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The Hong Kong extradition bill protests, with hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes even a million or two million people (out of a total population of 7.392 million) on the streets, have been going on for more than 11 weeks, with no end in sight, even though the PRC keeps threatening to invade. One of the main problems the protesters face is how to deal with infiltrators from the north who pretend to be protesters, but promote violence and beat up the Hong Kong people. Here's one way the Hongkongers are using to expose the intruders:

To avoid infiltration from non-HKers, protesters are using a ‘new’ form of cryptic online communication: pseudo Cantonese romanisation. This form of Cantonese is common in messaging among youngsters to simplify typing. pic.twitter.com/xIhiP7M04F — Daniel Suen (@d__suen) August 17, 2019

The speed with which this technique is spreading is attested here, here, and here ("anti-troll tactic").

This is not to say that this type of ad hoc, spontaneous Romanization of Cantonese has not already existed for some time. Indeed, young people have been using it extensively for texting, on social media, etc. for years. What's new is that it is now consciously being employed to out fake protesters who do not know Hong Kong Cantonese and its informal writing system.

This is how Chris Fraser describes it:

To confuse online trolls and to quickly identify (face-to-face) suspected non-native infiltrators, protesters this weekend advocate using improvised romanized Cantonese or Canto-English code mixing. Since most HKers don't know any "standard" Canto romanization, everyone makes things up as they go. The results can be amusing and very hard to figure out.

Here's a post advocating the shibboleth technique (I don't completely understand it myself).

Daniel Sun, in the first comment to his own Tweet displayed above, makes this important remark:

It’s affectionately known as Kong Nui Ping Yum – Hong Kong girls’ phonetics. AKA Martian script due to its apparent incomprehensibility.

This calls to mind other phonetic scripts invented or popularized by women. It's hard to believe that I haven't written a Language Log post about this yet, but I can't seem to find a record of having done so. Goodness knows that I have often lectured and written about women's scripts often enough, and was responsible for bringing the first investigators of nǚshū 女書 ("Women's Script") (devised and used by women in Jiangyong County in Hunan province of southern China) to the United States in the early 80s.

One of the greatest novels in the history of world literature, The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari 源氏物語), was written by a woman, lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu, in the early years of the 11th century. She wrote the novel in what was called "onna no moji" ("women's writing"), i.e., kana, in contrast to "otoko no moji" ("men's writing"), i.e., kanji ("Sinographs; Chinese characters"). Kana were also sometimes called "onnade 女手" ("women's hand"). Conservative Koreans followed suit by stigmatizing alphabetical Hangul, promulgated by King Sejong in 1446, as "amgeul 암글" or "amkeul 암클", "women's script". It was also pejoratively called "achimgeul 아침글", which means that it could be learned in one morning, as though that were something bad!

I have long been an advocate of phonetic scripts for topolects and languages, not only in China, but throughout the world. It seems that, in the case of Cantonese, although there have been Romanizations (e.g., Yale and Jyutping) devised by linguists and language specialists, they have never been taught to or caught on among the broad populace. Now, in the time of need, young people are creating their own informal, nonstandard Romanization for their living language. Perhaps, in time, they will be able to write great literature in it.

Jiāyóu fùnǚ! 加油婦女! ("Go women!")

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