Language attitude and discrimination faced by Yuni

 
By gathering with Sutiyem’s group of friends, we are able to get to know their friends. We have interviewed one lady, Yuni, who aged 33 and has already gained 10 years of work experience as domestic helper. She worked in Malaysia and Singapore for 4 years respectively precedent to Hong Kong. This year is her 2^nd year of working. With the help of globalization, she learns a variety of languages and changes her routine language pattern. She becomes multilingual, possessing knowledge on speaking English, Cantonese, Mandarin, Bahasa and Java.

Concerning her language attitude, she likes English the most and thinks Cantonese is the hardest language to learn due to its “terrible forming”. At the same time, she still thinks Bahasa and Java are both important. Though the usage of Java is not covered by the whole Indonesia, she still thinks it’s important since her family speaks Java and that she has to respect her family’s language use. Interestingly, she had attended English grammar classes in The University of Hong Kong for 2 years before. She considers English as an important tool and a special advantage to get a job. She claims that English is an international language and is useful for travelling around. Having good English skill would be considered as upper-class and more educated she said. We can see that language use can be associated with the social hierarchy.

Yuni didn’t feel any discrimination in her Hong Kong family. Her employer’s family usually called her as “姐姐”(tse1 tse1), also known as “sister” in English. Nevertheless, she did have an experience of being discriminated outside the family. She was once accidentally knocked on a woman. Even though she had apologized immediately, she overheard that woman shouting, “that 工人 is very bad. She is blind!” in which she found the labeling of “工人”, which means domestic helper in a sense, implies a negative connotation to her.