PETALING JAYA: Chinese dialects, once frequently spoken by the Chinese community, seem to be fading from daily use as Mandarin takes centre stage.
So, amid growing concern over the loss of a vital link to cultural heritage, more Malaysians are turning to social media, community classes and personal rediscovery to keep ancestral tongues such as Hakka, Cantonese and Hokkien alive for the next generation.
Timothy Tye, 60, the founder of Learn Penang Hokkien, has long championed the revival of northern Hokkien.
Since 2013, Tye has been uploading Penang Hokkien content online, describing it as his mission to revive the dialect and introduce it to a global audience. He maintains an active presence on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.
That same year, he introduced the Taiji romanisation system, a simplified method designed to help English speakers learn Hokkien, and later authored the Penang Hokkien Dictionary, which was adopted by the Penang government in 2023.
Tye believes the reason many children no longer speak Hokkien lies partly in the home environment, where parents often do not use the dialect when speaking with them.
He also attributed it to the fact that learning northern Hokkien in adulthood is often difficult due to a lack of resources available.
“Before I invented the Taiji romanisation, there was no writing system to learn Penang Hokkien.”
However, Tye maintained that learning Hokkien should not be at the expense of other languages.
Policy researcher Sarah Chan, a Hakka who currently resides in the United Kingdom, only learned the dialect a few years back.
“It is my mother tongue but sadly, when I was growing up, we didn’t speak enough of it at home,” said Chan, 54.
She later realised that, as a Hakka who could not speak the dialect fluently, she would be unable to pass it on to her children.
Chan said she was fortunate to meet one of the mothers at her son’s school, who helped her reconnect with her roots.
“I started taking one-to-one classes in Mandarin, and then Hakka from one of the Malaysian mothers at school.
“We can learn Mandarin for the sake of learning an important language, but at the end of the day, the dialect of our people is Hakka.”
University student Dillon Siow, 19, is of Hokkien and Teochew descent but was raised speaking mostly English, despite the fact that his parents sent him to a Chinese school.
When asked about his language proficiency, he rated English first, followed by Mandarin and Teochew.
“I speak Teochew with my grandmother, but I wish I was more fluent, so that I could remain connected with my heritage as a Malaysian Chinese,” he said.
