Language matters in Hong Kong’s birth rate debate, not just money
Hong Kong’s fertility woes are not just about affordability. They might also involve language use and how it shapes our views of the future
However, there is another, lesser-known factor that works more subtly and implicitly. It comes not from economics but from the structure of the language or languages we speak each day.
Consider a simple contrast. In English, one says, “Yesterday it rained. Now it is raining. Tomorrow it will rain.” In Chinese, the same three sentences need no such grammatical marking. The verb does not change. The future is not grammatically separated from the present.
This is the distinction around which behavioural economist Keith Chen built his research. He classified languages by whether they oblige speakers to mark the future grammatically. English does. Chinese does not. Chen found that speakers of languages with weak or no future-time marking tend to save more, plan more and invest more in long-term health than speakers of languages with strong future-time marking.
The logic is simple. If the future is not grammatically distant, it feels present. If it feels present, its burdens feel present, too. That is why speakers of weak future-time languages tend to save more and plan more – they are already living with the future.
English works differently. “Tomorrow it will rain” places the future at a distance. The burden might be real, but it belongs to a time that has not yet arrived. A couple speaking English might feel the same obligations but feel them less immediately, therefore finding it easier to take the first step.
This is not to claim that language determines or causes fertility directly. It only says that the way we speak might shape how vividly we imagine the future and how much weight that imagined future carries in making significant life decisions.
Hong Kong is well placed to examine this projection. According to the most recent census, Cantonese remains the usual language of about 88 per cent of the population while English is the usual language of about 4.6 per cent.
This means many Hong Kong couples do not simply speak one type of language. They move between them, often within the same conversation. If Chen’s findings hold, the grammatical structure of the language they are using at any given moment can subtly shape how close or distant the future feels and how much weight it carries.
If language structure shapes how people perceive the future, then policies that affect language use can have effects that current policy evaluation does not yet capture. Economic measures alone will not solve this issue completely. There is value in pursuing alternatives.
In short, Hong Kong’s fertility challenge might not be only an affordability problem. It might also partly be a problem of which language we speak and how that shapes the way the future is perceived.
No policy can make someone want a child. Policy can shape the conditions in which that desire is formed, though, and language can be one of those conditions. The question is not only “Can families afford a child these days?” but also “Can they see the future their children will live in?”. How they see it might depend on the language in which they see it.