Download YouTube Online Videos and Music!

展覽地點：馬來西亞庇能本頭公巷八號世德堂謝公司
Venue: Seh Tek Tong Cheah Kongsi, 8, Armenian Street, 10200 Penang, Malaysia
日期：2020年7月25日至10月25日每天早上9點至下午5點
Date: 25 July 2020 - 25 October 2020 Open Daily from 9 am to 5 pm

閩、粵、客等語言除了在中國南部有龐大的使用人口之外，在世界各地也有大量的使用者。單是福建話（閩南語）的使用人數就高達兩千五百萬，大約是瑞典總人口的2.5倍。雖然瑞典語的母語使用者並沒有福建話來得多，但它卻沒有失傳的危機，反而是使用人口比瑞典語多出好幾倍的福建話卻面臨絕跡。這是因為福建話使用者漸漸地放棄自身的母語，改說北方話（又稱華語、普通話、官話）。

一提到語言滅亡，有些人會覺得無奈。但更多人會將之歸咎於全球化，或說這是現代發展的必然現象。其實中國南方閩、粵、客諸語當今所面臨之危機，乃十九世紀興起的思想意識所引發，並非「全球化」或「發展的必然現象」。此展覽將釐清大眾對語言消失的迷思，並對「華語」和「漢族」這兩個概念，進行更深層次的探索。

Many southern Chinese languages such as Hokkien, Hakka, Cantonese and Teochew, are big languages with many speakers around the world. Hokkien alone has 25 million speakers; two and a half times the population of Sweden. While the Swedish language faces no threat of extinction, Hokkien is set to vanish as its speakers abandon it for Mandarin.

Many people tend to lament the death of languages with a sense of loss, and ascribes language endangerment to modernisation and globalisation as if it is a matter of course that these languages will die out.

In this exhibition, you will see that the root cause of decline in these languages is, in fact, an ideology, which emerged in the 19th century. This is also an exhibition that challenges our preconceived idea about Chinese.