At Save Cantonese, we are immensely grateful for volunteers who bring passion, insight, and dedication to our mission. Today, we are honored to shine the spotlight on Keith Tse (謝嘉麒), a scholar based in the UK whose writing and advocacy have been invaluable to our movement.
Who Is Keith Tse?
Keith Tse is a linguist and writer based in the United Kingdom, with deep roots in the study of Chinese dialects.
His interests lie at the intersection of ideology, culture, and language. Cantonese. His native dialect as a Hong Konger, has been central to both his academic work and personal identity. Through his blog essays, Keith has contributed thoughtful perspectives on language planning, heritage language activism, and sociolinguistics, especially as they relate to Cantonese and the challenges it faces in diasporic communities.
How Keith Contributes to Save Cantonese
From the earliest days of our coalition, Keith has been a steady and thoughtful voice in our campaign. He joined Save Cantonese in early 2021 after signing the petition to preserve Dr. Dennig’s Cantonese post at Stanford University, becoming one of our very first members, despite having no direct ties to Stanford.
Writing & Advocacy
Keith has penned multiple essays and blog posts for us (and related platforms), including:
His writings help translate complex linguistic ideas into accessible arguments, giving our supporters, partners, and audiences deeper context on why preserving Cantonese matters.
Translation & Accessibility
Another vital way Keith has contributed is through translation. He has translated several public announcements from English into Cantonese and Mandarin, including a press release for a $1M endowment Save Cantonese received from S.J.Distributors, ensuring that our messages reach broader audiences across the Chinese-speaking world. This work helps bridge communities who may not primarily engage in English, making Save Cantonese’s mission more inclusive and impactful.
Amplifying Voices
Because Keith writes for external venues, his pieces help broaden the reach of our movement. More people learn about our goals, the issues, and the urgency, not just within the Cantonese-speaking world, but in academic and language activism circles more broadly.
Critical Engagement
Keith doesn’t offer simple cheerleading. His contributions often engage with difficult questions: how to frame language policy, the tensions between language vitality and assimilation, and how diasporic communities can maintain linguistic diversity. These deeper questions help sharpen our strategies and messaging.
Bridge-Building
Being based in the UK and working across global networks, Keith helps legally and intellectually bridge perspectives across geographies. His international vantage helps us situate Save Cantonese in a broader language preservation context, not just as a local or American campaign, but one that resonates across the diaspora.
A Quick Q&A with Keith
1. Why did you decide to volunteer with Save Cantonese?
I got to know about Save Cantonese when I came across the petition circulated on Facebook at the end of 2020 that sought to reverse the decision of Stanford University to abolish the Cantonese lectureship held by Dr Sik Lee Dennig (張老師). After signing the petition, I was invited to join our Slack channel and have been an active member since. As a linguist and native speaker of Cantonese (Hong Kong), I was naturally drawn to the aims and content of Save Cantonese, and I was keen to follow the course and outcome of the campaign and lend my expertise in linguistics to the cause. The rest, as they say, is history.
2. What challenge about Cantonese preservation keeps you up at night?
While Cantonese is not endangered in the technical sense as it still has millions of speakers worldwide and has copious media content in global circulation, there have been changes to ways in which Chinese is taught these days that are concerning, namely the use and promotion of Mandarin as the language of instruction in schools. I support the teaching of Mandarin (普通話) in schools as I respect it being the official variety and lingua franca in the Chinese-speaking world, but as a child who grew up in Hong Kong before and after the handover in 1997, I see many positives in using Cantonese (or any local dialect) in education while learning Mandarin as a foreign language, which has the benefit of developing multilingual (or multilectal) proficiency in children and add sophistication to their processing of their native language. Standardising Mandarin at the expense of Cantonese would remove layers in Chinese children’s language proficiency and deprive them of their linguistic potential, which is important in today’s digital and multilingual world. Politicising the choice of dialects along the lines of the protests in Hong Kong is also a dangerous move, as it would give the authorities justification to attack Cantonese. Cantonese and Mandarin can co-exist peacefully in a sophisticated form of multilingual education, as they need not (and indeed must not) be held in a dichotomy that leads to an either-or. In any civilised society, there needs to be a productive dialogue in advocating for constructive change, which I believe is the approach that we should take in promoting Save Cantonese.
3. What gives you hope?
Being part of Save Cantonese has allowed me to witness our campaign at work, and I have been genuinely impressed by the enthusiasm and energy invested by our volunteering members to protect the Chinese variety that they love and one that means so much to them in terms of their cultural heritage and familial roots (most of the members at Save Cantonese are Chinese Americans and Chinese Canadians). The rapid development of our coalition is also promising, as we managed to secure funding in the form of a major endowment and attain 501(c)3 organisation status, which is evidence of the fantastic collaborative work carried out by our members. Ours is a hard battle, but I am hopeful that we have all the qualities and assets to face the challenges ahead.
4. What do you hope Save Cantonese achieves in the next 5 years?
Now that Save Cantonese has attained global attention and reach, our long term goal should not be so much territorial or quantitative (even though there are more pockets of Chinese communities in the world than most people realise) as qualitative, and it is my opinion that we consolidate the grounds that we have gained and develop the achievements that we have made. We already have student representatives at numerous institutions, such as Stanford, CCSF, UCBerkeley and UCLA, and the next stage in our engagement with public education should be to make contact with federal and governmental agencies and seek to promote Cantonese at the state level. We have already made progress in tracking the distribution of Cantonese schools globally and at K-12 level, and this is the direction in which I believe that we should concentrate our efforts.
Final Thoughts
Keith’s contributions remind us that activism often happens behind the scenes, whether it's in essays drafted, in arguments sharpened, or in connections made. His work strengthens our intellectual foundation while also reaching new audiences. As we continue our campaign, we extend our deepest thanks to Keith for standing with us.
If you would like to read more of Keith’s writings, check out his Medium blog. You can also connect with Keith on LinkedIn, and check out his academic webpage for his research and publications.
Let’s continue to uplift voices like Keith’s - voices that help our movement not just persist, but grow in depth, clarity, and impact.