cantonese and Taishanese, but ‘heavier’ on the Cantonese side.” According to her, the appellant also spoke a “mixture” of the two, but she found it difficult to understand him given his mumbling and “baby talk”. She claimed to be in the habit of repeating things for him but it was “difficult to do so consistently given the pace of the proceedings.”

[21] She took an oath during the appellant’s trial to translate from English to the Taishan dialect of Cantonese. Specifically, the oath she took was:

Q       […] Do you affirm that you shall truly and faithfully interpret the evidence of both given and all other matters and things from the present charge from the English language to the Taishan dialect of Cantonese language, to the English language of – no, from the Taishan dialect of the Cantonese language to the English language, to the English language to the Taishan language of the Cantonese language to the best of your skill and ability?

A       Yes, I do.

[22] In her cross-examination, Ms. Auyang said that during the trial, the appellant told her he could not hear well. She stated that the appellant confirmed that he understood the way she was speaking.

[23] In her affidavit, she stated:

In my interactions with Mr. Chen, he spoke a mixture of Cantonese and Taishanese. I found it difficult to understand him, as he mumbled and spoke in “baby talk” that was neither fully Cantonese nor fully Taishanese. It appeared to me that only Mr. Chen’s family members could completely understand him. I would frequently have to ask him for clarification to make sure that I understood him as well as possible.

. . .

I do not remember Mr. Chen ever telling me that he had any difficulty understanding me when I interpreted for him. Likewise, I do not remember Mr. Chen’s lawyer ever expressing to me that Mr. Chen was having any difficulty understanding me. I also do not remember anyone from Mr. Chen’s family ever telling me that he was having difficulty understanding me.

[24] In cross-examination, when asked whether she interpreted in Cantonese throughout the proceedings, she responded: “That’s my strongest dialect that I could do the best.” She said the appellant speaks some Cantonese but he primarily speaks in his dialect. She also used sign language with him. She “spoke Cantonese with a little bit of Taishan dialect in it”, “not fully Taishanese”. She acknowledged that she did not understand the appellant fully.

[25] She admitted that she asked the appellant in Cantonese whether he could hear and translated him as saying he could hear when in fact, he said he could not. She admitted she mistranslated him. Similarly, the instruction she gave him to push her if he could not hear was in Cantonese.

[26] Ms. Chong took over for the remainder of the trial. Ms. Chong listened to the audio recordings for the preceding days of the trial. For those that were audible, Ms. Chong stated that Ms. Auyang was not interpreting from English to Taishanese but to a very standard form of Cantonese. She stated that the appellant speaks a regionally distinct form of Taishanese that is very different from Cantonese. He would understand some words but not the entirety of the proceedings. For instance, on April 1, Ms. Auyang interpreted him as saying: “Now I can hear, now I can hear” when he actually said “I cannot hear.” On the same day, Ms. Auyang told him in Cantonese: “We want to know exactly at what time you can hear and at what time you cannot hear.” The appellant responded: “Only can hear some whenever, now does not work. I cannot hear.” However, Ms. Auyang interpreted this as: “Now it's working.”

[27] Ms. Chong maintained that Ms. Auyang “never spoke one word Taishanese. It’s all in Cantonese.”

[28] On April 1 and April 18, the trial judge engaged with the appellant on his need to do something if he could not hear. On April 1, Ms. Auyang, as a subsequent interpretation evaluation assessment reveals, misinterpreted the appellant as saying the interpretation was okay when he did not. The judge, focusing on the appellant’s hearing, instructed Ms. Auyang:

Mr. Chen has to understand that if he cannot hear something, he is to draw it to your attention immediately because we do not want to have this problem throughout the trial where we are replaying witnesses’ evidence. Would you just tell him that?

[29] On April 18, 2019, counsel reported to the court that the appellant’s son-in-law, who had been observing the proceedings, complained to him about Ms. Auyang’s interpretation. As a result, counsel had spoken with the appellant who had said he neither heard nor understood everything. The trial judge replied:

As everyone knows, we had a back and forth early on to make sure that every word was properly interpreted in these proceedings so that Mr. Chen could hear it all. We have been through the understanding issue. Not every accused, whether they have an interpreter or not, understands every single thing that happens in a case. That is why they have the assistance of counsel, so they can understand what happens.…

As part of this process we made sure that, if there were any other difficulties, someone would speak up immediately so that we would know that there was a problem and we could deal with it immediately. Mr. Chen was told in, I think, unequivocal terms that if he had any issue, he should immediately do something about it. Madam Interpreter was given those instructions, as well. From time to time Madam Interpreter has put up her hand and interrupted. She has been doing that. From my vantage point, which is not a bad one, I have never seen Mr. Chen speak up and say, “I’m not getting this”. He has never done that. I am looking directly at him.

As I remarked at the outset, this court document is lengthy.  Although the remainder does have many passages that are relevant to the linguistics of the interpretation, much of it has to do with the principles of the legal issues at hand and the rights and responsibilities of all the parties in the case.  Hence it is more a matter of jurisprudence than linguistics per se.

Then comes a section titled "MAG’s Interpretation Evaluation Assessments" which contains, among other perfunctory, procedural matters, this interesting sentence concerning Wanru (Angie) Gong who was retained by the CIU ("Court Interpretation Unit") to do an audit of Ms. Auyang's interpretation, it is noted that "Ms. Gong was mostly unresponsive to the questions on cross-examination as she did not remember much about the case except that the interpreter was speaking in Cantonese."  Ms. Gong was quoted as declaring that the interpretation was “100% Cantonese” and “not…Taishanese at all.”

In [31], it is stated that an Interpretation Evaluation Assessment done by Yuki Eng concluded that Ms. Auyang’s interpretation “was 100% in Cantonese”.

Then came a section called "Expert Reports" which electrified me, because the chief witness was Genevieve Yuek-Ling Leung, my former student at Penn about two decades ago.  I still remember her vividly from my "Language, Script, and Society in China" class.  She was knowledgeable about matters pertaining to the relationship between Taishanese and Cantonese, but that was still during the period that was part of a learning process for her.  Judging from her testimony to the Ontario court, her ability to formulate and analyze the linguistic (and consequently the legal) issues at stake are far more advanced than they were then.  Now she is a full-fledged, highly competent professor, so the Canadian court is to be commended for finding an expert who was capable of providing the linguistic expertise they needed.

[35]   Genevieve Yuek-Ling Leung prepared an expert witness report dated July 31, 2023 for the Crown. She has a Ph.D. in Educational Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. She was an assistant professor in rhetoric and language at the University of San Francisco between 2012 and 2018 and has been an associate professor since then. She also serves as the Academic Director of the MA program in Asia Pacific Studies. Her report did not specifically relate to Ms. Auyang’s interpretation but provided some historical context.

[36] She wrote that Taishan is a county-level city of Guangdong province in China. The area was agrarian and most people lived in villages with others of the same surname. Most people born and raised in Taishan speak Taishanese. Because of migration and intermarriage, many people in the region also speak some form of (standard or near-standard) Cantonese. When the People’s Republic of China was established in 1949, Mandarin was first promoted and then adopted in 1955 as the official language. In 1958, with Mao’s Great Leap Forward, speaking a non-mandarin Chinese language was considered counterrevolutionary or subversive behavior. She wrote:

As such, depending on age, it is possible for people from Taishan to be monolingual Taishanese (especially the elderly and those who left China around or before or around 1955); to be bilingual Cantonese-Taishanese (also the elderly and those who left China around or before 1955); or to be multilingual with various degrees of fluency in using Cantonese, Taishanese, and Mandarin (especially for younger people and/or those who have travelled in and out of the Pearl River Delta and/or are more educated).

[37]  In the 1940s and 1950s the language of public education in Taishan was “mostly/nearly all Taishanese, with some Cantonese (depending on the teacher).”

[38] When asked whether Taishanese was a form/dialect of Cantonese, Professor Leung reported that it was not. One is not a dialect of the other but each is part of the larger Yue language family.

As sister dialects, Taishanese and Cantonese are both typologically considered dialects. Each is part of the larger Yue language family; one is not a dialect of the other. Taishanese can be called a dialect (or a language) as long as Cantonese is also called a dialect (or a language). The term in Chinese that linguists use to characterize Taishanese is fangyan. A word that has been in use since the second century B.C., fangyan refers literally to the language of a place; so Taishanese is what is the fangyan spoken in Taishan. When Western linguists studied the languages of China, they mistranslated fangyan as “dialect” and the Chinese government has also followed suit in insisting that the English translation be “dialect” so that Mandarin becomes central to the construction of a Chinese identity; to many globally, this translation also made sense, since it followed the adage “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy” – the variety with more power (Mandarin, Cantonese) became to be known as the “language” and those with less power … became to be known as the “dialect.” The mistranslation has stuck, but it is also not precise. […] Taishanese has enough distinct lexical, syntactic, morphological, and phonological differences from Cantonese (and vice versa) that they can be considered different languages, or at least to be called sister dialects. Despite this clear linguistic evidence, it would be remiss not to mention that beyond the English mistranslation, there are sociopolitical implications for using “language” to refer to Taishanese or Cantonese, especially in comparison to Mandarin, so this is often why it is not done in certain public spheres. [Citations omitted.]

[39] Professor Leung was asked to what extent she expected Cantonese to be comprehensible to a monolingual Taishanese speaker, and she said that “it depends on social factors like education and interpersonal networks” and later added vocation and age of exposure to Cantonese. She opined that “for someone with limited schooling and whose life centered around the village or the countryside, or solely worked in communities with other Taishanese people, it is possible to live without much Cantonese exposure at all.” In the context of someone born around the 1940s, Professor Leung stated that “because of social/political/economic instability happening around the time … it is also common for people of this age group to be ‘left behind’ in the sociolinguistic field and not be as bi/multilingual as younger generations.”

It is uncanny that, already when she was a graduate student in my classes, I had a premonition that in her future career she would do something significant to educate the public on the difference between fangyan and topolect and between topolect and language.  And so she has.  Gives me a warm feeling of satisfaction.

Another expert report was elicited from Jia Wang:

[40] Jia Wang is the interim director of the China Institute at the University of Alberta. She provided a will-say statement that is part of the fresh evidence package. Her statement addressed the distinction between the concepts of language and dialect. She described the Chinese language as follows:

Chinese is a cluster of languages spoken by the Han Chinese majority and some ethnic minority groups. Though often referred to simply as “Chinese”, many of the spoken varieties known as “fang yan” or dialects, are mutually unintelligible. For example, the differences between Mandarin and Cantonese are so vast, they are often compared to English and Dutch or English and French….

The concept of a “dialect” in Chinese differs from what an English speaker might expect. In English, many consider dialects similar to accents – for instance, American English, British English or Australian English speakers have little to no trouble conversing unless the accent is particularly thick. But this is not the case for many speaking different Chinese dialects.

Taishanese, spoken primarily by residents of Taishan of Canton (Guangdong) Province and those migrated from the region, is known in China as a unique dialect that is difficult for non-speakers to understand. Though bearing some resemblances to Cantonese (since both of them are part of the Yue language group), Taishanese pronunciation and vocabulary can differ greatly from Cantonese due to notable influence from Gan language which originates in Jiangxi Province. Taishanese is related to Cantonese but has little mutual intelligibility with the latter. Without proper training in Cantonese, a Taishanese speaker cannot understand Cantonese and same is true vice versa.

Sounds like Jia Wang is a reader of Language Log.

How would this case have played out if it had taken place in a Chinese (PRC) courtroom?

Under normal circumstances, there would have been no accommodation for considering the possibility that Taishanese is different from Cantonese.  There would have been no intense investigation into whether the interpretation — if any were provided at all — had been accurate. adequate, and effective.

—————–

Is Taishanese Cantonese?

Legally, in Canada, no.

Much less, is Cantonese Mandarin?  Is Taiwanese Mandarin?

Legally / linguistically, in a fair and impartial world court, no.

The dogma that there is only a single "Chinese" language is crumbling, in part because of scientific-minded, rational individuals like Genevieve Leung and competent, impartial legal officials of the Canadian justice system.

 

Selected readings