Umbrella is Threatening in Cantonese

China’s government has tried to insist that Cantonese isn’t really a language, and to suppress its use. But as with Bengali in the independence movement for Bangladesh, and the Soweto uprising against the imposition of Afrikaans in apartheid South African schools, Cantonese is beginning to take on a central role in Hong Kong’s resistance to the authority of mainland China.

And a telling example of this is in the very name of the “Umbrella Movement,” as the protest movement has come to be called.
Hong Kong protesters frequently write “Umbrella Movement” using the Mandarin word for “umbrella” (雨傘), because they grew up learning the Mandarin writing system, known colloquially as zhongwen, in school. They will also frequently write it with the Cantonese word 遮, since they casually picked up the Cantonese writing system pretty much everywhere else in Hong Kong.

But the meaning of the Cantonese phrase 遮打 would be lost on a Mandarin-only speaker, particularly when you break the words down into the constituent parts.

If read as Mandarin rather than Cantonese, the characters 遮打 are pronounced zhe da (pronounced “juh da”). Both are usually verbs; zhemeans “to obscure” or “cover,” while da means “to hit” or “fight.” So to a Mandarin-reader, the Cantonese phrase doesn’t make much sense—it’s the “Cover-Hit Movement.” 

In Hong Kong Cantonese, however, those same two characters, while pronounced similarly to Mandarin—ze daa—mean something quite different: they’re the Cantonese transliteration of Chater Road, one of the downtown Hong Kong streets where the protesters camp out. The second character, 打, also means “to fight” in both Cantonese and Mandarin, notes Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, a literature professor at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU). And it carries yet another layer of meaning, Ho explains: “The ‘打’ would, to a Cantonese speaker’s mind, mean ‘to attack’ or ‘knock down,’ and the target would be [Hong Kong chief executive] CY Leung or the HK government.”

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