Native Lexical Innovation in Penang Hokkien: Thinking beyond Rojak

Abstract

A few years ago, in a box of yellowed papers at the back of a cluttered antique shop in Chulia Street in George Town, I came upon a small green volume entitled “Chinese New Terms and Expressions” that had been published in Shanghai in 1913. The author, Evan Morgan, had spent several years collecting and noting down recently coined Chinese words he came across in newspapers, magazines, and books, and his work was a testimony to the rapid changes that had occurred in the Chinese written and spoken language over the previous decades, as China transformed itself from empire to nation-state and words for new technology and new ideas had entered the language. Having spent the previous few weeks wandering around George Town collecting vocabulary for a dictionary of the Hokkien language as spoken in Penang,2 as I leafed through this volume it occurred to me that although many of the new Chinese terms it recorded were shared with other varieties of Hokkien – such as those spoken in Amoy and Taiwan – a fair number of these had not gained currency in the Hokkien of Penang. As Amoy and Taiwanese varieties have tended to follow the lead of Japanese and Mandarin in the creation of their modern vocabularies, Penang Hokkien vocabulary has, to some extent, modernized along a different trajectory. This is due in part to Penang Hokkien speakers’ longstanding acceptance of loanwords from Malay and English – hence the common metaphor rojak ‘spicy fruit-and-vegetable salad’ – and their free use of these in place of native Hokkien vocabulary, but another significant contributing