It’s not just Cantonese. It’s all the indigenous languages in China. It breaks my heart because languages are so unique and beautiful. Cultures should be cherished, not crushed.
English the the native languages in many western countries are also under threat as a result of mixing people, cultures and languages together for generations.
I grew up in San Francisco where you could hear Cantonese spoken often out on the street and could go to the bank or hospital and there will often be someone who spoke it. Before I took Cantonese classes at the local college I though it sounded terrible, after I started learning and understanding the culture better it just became my hobby and made close Cantonese friends I still gather with 20 years later. It is a very colorful and expressive language I really enjoy using from time to time. I am Mexican
are you learning a language for fun? Mandarin is much more common used in the world. If you are interested there are many other chinese dialects for you to explore.
@@liveinsea1 I don't have any interest on learning Mandarin. I have a strong connection to the Cantonese language and culture since I grew up around it.
As a native speaker of a language spoken by less than 8 million people worldwide, I agree that languages should be preserved regardless of how 'unimportant' they are, since language is the most important and undeniable evidence that one group of people is distinct from another group that speaks another language.
I'm a Vietnamese growing up with TVB dramas as a part of my childhood. This made me fall in love with Hong Kong and its culture. At this moment, when lots of people choose to study Mandarin Chinese for their career, I still learn Cantonese simply because I love it and somehow Cantonese shares certain similar words with Vietnamese, which makes it cooler to me. Though I'm not from Hong Kong, I'm still really excited whenever I hear Cantonese. It gives me a vibe as if I was in a TVB drama, just like in Hong Kong in the good old days haha. Hope that people will continue to learn Cantonese, even if they don't learn how to read and write, it's still great if we can communicate in this language.
It's a very poor language for open discourse. The suffocation of open communication means there is very little chance of innovation, so very few people see learning Cantonese as a worthwhile investment.
I applaud them for their efforts to preserve Cantonese language/ culture. This is a battle worth fighting. Also it made me happy to see ethnic diversity in the children's Cantonese class. Language is powerful and the more you know the richer your life and opportunities will be.
Hello. How are you today? I have to say that your profile is beautiful and your article is worth reading. When I saw your profile and the beautiful post you left, I took a page. If you don't mind, I hope you don’t mind us to be friends?
The traditional chine writing system before mao zedong chanced it is also becoming rare and learning it is hard becouse all chinese courses in my country use simplefied
@@andia968 I live in Canada, but both the US and Canada have a similar shameful history with residential schools that robbed the indigenous children of their language and culture, and in some cases their lives. Today it is not the case for Indigenous children. They have the choice of staying on a reservation, but the conditions are poor. The system still is discriminatory in a lot of ways. One problem with Indigenous languages is that they are oral and not normally taught in classes. That makes them difficult to preserve because they are mainly only passed on by family members.
@winterbreak I think you misunderstood my statement. I said "the more you know...." (a reference to learning multiple languages). FYI I speak 3 languages.
The story of Babel Tower gives us a hint. The single-language people attempted to reach Heaven by building a tower, but they failed and were punished, because unifications at phenomenal or physical level (e.g. single language, single appearance, single voice, single ideology for all people) are not the true unification. We are born with the ability to communicate via mind, but we are heavily hindered by materials so that our telepathy ability is blocked. If we awake to our original connection with God we don’t need to build a physical tower in order to reach Heaven. The correct way to Heaven is spiritual awakening, rather than enforcing artificial unifications at phenomenal or physical level.
@@universalalpha7901 I am afraid you learned the wrong message from the tower of babel. This moral of the story is multiculturalism as part of an attempt to absorb various ethnicities (reach the sky) does not work. You end up with a racial hierarchy (the tower) that falls down eventually.
@@wanghui562 The people who tried to build the tower had only one language & one culture. The punishment they received is a failure of single language & single culture. It was single language & single culture that triggered God’s punishment, not multiculturalism.
@@universalalpha7901 God is a metaphor for nature. Nature (God) punished people by making them speak different languages, this is a metaphor for imperial overreach naturally resulting in a disintegration of a unified identity.
Even though the influence of Cantonese has declined, it still doing much better in survival than other Chinese dialects and this all because of the wide available popularity of Hong Kong entertainment and media within the Cantonese communities around the world and with Hong Kong as a SARS region still being a very important business trading center for all of the Cantonese speaking communities around the world, this is still encouraging the Cantonese people to retain the language and culture.
people insult my intelligence by trying to delete Cantonese speaking dramas and films while trying to dub over these same dramas. it is just not the same.
it sounds unnatural but that for pro-dubbers to worry about. what I'm concerned about about is trying to delete the original versions from public viewings. even now, many channels on youtube are doing exactly that. it is so hard to find the original cantonese versions of many films and series. I thank the illegal sites that stream them and kept the original versions instead of the mandarin dubbed versions.
Part of the problem is a massive lack of Cantonese learning resources compared to those available for Mandarin. I would love to learn Cantonese one day.
What about the hundreds of Native American dialects that white pedos extinguished, along with the tens of billions of lives that white "Americans" joyously slaughtered?
In addition to lack of learning resources. Cantonese speakers write in Standard Chinese which is the literal form of Mandarin speech. There is Written Cantonese, but it is not used in formal Standard Chinese writing.
@@RaymondHng wow, I never knew that! Does this mean media like television shows and official news are published using standard written Chinese (e.g., for subtitles or papers)?
I've studied Cantonese and never gotten good at it, especially listening comprehension, but still consider it a wonderful, colorful language. Best wishes for its future. Thank you for covering this.
I am currently learning Cantonese and I am English. I love this language and it is sad to see the decline, but as long as Cantonese speakers stay strong nothing will be able to take that away.
Kudos for tackling such a hard language, keep it up! You must be happy with the recent influx of Hongkongers here giving you more potential people to practice with. I'm English too and learning Ukrainian so in spite of the sad circumstances of their coming here, I'm glad to get the opportunity to talk to them
Cantonese is not declining... Mandarin and Cantonese are the only two languages in China that are not declining. There's hundreds of non-Mandarin languages in China, and most of them are going extinct due to forced or unforced assimilations, but Cantonese is not one of them. The fact that media in the West would even cover Cantonese shows how incredibly influential Cantonese is, because nobody in the West even knows any Chinese language other than Mandarin and Cantonese.
@@larshofler8298 What? Most people in the west learn Mandarin. It is declining as China censor it. Did you not watch the video? In 20 years China will most likely be just speaking Mandarin.
@@saimbot99 You are not reading my post. Of course I'm saying that China is censoring languages, but Cantonese is a hegemonic language just like Mandarin. Cantonese is not under threat, and most people in the West only know two languages in China, Mandarin and Cantonese. The fact that you learn Cantonese shows how influential Cantonese is. Most people in the West learn Mandarin because it is the most common language in China, and is also spoken in Taiwan and Singapore. Mandarin is the lingua franca of the Chinese speaking world. It's not because Cantonese is going extinct, it's because Cantonese simply isn't that popular.
@@saimbot99 There are languages that actually have gone extinct or going extinct due to forced Mandarin assimilation, and it's NOT Cantonese. Prominent examples would be Shanghainese, and some dialects of Hokkienese, but arguably EVERY LANGUAGE THAT IS NOT MANDARIN/CANTONESE. They got school children literally beaten by teachers for speaking their native languages at school, and that will never happen in Cantonese speaking regions. Cantonese even acts like a Mandarin of Guangdong province, even though half of Guangdong speak Hakka and Hokkienese. Cantonese is by far the LEAST persecuted language in whole of China, and the only Sinitic language that has its own standardized writing system apart from Mandarin. I just hate it when people in the West thinking there's only two languages in China, and that you either speak Mandarin or Cantonese. The truth is, hundreds of millions of people in China speak neither. Their languages and cultures are distinct from both Mandarin and Cantonese, they are not "in between". Languages like Hokkienese, Hakka, Wu are just as unique as languages as Cantonese, but those languages are going extinct under heavy Mandarin assimilation at a much more visible rate than Cantonese, and the most crucial part is that those languages don't have standardized writing system, nor an entire "ecosystem" that keeps the language alive (like Cantonese TV and radio shows, Cantonese-language based culture). The rest of the country does not have the same kind of privilege that Cantonese has. They are reduced to local dialects of the broader Chinese-Mandarin culture, when in reality they are distinct ethnic and linguistic groups that have little connection to Mandarin.
I am Mandarin-speaking Northern Chinese but I learned Cantonese (and still learning on a daily basis), it's fun and super useful for lots of things. Cantonese songs and movies used to be a huge part of Chinese-language entertainment, particularly pre-1997, when the center of the Greater-China entertainment industry was undoubtedly in Hong Kong. In my opinion, the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese is obvious but I think people tend to exaggerate it, as comparing to other southern dialects, Cantonese is not that hard to learn for a northerner like me as long as you spend some time to learn and pay attention to details, its a rewarding experience definitely.
Agreed. It’s much simpler to understand than many other dialects from southern Chinese cities and tbh Hokkien ( Min Nan hua?)is a lot harder for me to understand ……..I’m also a northern Chinese
Is it similar to one who may speak a romance language like Italian and want to learn Spanish? Many words are the same and some just change pronunciation? I started learning Spanish at 13 and it has really enriched my life and opened the door for me to have more friends
@@ericpoeperic its like this, spain and italy settled on an official language many years ago, but the language their govts picked as official was probably just the dialect spoken around the capital. so the regions that were further away from the capital had to conform to the new official language that wasnt theirs, not everyone was happy about it, but it was forced on to them. china is doing that same thing right now, but HK people would rather be given a choice and speak both, or more. when a country wants to go into the "big leagues", they need to pick an official language, so they can standardize testing and standardize business practices and things like that. many european countries already went trough this, but it was a long time ago, when representation for minorities wasnt considered important. but nowadays, that thinking has changed, and many ppl think that it would be better if this kind of thing was done in a softer way.
@@amandaz2804 Exactly, Hokkien does not have /f/ consonant whereas Cantonese has more /f/ consonant than Mandarin does, so Hokkien basically is 福建 Fujian (Mandarin) and Fukkien (Cantonese).
@@sergeigen1 France, Italy and Spain essentially standardised themselves out the chance of having a shared language by consciously murdering their border dialects
I grew up thinking that my native tongue was Cantonese but later realized that it was a smaller dialect of Cantonese. Language varies greatly over a geographic area.
It's probably the Hoisan (台山) dialect spoken in Chinatowns in North America. In Canton or Hong Kong, people generally can understand these subdialects -- probably because they're in frequent contact.
@@AS-fv5cr Cantonese is written in traditional script, Mandarin is written in simplified version, like they are too lazy to complete the word. To me it's similar to BTW vs by the way...
When I watch Hong Kong movies, I hope to find in their original Cantonese dialogue, but about half or more are now in Mandarin versions. Sometimes the Cantonese slang used in Hong Kong movies will be lost in translation, if translated in Mandarin for its speakers, especially from mainland China. You have embrace Cantonese culture to fully enjoy it. I love speaking Cantonese, even though I'm an ABC. I particularly like Hong Kong culture.
yeah, I used to want to learn Cantonese as well, but those days are long gone, Mandarin rules all Chinese territories now, I'm ok with that, after all, it's for we Chinese to communicate with each other, to bridge our differences. If you don't speak English in US, life won't be pleasant, so I'm fully supporting PRC's policy of making every citizens to learn how to speak one common language, makes sense to me from every angles, cheers!
@@汤圆-y7f Well, having a common language like Mandarin for the sake of communication does not contradict the existence of Cantonese. Why they should not co-exist? Language itself is a tool to pass along the culture of a nation or ethnic group. When you wipe it out, the culture of that group cannot last long. Hence, the best way to kill a culture is to destroy its language. Do you know that the younger generation of Shanghai can't converse well with their grannies in Shanghainese because they are not allowed to speak Shanghainese at school? Similar situation happens in Guangzhou in the case of Cantonese. Your wife loves you enough to speak Mandarin so you don't have to make the effort to learn a different language. That does not mean Mandarin is superior in that sense. Cantonese is my mother tongue. There is so much cultural heritage in Cantonese and I believe the same for other languages too. When you believe Mandarin is the future, please also respect there are many more cultures on earth that deserve their existence.
To be fair, many Hong Kong films were originally dubbed into Mandarin before any other languages. They were filmed without sound back in those days. So no matter what language was added, it was technically a dub job. And usually was done with actors other than those who played the characters onscreen. Many Hong Kong actors spoke different languages or dialects from each other. Although Cantonese would be the most accurate to the region where HK films were made, it strikes me that either a Mandarin dub or a Cantonese dub could be considered equally valid, depending on your point of view. After all, they are both dubs. There isn't an original language track (that I'm aware of) where every actor speaks and is recorded as themselves. If you watch an old Hong Kong movie and it's in Mandarin, it's probably the first or second dubbing of that film. Some films have only Cantonese and some have only Mandarin as their chinese language option. I don't think there's anything malicious behind the decision.
@@fahjie I never said Mandarin is superior, if those elites choose Cantonese as the common language for Chinese 100 years ago, I'm totally ok with that, I would not waste a second to learn Mandarin (it might not even exist today). Also in my opinion, most of those old Chinese "cultural heritage" are pure garbage as far as I see it, not a whole lot of values in them, unscientific, superstitious, illogical... I don't miss those in a nanosecond.
@@TheSamuraiGoomba that's not entirely true, the real reason why voices had to be rerecord again in the studios(the original actor/actress rerecording their own dialogues again in a studio) in the 80s/90s is because the mics couldn't pick up the actors voices very well on set. It is true some actors had to be redubbed the most famous is jet li but if you watch the rare hong kong movie hitman 1998 it is jet li original voice speaking mandarin and cantonese. Lam ching ying of Mr Vampire fame has his voice redubbed not because he couldn't speak cantonese but because his voice didn't sound good enough if you watch some lam ching ying interviews you can hear his real voice
Knowing 2 languages decreases your chances of many forms of dementia, it helps rewire your brain so it can operate with more backup systems incase of emergencies like trauma or disease.
And India killed our major languages. In the next 10-20 years, India will kill to extinction a few more Asian languages. Not to mention that 1000+ languages of South Asia and SE Asia were killed by indians in 3000+ years.
Nah. We should document all existing languages but then switch to some common language with borrowings from many languages. English takes vocabulary from every language it interacts with. If there’s anything in your language that can’t be properly expressed in English, just throw that phrase into English and it will become part of English. Look at American English and the word “cilantro” for example. It’s the Spanish word for Coriander, but because Mexican food often uses the leaves, we took the word used by Mexicans and made it part of American English to refer to just the leaves, and then we made the old word, coriander, refer to just the seeds (the part of the spice used more in traditional English food). So if there is something unique and special about your language, give it to us and let it become part of English. In the future, the whole world will speak a descendant of English called Babelish.
Funny thing is that Cantonese replaced my native dialect in many hakka families as we were persecuted for not being “native” cantonese speakers creating a sense of us and them.
Cantonese is also the funniest language you can learn out there, in the sense that you can come up with many puns and put them into everyday conservations casually. This is something relatively hard to deliver in most other languages, including Mandarin, despite it also has the property that a lot of words/characters have the exact same sound.
Well said. If you compare Mandarin with other languages that are closer to ancient Chinese pronunciation, you will find out significant differences between Mandarin and ancient Chinese pronunciation. There is an article that talks about this, the title is : Comparative Study on Chinese character pronunciations in Korean, Japanese, Cantonese, and Mandarin.
Languages are most fundamentally close to the hearts and minds of the people of each society and all countries. People don’t give up these too easily. In 1952 on February 21st I was a second grader and went to the march for our language Bangla in Dhaka and on that basis in 1971 Pakistan split up in two, Bangladesh and Pakistan because the ruling class was unable to come to an amicable settlement. Countries need to respect each languages and nurture their population.
@@khansahb-o4e It started the split and made people aware of the step motherly treatment. At least that is what the research paper from some Pakistani Universities themselves say. The allocation of resources unfairly to West Pakistan etc made the issue acute. India somehow escapes the issue with Tamil. Despite the push for Hindi and sometimes India ignoring Tamil concerns, when push comes to shove, New Delhi has backed off. Also, Tamil Nadu being reliant on the rest of India for its rivers plays a role.
@@johnkoh5207 And Germany should ask itself why local german Dialects are dissappearing slowly. Its happening everywhere, doesnt even have to be intentionally by the Central Gouvernments...
Why don't DW also why English is the main state language taught in UK. Why not make a program about Welsh, Garlic, etc disappearing. @Karen you should ask DW why not.
I don't think Cantonese people need to worry, just now. I'm Swiss, I speak Swiss German. We use the Germans' German to write (with some simplification because nobody cares about the eszett). There's no schooling, no standard, no nothing, people just use it in their daily lives. It's been like that for ages and Swiss German is alive and well. And there are FAR fewer Swiss German speakers than there are Cantonese speakers. so long as people keep using it, it won't disappear.
Cantonese will disappear. Shanghainese is disappearing because the CCP bans Shanghainese in schools and also bans Shanghainese TV and internet shows. The CCP does it quietly, but effectively, and Shanghainese is basically dead in the generation born after 2000.
The thing is, that’s a first world democratic European country not a bigoted communist country that sees anyone who is NOT Mandarin Han as lower than dirt, Cantonese is already banned on several Chinese social platforms
@@thepapistyourmotherwarnedy752 WTF you talking about Cantonese speakers regarded as lower than dirt and Chinese social media banning Cantonese language? What's your point of making rumors? I doubt that you've ever been to HK or Guangdong Province of China or ever used any Chinese social media
Belarus, Ukraine, and other ex-Soviet countries had our languages threatened by Russian during the Empire and Soviet Union times. We are still recovering and reclaiming our languages and cultures. My heart is with the Cantonese speakers. Don't let them take away your heritage.
@@RoseNZieg na punjabis are just 10% of population. if you add the surrounding areas where it is spoken but official is hindi, then about 17-20%. but it is the vibrancy of language and culture that makes it popular, not just lately but from 1950's. most indians do not know how to speak punjabi.
I remember being in shock in my greener years to hear that hindi was the "official" language. the lost of the other languages in India would be sad if they were to try and force people to use Hindi instead.
Cantonese native speaker in taiwan? Really? Interesting, could you tell me more about that? Because as far as i know in taiwan the spoken dialects are predominantly hokkien and hakka.
@@MuhamadFarhanShiddiqthe prevailing dialects are what you stated. Fortunately I have had the luxury to adopt Cantonese and Hakka since I was born. Unfortunately I speak little Taiwanese.
Cantonese is much older than Mandarin, and a closer derivative of Middle Chinese. Hence, if you tried to read ancient Chinese poems using Mandarin it mostly wouldn't make sense because they were written in something much more similar to Cantonese.
As a Cantonese native speaker myself, I can say that Cantonese is dying fast within Hong Kong, Macau and Guangdong. Back in the 70s-90s expats actually tried to learn the language according to my parents. Nowadays mainlanders, expats and increasingly international school kids are unwilling to learn the language as they think its useless, old-fashioned and lame. And surprisingly enough, people with these attitudes only speak one or two languages at most which shows how ignorant they are about other cultures. One should never forget their native language. Like myself, I speak English and Mandarin fluently alongside Cantonese, and this really broadened my circles without abandoning my roots.
@@ilmanley The answer is yes. Despite the fact that colonial mentality is a thing in HK, there are a few cases of expats/non-ethnic Chinese speaking decent amount of Chinese. 陳明恩、何國榮、Vivek Madhubani、Jeffery Andrews、謝嘉怡 and more.
Outside of HK and maybe Guangzhou, Malaysia has probably the next highest cantonese speakers at least 3-4mil people especially in the capital, Kuala Lumpur.
As a native Cantonese speaker, I would argue that expats in Hong Kong and other regions are not as much of a problem as the Mainlanders. I have heard of many expats arriving in Hong Kong that do learn Cantonese. Whereas it is likelier for Mandarin-speaking Mainlanders to keep speaking Mandarin. But still in the end of the day the main issue has more to do with governmental policies rather than the people themselves. There isn't enough institution of Cantonese that encourage people who come to learn and speak Cantonese. And I would further argue that one of the reasons why Hong Kong and Macau were able to preserve Cantonese better than Guangdong is actually because they were colonies that weren't a part of China. This might sound controversial, but I think that especially with the example of Hong Kong, being a British colony made it escape the Chinese centralized administration which was promoting Mandarin throughout the entirety of China. While British Hong Kong might be a colonial institution, the British had a more hands-off approach to Hong Kong that has allowed locals to speak Cantonese, which makes Hong Kong a bastion of Cantonese speakers. Which explains why when Hong Kong was returned to China plenty of Hong Kongers actually opposed it. Which I wouldn't disagree, perhaps if Hong Kong remained as a highly autonomous British territory things would have fared better.
I am born in a cantonese speaking family in Kuala Lumpur. When my family is posted to china I used my understanding of cantonese to help me to speak mandarin. There are lot of words which are quite similiar between cantonese and mandarin.
There is an article that compares Chinese character pronunciations in different languages and explains ancient Chinese features. The title is : Comparative Study on Chinese character pronunciations in Korean, Japanese, Cantonese, and Mandarin.
This reminds me of Alsatian, a German dialect spoken in Alsace-Lorraine, France. Prior to the world wars, it was spoken by about 90% of the population, but ever since then, the French governments have made little effort to preserve the language, so much so that only about 30% of the population can speak it now, and even fewer use it as their first language.
I speak Mandarin and Taiwanese before learning Cantonese years ago while working in Hong Kong. Cantonese is a very colorful language and it's amazing how certain words (my favorite is water) can be used in so many different contexts. I can't say the same about the other 2, especially Mandarin. It would be a big blow to Chinese culture if Cantonese disappears. Hope all Cantonese speakers around the world unite and keep this awesome language for generations to come.
The truth is : Cantonese is not a language, it's just one kind of dialect in China. China has hundreds of dialect. Cantonese is just one of them and it's not even in top ten list if ranking by population. Mandarin is the common dialect for the whole country and I don't see any excuse to not master Mandarin if you are a Chinese. For sure, if you don't want to go to other cities of China, that's fine. And I also don't see any conflict since all other places in China, they keep their dialect pretty well.
@@pipilu3240 I am not sure if you saw the whole piece or not. There is a conscious effort by some Chinese social media to quash Cantonese. Why would they want to do that, unless there is a perceived threat that Cantonese poses? Also, Cantonese may not have a population advantage, heck, I think more people speak Sichuanese than Cantonese, but which one has more influence culturally and globally? Like it or not, Cantonese has outsized influence. Why do people all over the world say dim sum, and not dian xin?
@@psk888 You are too sensitive and you will imagine what you like or prefer. That's up to you. You can have the bias if you like to do that, but that's bias. If explaining things in your way, then the US is the biggest country which try to eliminate other culture and language in the world.
Recently I've seen a lot of content for learning Mongolian, Cantonese and Tibetan languages rising on Douyin for some reason.. it's either just my algorithm or just more people are starting getting interested I'm not sure. I hope that China can preserve all their beautiful languages and cultures.
I'm Cantonese, and there are many words in the Cantonese language that Mandarin doesn't even have a translation for it. Cantonese predates Mandarin, we Cantonese are not gonna let our language die off. Even Shanghainese is being eliminated, sad.
I’m Cantonese too. But no, Cantonese and mandarin branch off from medieval Chinese. Fujianese (minnan) due to its isolation still retains ancient Chinese and predates both Cantonese and mandarin.
Cantonese is spoken by more than 80 million people all over the world, including more than 60 million people in Guangdong Province, more than 10 million people in Guangxi Province, more than 7 million people in Hong Kong, more than 700,000 people in Macau, and 5 million in overseas Chinese communities. How many people. It's already as influential as some languages
As a people from South East Asia, we love to hear Cantonese language than Mandarin. It is nice to hear than Mandarin. I remember watching HK movies starting by Anita Mui, Lee Chin Hsia, and other HK star so emotionally attached to our heart. But when watching Mandarin drama series, it sounds so weird language and it is not enjoyable to watch it.
How do you explain the situation in the US? Many Americans with immigrant backgrounds can't speak the language of their ancestral origins, plus they have very shallow roots in the old world. Yet Amercians are in/famous for their maverick attitudes and new identities.
@@amos325 It's not a different tone or accent, Cantonese is a different language on its own, it not mutually intelligible to Mandarin. A person that only learn Mandarin cannot understand Cantonese & vice versa. Cantonese to Mandarin is like English to German.
Way more than 80 million. There are 100 million in Guangzhou alone... if you factor in all of the Cantonese speakers in the entire world? Many many millions more. I know most of the big Chinese populations in places like Monterey Park and Alhambra, CA - alone are Cantonese speakers.
As a Cantonese speaker that knows a little Mandarin and is learning Japanese, there are so many more onyomi words (Japanese words that have a pronunciation based on Chinese) that sound like Cantonese than ones that sound like Mandarin.
That's one of the reasons linguists have determined modern Cantonese is the Chinese dialect closest to middle/old Chinese. Korean vocabulary with Chinese origin also sound like Cantonese. Ancient Chinese poetry has better rhyming when read in Cantonese. There's also a 10th century Chinese dictionary of rhyming and alliteration words which are most consistent in Cantonese reading.
I thought Mandarin is like a creole language which came from mixing Han language with Manchurian language. Anyways, Mandarin is the official standard language for Qing, ROC and PRC, regardless.
Cantonese is the language of the beloved films of my youth, and the language of Bruce Lee! And like me, Bruce Lee was born in California, USA. So I consider Cantonese also an (adopted) American language, and it must be preserved!
There is an article that compares Chinese character pronunciations in different languages and explains ancient Chinese features. The title is : Comparative Study on Chinese character pronunciations in Korean, Japanese, Cantonese, and Mandarin.
Hokkien language had been spoken well across the globe for 400 years especially in S.E Asia and Mutual mutually unintelligible to other Chinese. . Same with Shanghai(wu) language
A number of people in the comments seem to think that it will be easier to have only one standardised language worldwide, but that is not possible. A first requirement for that would be a global government that could actually implement standardisation. Then, the global language should be chosen. If you choose an existing language, that will generate a huge amount of dissatisfaction. If you construct a language, which is the better choice, then its grammatical properties will still be based on certain languages over others, and there'd be no native speakers OR cultural identity for the language to actually be adopted as a tool for communication. But let's suppose that those problems could be solved easily and a global lingua franca is implemented... then it would still be unethical of the global government to deny people education, news, road signs, you name it, in their own language. And IF as if by magic everyone in the world spoke a single language, then there's two possible futures. The first is that the standard language is artifically kept the same while the people in the streets locally innovate their own varieties, leading to a bilingual situation where people speak the official language in certain contexts and an increasingly divergent local variety in informal situation (as is the case with Arabic). The second possibility is that the standard language is constantly adapted in order to accommodate inevitable language change, but if >8 billion people are part of the linguistic community then that can never be done properly, it is doomed to fail. A multilingual global society is inevitable. A quest for a monolingual global society can only lead to a loss of identity, knowledge, and colour.
well, there won't be a monolingual global society, but history has shown via colonialism that having a common language that everyone uses for ease of trade/dialogue is totally a thing. Nobody's trying to actively wipe out Cantonese either, which btw is a Dialect. The language is the same, and written the same as Mandarin, only the sounding is different. Mandarin's main purpose is similar to English, many people know it, its used for trade and to communicate across broad borders. That doesn't mean the dearth of individual dialects no matter how bad the Canto speakers try to make it sound.
Why don't you go into our human history and learn the section call Human Linguistic History? Whatever denominated language widely spread across the word were due to their culture influence! Like the age of exploration, Spanish was the most widely spread language, later the British started their age of colonization, therefore English became wide spread, also followed by the same Anglo-Saxon's culture after WWII, therefore we are still mainly use English as a intermedia language for communication, this may slowly change if there is another culture has far more strong influence. No matter we like it or not, the language always non stop evolving, changing, and developing base on the environment and human development.
@@verreal Were you talking to me? I can't tell. If so, that's what I already said in my comment, right? (Although I do know some speakers of Esperanto).
As a Cantonese (Canton is the old English name of Guangzhou), I'm furious! We need to preserve our language, but the social environment prohibits young school kids from speaking Cantonese. Nowadays, even children, born into native Cantonese families, aren't able to converse in Cantonese fluently! It's SAD!
What China is doing is simply what the Franch state did after the French Revolution. Before the revolution only 15% of population spoke modern French. Now the French Laguge has become the only langauge spoken in France at the expense of other linguistic minorities (who have been wiped out). France enshrines the French language in the constitution and is the only EU country that refuse to ratify the EU charter for the protection of linguistic minorities.
Unfortunately, other Chinese dialects do not have these privileges or very limited in such like the way Cantonese has. Cantonese is the only Non-Mandarin Chinese dialect with widespread influence other than Mandarin. Hong Kong currently as a SARS region is what is encouraging Cantonese speaking communities in Guangdong and internationally to retain their culture and language and keeping it alive, but once Hong Kong is very likely to fully return back to China after 2047, Mandarin will be more fully enforced in Hong Kong and Cantonese entertainment and media will then start to decline and then at that point, that is when the Cantonese influence will really be in danger of dying out and will lose all of the privileges like other Chinese dialects.
2047 ? that’s like a light year away. plus Cantonese have over 80+ mils speaker in China and include outside would be 100+ mils in total. that’s more than the population of some European country and place in Asia like Vietnam. The language is not in danger of dying out anytime soon ! At least not for another 100+ years. you likely won’t live till then to be able to witness it. just because hk is going back to China does not mean anything. u realize the population of hk does not reflect on all over the world community that speak the ‘yue’ language
Never forget, China is also trying to suppress the Mongol language, which is different from the one used in Mongolia, since the Mongols in China still use their traditional alphabet to write their language while in Mongolia, they use the Cyrillic alphabet (that’s the same alphabet used to write Russian)
1 big question though, WHY Mongolia do not use their MONGOL traditional alphabet, it is China that preserves it all these years and still doing so. Are you Mongolian from Mongolia? If I were China, I would not preserve it, if you want to preserve it, then by all mean, do it by yourself, it is your language after all, the state would not interfere, but you will not see road signs , bank notes in your language. The same for Cantonese. It is for unity sake, just like what USA has done, the Germans, Dutch, Spaniard, you all speak English....Immigrants? learn how to speak it. I am a Hakka, we preserve our language ourselves, and it is not that we do not know someday our language will die too.
@@handaxia1251, Mongolia uses the Cyrillic alphabet because it was a puppet state of the Soviet Union. It adapted a lot from the Soviet Union. They’ve been using Cyrillic for almost a century now and the Mongolian alphabet is totally different so it would be hard to revert back for the government
I speaks mandarin and wife's native language is cantonese, after we met, she started to learn mandarin, I think she realized that mandarin is the future, there is no future for cantonese or any other local dialects in China, all the movies/shows/music nowadays are all basically in mandarin, why resist? life is short, no point to fight a battle you can't win. By the way, I've never forced her to speak mandarin, she enjoys of speaking it, she loves all the mandarin tv shows.
@@汤圆-y7f That's hogwash. The creative TV and movie talents are in Cantonese. The young people, whether in mainland China or Taiwan, look towards Cantonese pop culture as being cool. Mandarin is the language of the hoi polloi -- a necessity for selling and making money as viewed by the Cantonese people.
@@brianplum1825 You are right if this is maybe 1990, but we are in 2022, few in either mainland or Taiwan think Cantonese pop culture is cool, because there isn't any, Hongkong is practically dead culturally speaking
@@汤圆-y7f The best HK entertainers now unfortunately work in mainland China where the audience is two hundred times bigger and money is much more. The HK people still look down on mainlanders as uncool and sophisticated. I'm sorry to tell you a few of your Cantonese in-laws may hold the same attitude about mandarin speakers. Look up the 2010 Guangzhou TV protests when the government tried to do away with Cantonese TV. The Guangzhou people won't let their language decline like Shanghainese.
2 of the languages I can speak are spoken by less than 400k in the world, I won't give up my native American traditions or languages if I can help it. I know a lot of people don't like learning new languages, but it's how a lot of people's kept stores going for generations.
This has already happened to my parents' Fujian dialect. Young people do not need to learn it and parents only speak Mandarin to their child at home. I hear more Fujian dialect outside China, due to overseas immigration pattern like the anchor said. Sadly, I knew this was going to happen in HK when I visited in 2004, just 7 years after the handover, I spoke with so many parents and others lamenting that they had to speak Mandarin in many situations as part of their daily life already.
I don't hear and see Cantonese native speakers any more. Pre-2000 many Chinese in the Western countries were Southern Chinese or Hong Kong, so Cantonese, who helped define North American Chinese cooking or chop suey food. Now is mostly Mandarin speaking people from rest of China.
I understand the desire for a common language, but also see the need to preserve culture. It seems that many countries want a common language to unify the people. That may or may not work, but seems to be the idea. It is a problem here in the Philippines. There are over 100 languages but the two official languages are Filipino and English. "Filipino" is very similar to Tagalog... and that causes issues in other parts of the country. So after years of complaints, the schools are now teaching Filipino and English, like they have been, but also the local area's mother tongue. Most people just speak their mother tongue at home, and in their city. So when we travel, even on the same island, my wife cannot speak to the people sometimes. They supposedly learn Tagalog & English in school, but never use them, and forget quite a lot (after all I supposedly learned Spanish & French is school and speak neither).
Yes that’s how it should be. China didn’t ban speaking Cantonese. It’s just that many parents are not responsible enough to make their children speak Cantonese outside of school to preserve it. Every country needs a common language to teach in school.
I'm glad she brought up that Cantonese is actually a very old language. You can hear a lot of the cognates in Korean and Japanese - the on'yomi and hanja-eo sound much more like Cantonese than Mandarin.
Strong Tang-era rhyme scheme influence on Korea and Japan. The other Middle Chinese 'dialects', from Hakka to Shanghaiese to Mao's own native 'Gan' Chinese tongue, descend from that. Korea received a strong second dose from the Ming era though, so I expect Mandarin cognates in Korean to major degrees.
The problem is China’s dialects varied greatly town by town. Without mandarin many people cannot communicate with people from neighboring towns. It’s a critical issue under the current background of mass immigration. It’s not possible to select a “standardized”dialect for each province without causing similar issue like choosing mandarin. So the current policy of formerly educating mandarin while preserving local culture, making most people bilingual is the best solution we have. Westerner’s fascination for Cantonese/Mandarin is just a result of their mindless fear over China’s scale as a whole.
Yes, but most of the school at least in Guangzhou they banned Cantonese, students must speak Mandarin only. If they respect and willing to protect the culture, would they do that?
@@andrewsitu3472 no, genetically almost all southern Chinese are more diverse than north because they are a mix of original Han settlers and local people, bit like Spanish colonies
@@andrewsitu3472 No, they are heavily mixed, if you check the result of genetic research. Southern people varied greatly, some share ancestry with people in Southeast Asia. Most southern ethnic groups already been fully assimilated, only small pockets still left. Some Southeast Asian ethic groups originated from southern China.
Mandarin has always been the nation wide Chinese official dialect going back centuries. It isn't an innovation by the current government. All these ways of speaking have the same written language. Having everyone speak Mandarin means everyone can understand each other. The Germans used to have upper, middle and low German. Now they have one official German. The French really had many variations, but more and more they speak the official French. Italian as a language was the invention of Italian nationalists. The Chinese are doing what nations do to be strong and be unified.
I taught Cantonese a few years ago. The language school was struggling to keep the classes since less and less family chose Cantonese. Not because the families speak Mandarin, but rather they think their kids would be able to do business with China years down the road. Many kids ended up quiting since they don't speak Mandarin at home. What's the point of learning a language when it's not used?
My wife is chinese and I've been learning both languages, mostly to speak to her relatives as all of her family don't speak english. We've been wondering which one to focus on, I think I'll go with Cantonese.
Also fun to curse someone or his whole family out using that language with such a rich vocabulary and in a poetic way . I love to hear Hong Konger especially the lower working class fight and curse at each other. This guy they just post in this video just cursr too in cantonese and they ahve to blep it out. Its too funny.
I'm all for preserving all varieties of Chinese, but it's just not true that Cantonese is closer to Ancient Chinese than Mandarin. Both dialect groups evolved from Late Middle Chinese (Tang-Song period) and each preserves some older features the other doesn't. Also there are many dialects of Mandarin and Cantonese, with Southern Mandarin being more close to Cantonese, e.g. "I" is "wo" in the Beijing dialect, but in the Chengdu dialect of Mandarin it is "ngo", just as in Cantonese. The only modern dialect group that evolved separately from all others is Min Chinese spoken in Fujian and on Taiwan. Also it's not true that Mandarin was promoted by the Communists. It was declared the official language during the late Qing period and heavily promoted by the governments of the Republic of China. On Taiwan the Kuomintang party even banned Min Chinese to promote Mandarin from the 1960's on.
Guangzhou's Cantonese influence has waned a lot, but even in Guangzhou alone, the survival of Cantonese is still faring better than the other Chinese dialects due to their important cultural and business relationship with Hong Kong as currently a SARS region and the wide availability and popularity of Hong Kong entertainment and media; even Guangzhou is allowed to produce and broadcast some Cantonese language medias and entertainment, some schools in Guangzhou are allowing limited amount of Cantonese language classes to be taught including some are hosting Cantonese cultural appreciation events, the Cantonese families are placing way more emphasis now on their children to retain the language/culture and Cantonese. And if you add Hong Kong and other Cantonese speaking towns surrounding Guangzhou in Guangdong and with the large international Cantonese communities, the survival level is even higher.
The government can pick whatever language to use in official situation as they like, but the freedom of using dialect in daily life is a human right which should be respected.
they don't even have the right to unify the official language like that, because they govern over differing authentic languages which originated in those lands. The same as if Poland all of a sudden governed all of Europe and decided to make Polish the official language and force out nonpolish speakers into the daily life use only. Only when the country is ethnically and culturally homogenous can there be a moral right to have only one official language
@@user-fv5ol4or1b FYI Cantonese was an invasive dialect to Hong Kong and Macau! Before the British took over Hong Kong, and Portuguese took over Macau, the native dialect of HK and Macau was Hakka speak by the farmers, and Dengka speak by the fisherman! Could you kindly explain to me why is Cantonese is far more superior than native Hakka and Dengka of Hong Kong and Macau?
@@eveleung8855 The Cantonese speakers aren't the Communists who outlaw schools teaching in children's native dialects. You can also ask why English is so superior that HK Hakka people have to use it.
@Brian Plum English is superior? Why so double standard in one hand must promote the use of Cantonese, but bashing Hakka? Can you tell me in your opinion, English or Cantonese which is far more superior?
as someone that speaks native cantonese, i really want more people to speak this language. it is such a beautiful language and i'm worried that in the future lesser people will be able to speak cantonese
regional Natives can speak their local langauge / dialects all they want. But they must know the common language 'Mandarin' to be able to communicate with all type of Chinese in China & overseas Chinese. China is a Huge Country with hundreds types of regional languages & dialects.
She said more or less the same as Portuguese and Spanish but that is not the case. Spanish and Portuguese have an 89% lexical similarity so basically 90% of the vocabulary is the same whereas in mando and Canto it’s much different with a lot less similarities. The similarities however lie in the mapping due to the characters. What I mean is when you hear a pronounciation in mandarin if you never heard the word in canto you can guess if you speak both languages. For example 人口 (ren kou) in mandarin meaning “population”’ I know that 人 in Cantonese is (Jan4) and 口 is (hau2) in Cantonese so I can guess that based off the mapping which is convenient if you know both languages
There are 4 major cantonese dialects. Spanish to Portuguese is bad comparison. You must compare to hakka, taishanese, gz, hk, guangxi, and yue hai Cantonese. Those are dialects. Even chinese don't know the god damn differences. Even my dialect taishanese has 4 different villages and we speak different.
I don't really think the comparison is that wrong, lexically they are similar, apart from the common basic vocabulary that's unique to Cantonese like 邊個，乜嘢，成日 and some minor grammar differences, the vast majority of the words are the same and you can fairly consistently guess how sounds change from one to the other with exposure. I agree that the sounds of the words are further apart though. So my best explanation would be that the difference Mandarin and Cantonese is like the difference between Spanish and Portuguese, if the person speaking Spanish was from Russia and the person speaking Portuguese was from India.
I grew up watching Hong Kong movies, dramas and even operas. Cantonese is such a colorful language. It is sad that Hong Kong will one day become another Chinese city, losing its unique identity and culture.
@@hiyukelavie2396 I had visited a few major cities in China including Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Beijing and of course, Hong Kong.. I also have relatives both in Hong Kong and Guangzhou. That is enough for me to know what I am talking about. Do you even know that in Guangdong, the younger generation Chinese are speaking mainly Putonghua instead of Cantonese. In Hong Kong, they are pushing schools to teach the Chinese language using Putonghua instead of Cantonese. Of course there are subtle differences in all provinces in China but here we are talking about Hong Kong slowly losing its uniqueness, language and identity.
@@veekwok5611 "Do you know that in Guangdong, the younger generation Chinese are speaking mainly Putonghua instead of Cantonese" Lol, compare this to Chinese people who migrate to the west, many of whom stopped speaking any sort of Chinese within one generation "In Hong Kong, they are pushing schools to teach the Chinese language using Putonghua instead of Cantonese" I understand why you might feel emotional about this. But try to be rational Do you know that there are literally hundreds of different dialects in China? Like, literally hundreds. This is not an exaggeration Knowing that, do you think that all schools in China should be teaching the Chinese language in their own dialects? Take a moment to think about this You know this is impossible It's extremely difficult, not to mention inefficient, to train enough teachers to all teach in their local dialect. What you will end up with is a shortage of teachers. It makes practical sense to stick to Putonghua, in order to train enough teachers for a nation of 1.4 billion people This is simply the reality of the situation Now, understanding this, what makes Cantonese so special? Why should Cantonese receive special treatment compared to other dialects? If Hongkies get to teach in Cantonese, shouldn't the speakers of the several hundred other dialects in China all get the same treatment? The reality is, the vast majority of people in China understand the practicality of schools being conducted in Putonghua and have no problem with it It's actually mostly overseas Chinese like you who moan and groan about it the most
Considering how the CCP treated some cultural aspects of society in the past. The fact that they are pressuring to have Mandarin mainstream like this is just another way for them to destroy a culture. I am glad that DW talks about this topic. Despite being only about 10 mins, it holds significant relevance for me.
Well the cultural revolution or communism in general always emphasised on destroying cultures as it was viewed to be teaching followed by the rich and powerful, which I think is quite dumb in logic.
When my sister was born in 2008, our family stopped speaking Cantonese at home in favour of Mandarin, for job prospects/ practicality. I’ve lost my fluency almost completely over the years, and it’s sad seeing my culture in China dying within my own generation…
It may be sad but if you think about it, languages are simply mouth noises that we make with our vocal cords. We all know it would be much better for humanity if we all spoke the same language.
Language unification is seen everywhere around the world. Sometimes violent. Sometimes less so. In cases such as like this it becomes moreso the responsibility of the community to teach the language to the next generation.
@@rinahk3407 yes. That’s good. But a lot of hongkongers think that this is eliminating Cantonese culture. as a Cantonese myself, I don’t think learning mandarin would do damage to Cantonese as long as the parents and the community keep up with the local culture.
It's also worth mentioning that many ancient texts, poems and songs make more sense and sound better in Cantonese even though they have been translated into Mandarin already. It would be a great loss to the Chinese history and literature.
Well said. Pronunciation plays a key role in ancient Chinese literature study. For example, poems and literatures written in ancient China follow a number of rhymical rules. Reading those ancient poems and literatures in Cantonese, rather than Mandarin, can better fit the ancient rhymical rules. and demonstrate the beauty of ancient Chinese literature beyond words and meanings. A person who knows only Mandarin can never truly understand the true beauty of ancient Chinese culture.
There is an article that compares Chinese character pronunciations in different languages and explains ancient Chinese features. The title is : Comparative Study on Chinese character pronunciations in Korean, Japanese, Cantonese, and Mandarin.
Orwell's playbook many regional dialects have already been lost; even people who live overseas who try to teach them on youtube or the like can be targeted for harassment or threats; same reason they have come down hard on foreign language tutors who aren't employed by the state. After all you can't censor or control what you can't understand.
Hong Kong is just about the only Chinese territory where Cantonese is used as medium of instruction for local schools. In HK universities English is the medium of instruction. So if there is any push it is only in Hong Kong (and Macau). Taiwan by the way uses Mandarin as instruction medium. Given Taiwan's very diverse ethnic background, it makes sense. Such ethnic diversity is less of an issue in Hong Kong. Across China, Standard Chinese (Mandarin) is used in schools and bilingual education and local dialects are encouraged though I suspect it is mainly local community efforts. If Cantonese or any dialect is under treat of preservation the very sizable community can easily raise to the occasion. Except for very uncommon regional dialects, it is not likely that any dialect be lost. Languages and dialects are emotional subject. One should rightly understand the goal of any policy that involve this emotive subject. The Touyin clip is not about suppression of the use Cantonese but one of monitoring online contents. It could easily be done without intrusion and was perhaps done by someone inexperienced, creating an incidence that upset a group of people unintentionally. This is a good video. If we start off by seeing the Chinese government in a more positive light, we could avoid slanting the issue eh ... unfairly. I am from Singapore where the very diverse Chinese community heeded the call to 学华语 in favour of our dialects. And English to connect to the world. I think we did rather well. And oh, we still retain our dialects and took an interest in where our forefathers hail from.
when my close friend who speaks cantonese as her mother tongue visited china with me and our asian studies class (has family from hong kong but parents immigrated from vietnam), she was constantly looked down upon when she revealed that shes chinese but had poor mandarin. it was like she wasnt even seen as chinese at that point to some people. i dont know and havent learned any chinese languages, but i know the difference when hearing them, and its always interesting that i associate cantonese more with chinese americans just because its rarer for me to find a chinese american who speaks mandarin.
Even without government's suppression, dialects or local languages are slowly fading away due to high mobility and globalization, e.g. parents from different dialect groups tend to just speak standard language to their kids, and kids might avoid speaking dialects in order to fit in with other kids coming from different language background.
There's nothing wrong with having a national, official language. Canada has two official languages: English and French. Laws are written in these two languages.
One can understand standardisation in schools and universities. There's a lot of practical value to something like that. But to limit other languages online in like Tiktok... Why? That's a bit too overt to explain away as mere practical consideration. Online translation tools are amazing these days. There's zero need for it. To wilfully impinge on cultural identity like that reminds of the so called "cultural revolution" and what good came of that?
The CCP sensors all media contents. If the CCP 50 cents media police cannot understand the contents, they cannot control/ sensors it. For example, organizing protest/revolution like the Arab Spring in Egypt
What are the chances those users were saying controversial things and the app just used that excuse to ban their videos/channel? I don't believe this story tbh
I'm from Singapore, and I support the continuance of Cantonese. But I beg to differ with the information presented here. Cantonese is a dialect and not a language. The prove is seen in this video. The Cantonese farewell broadcast was automatically translated to Chinese characters. It is overstating the differences to call it a different language. There are differences for sure. I also disagree with the claims of the Cantonese community that their dialact is older. If you listen to Tang poems as spoken during that time, you will know it is neither Mandarin nor Cantonese. It is nothing like what we hear today. It is true that Cantonese based dialacts are dominant in America, but they are not dominant in South East Asia. The dominant Chinese dialect in SEA is Hokkien/Teochew (closely related). Hokkien is as old as Cantonese, and may be older. It is true Mandarin is a late comer. Chinese dialects have many expressions that are unique, and the tones are different from Mandarin. They are worth preserving. Communist China is trying to obliterate regional distinctives in their perpetual push for uniformity and control. The attempt to quash dialects is totally unnecessary. Guangzhou was the start of China's opening to the world and it is Cantonese. It has not slowed China's progress. China gives lip service to the 56 ethnic diversities, but tries to quash such a big group of people speaking Cantonese. It is apparent that Cantonese (Southern dialect) is too strong for the governing class (Northerners). Long live Cantonese. Long live Hokkien. Long live the dialects.
Please Singaporeans protect your mother tounge. As a southern Chinese I am shocked to learn you guys give up native language passsed from grandparents to learn Beijing mandarin. You guys have all the opportunities but choose the most utilitarian one instead of love for mother language
In Malaysia our children learned Mandarin at school but they are reminded to speak Cantonese or their mother tongue at home and we're proud of it. China can mandate learning of Mandarin like us here in Malaysia we learned Malay as national language but people should feel free to speak own cultural languages. Malaysian Chinese speak chinese Mandarin, Canto, Hokkien, Hakka and many other chinese languages.
I've always enjoyed the fact that the 'official' dictionaries of Putonghua (the government-endorsed variant of Chinese) are called 'Xin Hua' dictionaries. That's 'New Speak' dictionaries - exactly the same term used in the book 1984...
Orwell's use of "Big Brother" was also an obvious reference to "dai lou" (colloquial slang for gangster boss). In addition, Orwell seemed annoyed by the limitations of Chinese vocabulary, suggesting it was almost brainless to use the prefix "doubleplus" e.g. "doubleplus big" ("好好大" in Cantonese) when the apparently explicit "richness" of English vocabulary could offer precise synonyms like gigantic, large, enormous, vast, immense, huge, gargantuan... etc. I think Orwell's blind spot masked the fact that the Cantonese use of "好" is similar to the English use of "very".
If we know how the chronic problems of India resulted from many languages, we would appreciate how Emperor Qin ShiHuang has unified languages of China back in period 259-210BC. There must have one single language to avoid divided nation. Having said this critical importance, for cultural aspects, Cantonese and all other dialects have their importance to preserve. It is a matter of primary and secondary.
"There must have one single language to avoid divided nation" Interesting. Switzerland has 4 official languages and no lingua franca. Despite of that, everyone feels strongly Swiss and nothing else.
Don't worry, Cantonese is like a 4th dialect to Vietnamese with a robust writing system that can articulate Cantonese. Even though China is trying to eradicate Cantonese, Vietnamese is not going anywhere.
Mandarin speaking Chinese move around much more nowadays, globally and nationally to the south, Hong Kong. Mandarin is the language of the ruling party. Of course, this will keep them being dominant.
Xi is Chairman Mao 2.0 and he lives up the mass murderer's legacy in destroying Chinese culture, languages, dialects, and traditional values. Chinese languages consists of hundreds of dialects and many are facing extinction. Cantonese is a very rich and sophisticated dialect, often carries intricate subtleties and humour.
![⭐️( ลอยกระทง 2024 ) Ver. แดนซ์ Remix BY [ ดีเจกิต รีมิกซ์ ]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/rMWOLhgXUHc/mqdefault.jpg)
It’s not just Cantonese. It’s all the indigenous languages in China. It breaks my heart because languages are so unique and beautiful. Cultures should be cherished, not crushed.
English the the native languages in many western countries are also under threat as a result of mixing people, cultures and languages together for generations.
The best sound is the child's voice. Should you learn the child's voice instead of letting the child learn your language?
@@anacc3257 Did you get the memo that Modern English is an amalgamation of many, many ancient languages?
@@anacc3257 honestly this is the dumbest thing I have seen in a while lmao
@@peabaseHe's not even smart enough to realise that even China teaches English instead of exporting Mandarin
I grew up in San Francisco where you could hear Cantonese spoken often out on the street and could go to the bank or hospital and there will often be someone who spoke it.
Before I took Cantonese classes at the local college I though it sounded terrible, after I started learning and understanding the culture better it just became my hobby and made close Cantonese friends I still gather with 20 years later. It is a very colorful and expressive language I really enjoy using from time to time. I am Mexican
The older immigrants in San Francisco who emigrated from the villages are actually speaking Toisan.
You can speak Cantonese!? Incredible!
@@lilytsui3015 Its just like any other thing, takes time and practice.
are you learning a language for fun? Mandarin is much more common used in the world. If you are interested there are many other chinese dialects for you to explore.
@@liveinsea1 I don't have any interest on learning Mandarin. I have a strong connection to the Cantonese language and culture since I grew up around it.
As a native speaker of a language spoken by less than 8 million people worldwide, I agree that languages should be preserved regardless of how 'unimportant' they are, since language is the most important and undeniable evidence that one group of people is distinct from another group that speaks another language.
Languages are born and some die, new ones emerge. Languages are dynamic.
why is it important to be distinct from others? Shouldn't we rather accept others and work together?
And learning to speak different let's them know you care enough to learn to have a conversation 🙂
Trying to kill a language is like killing the people
Not 8 but 80 Million
I'm a Vietnamese growing up with TVB dramas as a part of my childhood. This made me fall in love with Hong Kong and its culture. At this moment, when lots of people choose to study Mandarin Chinese for their career, I still learn Cantonese simply because I love it and somehow Cantonese shares certain similar words with Vietnamese, which makes it cooler to me.
Though I'm not from Hong Kong, I'm still really excited whenever I hear Cantonese. It gives me a vibe as if I was in a TVB drama, just like in Hong Kong in the good old days haha. Hope that people will continue to learn Cantonese, even if they don't learn how to read and write, it's still great if we can communicate in this language.
Bạn học tiếng Quảng ở đâu vậy ạ?
@@keit7742 mình học ở trên Zalo và hellotalk
Cantonese is very similar to viet in the Han system
me too. I’m a Vietnamese that also learn Cantonese. I like it better than mandarin
Cantonese and Vietnamese people are brothers. Northern Chinese are teaching Cantonese to hate Vietnamese
I’m Canadian and will ensure my future kids continue to speak Taishanese/Cantonese just like the rest of my family ensuring the language is preserved
Cantonese is, by far, the best language to swear in. That alone should justify efforts to preserve and spread it!
lmao
Well you don't speak a Slavic language obviously.
It's a very poor language for open discourse. The suffocation of open communication means there is very little chance of innovation, so very few people see learning Cantonese as a worthwhile investment.
You should learn Hokkin, a dialect ten times worse than Cantonese when it comes to swearing, I'm a native Cantonese speaker, that tell you something.
Hakka is a better dialect.
I applaud them for their efforts to preserve Cantonese language/ culture. This is a battle worth fighting. Also it made me happy to see ethnic diversity in the children's Cantonese class. Language is powerful and the more you know the richer your life and opportunities will be.
Hello. How are you today? I have to say that your profile is beautiful and your article is worth reading.
When I saw your profile and the beautiful post you left, I took a page.
If you don't mind, I hope you don’t mind us to be friends?
The traditional chine writing system before mao zedong chanced it is also becoming rare and learning it is hard becouse all chinese courses in my country use simplefied
so are many of indegenous languages in US are dying or extinct because US encourage indigenous to use english
@@andia968 I live in Canada, but both the US and Canada have a similar shameful history with residential schools that robbed the indigenous children of their language and culture, and in some cases their lives. Today it is not the case for Indigenous children. They have the choice of staying on a reservation, but the conditions are poor. The system still is discriminatory in a lot of ways. One problem with Indigenous languages is that they are oral and not normally taught in classes. That makes them difficult to preserve because they are mainly only passed on by family members.
@winterbreak I think you misunderstood my statement. I said "the more you know...." (a reference to learning multiple languages). FYI I speak 3 languages.
as my mother tongue is cantonese, it’s a beautiful language, we have to keep going with cantonese…don’t let it fade away :(
The story of Babel Tower gives us a hint. The single-language people attempted to reach Heaven by building a tower, but they failed and were punished, because unifications at phenomenal or physical level (e.g. single language, single appearance, single voice, single ideology for all people) are not the true unification. We are born with the ability to communicate via mind, but we are heavily hindered by materials so that our telepathy ability is blocked. If we awake to our original connection with God we don’t need to build a physical tower in order to reach Heaven. The correct way to Heaven is spiritual awakening, rather than enforcing artificial unifications at phenomenal or physical level.
@@universalalpha7901 I am afraid you learned the wrong message from the tower of babel. This moral of the story is multiculturalism as part of an attempt to absorb various ethnicities (reach the sky) does not work. You end up with a racial hierarchy (the tower) that falls down eventually.
@@wanghui562 The people who tried to build the tower had only one language & one culture. The punishment they received is a failure of single language & single culture. It was single language & single culture that triggered God’s punishment, not multiculturalism.
@@universalalpha7901 God is a metaphor for nature. Nature (God) punished people by making them speak different languages, this is a metaphor for imperial overreach naturally resulting in a disintegration of a unified identity.
Marry your own
Even though the influence of Cantonese has declined, it still doing much better in survival than other Chinese dialects and this all because of the wide available popularity of Hong Kong entertainment and media within the Cantonese communities around the world and with Hong Kong as a SARS region still being a very important business trading center for all of the Cantonese speaking communities around the world, this is still encouraging the Cantonese people to retain the language and culture.
people insult my intelligence by trying to delete Cantonese speaking dramas and films while trying to dub over these same dramas. it is just not the same.
it sounds unnatural but that for pro-dubbers to worry about. what I'm concerned about about is trying to delete the original versions from public viewings. even now, many channels on youtube are doing exactly that. it is so hard to find the original cantonese versions of many films and series. I thank the illegal sites that stream them and kept the original versions instead of the mandarin dubbed versions.
cantonese language only has influence on the cantonese while all others prefer British or american entertainment.
@@RoseNZieg that's what they've been doing in SG all these years.
languages, not dialects
Part of the problem is a massive lack of Cantonese learning resources compared to those available for Mandarin. I would love to learn Cantonese one day.
Search “cantonese lecture”, there are a few on TH-cam.
What about the hundreds of Native American dialects that white pedos extinguished, along with the tens of billions of lives that white "Americans" joyously slaughtered?
Try the songs first.
In addition to lack of learning resources. Cantonese speakers write in Standard Chinese which is the literal form of Mandarin speech. There is Written Cantonese, but it is not used in formal Standard Chinese writing.
@@RaymondHng wow, I never knew that! Does this mean media like television shows and official news are published using standard written Chinese (e.g., for subtitles or papers)?
I've studied Cantonese and never gotten good at it, especially listening comprehension, but still consider it a wonderful, colorful language. Best wishes for its future. Thank you for covering this.
I am currently learning Cantonese and I am English. I love this language and it is sad to see the decline, but as long as Cantonese speakers stay strong nothing will be able to take that away.
Kudos for tackling such a hard language, keep it up! You must be happy with the recent influx of Hongkongers here giving you more potential people to practice with. I'm English too and learning Ukrainian so in spite of the sad circumstances of their coming here, I'm glad to get the opportunity to talk to them
Cantonese is not declining... Mandarin and Cantonese are the only two languages in China that are not declining. There's hundreds of non-Mandarin languages in China, and most of them are going extinct due to forced or unforced assimilations, but Cantonese is not one of them. The fact that media in the West would even cover Cantonese shows how incredibly influential Cantonese is, because nobody in the West even knows any Chinese language other than Mandarin and Cantonese.
@@larshofler8298 What? Most people in the west learn Mandarin. It is declining as China censor it. Did you not watch the video? In 20 years China will most likely be just speaking Mandarin.
@@saimbot99 You are not reading my post. Of course I'm saying that China is censoring languages, but Cantonese is a hegemonic language just like Mandarin. Cantonese is not under threat, and most people in the West only know two languages in China, Mandarin and Cantonese. The fact that you learn Cantonese shows how influential Cantonese is. Most people in the West learn Mandarin because it is the most common language in China, and is also spoken in Taiwan and Singapore. Mandarin is the lingua franca of the Chinese speaking world. It's not because Cantonese is going extinct, it's because Cantonese simply isn't that popular.
@@saimbot99 There are languages that actually have gone extinct or going extinct due to forced Mandarin assimilation, and it's NOT Cantonese. Prominent examples would be Shanghainese, and some dialects of Hokkienese, but arguably EVERY LANGUAGE THAT IS NOT MANDARIN/CANTONESE. They got school children literally beaten by teachers for speaking their native languages at school, and that will never happen in Cantonese speaking regions. Cantonese even acts like a Mandarin of Guangdong province, even though half of Guangdong speak Hakka and Hokkienese. Cantonese is by far the LEAST persecuted language in whole of China, and the only Sinitic language that has its own standardized writing system apart from Mandarin.
I just hate it when people in the West thinking there's only two languages in China, and that you either speak Mandarin or Cantonese. The truth is, hundreds of millions of people in China speak neither. Their languages and cultures are distinct from both Mandarin and Cantonese, they are not "in between". Languages like Hokkienese, Hakka, Wu are just as unique as languages as Cantonese, but those languages are going extinct under heavy Mandarin assimilation at a much more visible rate than Cantonese, and the most crucial part is that those languages don't have standardized writing system, nor an entire "ecosystem" that keeps the language alive (like Cantonese TV and radio shows, Cantonese-language based culture). The rest of the country does not have the same kind of privilege that Cantonese has. They are reduced to local dialects of the broader Chinese-Mandarin culture, when in reality they are distinct ethnic and linguistic groups that have little connection to Mandarin.
I am Mandarin-speaking Northern Chinese but I learned Cantonese (and still learning on a daily basis), it's fun and super useful for lots of things. Cantonese songs and movies used to be a huge part of Chinese-language entertainment, particularly pre-1997, when the center of the Greater-China entertainment industry was undoubtedly in Hong Kong. In my opinion, the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese is obvious but I think people tend to exaggerate it, as comparing to other southern dialects, Cantonese is not that hard to learn for a northerner like me as long as you spend some time to learn and pay attention to details, its a rewarding experience definitely.
Agreed. It’s much simpler to understand than many other dialects from southern Chinese cities and tbh Hokkien ( Min Nan hua?)is a lot harder for me to understand ……..I’m also a northern Chinese
Is it similar to one who may speak a romance language like Italian and want to learn Spanish? Many words are the same and some just change pronunciation? I started learning Spanish at 13 and it has really enriched my life and opened the door for me to have more friends
@@ericpoeperic its like this, spain and italy settled on an official language many years ago, but the language their govts picked as official was probably just the dialect spoken around the capital. so the regions that were further away from the capital had to conform to the new official language that wasnt theirs, not everyone was happy about it, but it was forced on to them.
china is doing that same thing right now, but HK people would rather be given a choice and speak both, or more.
when a country wants to go into the "big leagues", they need to pick an official language, so they can standardize testing and standardize business practices and things like that.
many european countries already went trough this, but it was a long time ago, when representation for minorities wasnt considered important.
but nowadays, that thinking has changed, and many ppl think that it would be better if this kind of thing was done in a softer way.
@@amandaz2804 Exactly, Hokkien does not have /f/ consonant whereas Cantonese has more /f/ consonant than Mandarin does, so Hokkien basically is 福建 Fujian (Mandarin) and Fukkien (Cantonese).
@@sergeigen1 France, Italy and Spain essentially standardised themselves out the chance of having a shared language by consciously murdering their border dialects
as a teochew speaker (similar to cantonese) i thank you for this video. They call it "dialacts" but they are not dialacts. they are languages.
I am Hokkien. Teowchew is dialect as Cantonese.
I am Teochew, Teochew is nothing similar to Cantonese
@@limcheating1 OP has no idea what he's talking about
@@limcheating1 Ikr most of the words in Cantonese literally sound closer to Mandarian than Teochew.
@@moistnutella9560 lmao Cantonese is closer to hokkien. Canto pronunciation is not even anywhere close to mandarin. There like 1% of that
I grew up thinking that my native tongue was Cantonese but later realized that it was a smaller dialect of Cantonese. Language varies greatly over a geographic area.
It's probably the Hoisan (台山) dialect spoken in Chinatowns in North America. In Canton or Hong Kong, people generally can understand these subdialects -- probably because they're in frequent contact.
Could you please elaborate on the difference? My Cantonese wife told me that there are no dialects. Very curious
@@AS-fv5cr Cantonese is written in traditional script, Mandarin is written in simplified version, like they are too lazy to complete the word. To me it's similar to BTW vs by the way...
@@___beyondhorizon4664 so 80 million people who speaks Cantonese in Guangdong China don't know how to write? dont be such an ignorant
圍頭話?
When I watch Hong Kong movies, I hope to find in their original Cantonese dialogue, but about half or more are now in Mandarin versions. Sometimes the Cantonese slang used in Hong Kong movies will be lost in translation, if translated in Mandarin for its speakers, especially from mainland China. You have embrace Cantonese culture to fully enjoy it. I love speaking Cantonese, even though I'm an ABC. I particularly like Hong Kong culture.
yeah, I used to want to learn Cantonese as well, but those days are long gone, Mandarin rules all Chinese territories now, I'm ok with that, after all, it's for we Chinese to communicate with each other, to bridge our differences. If you don't speak English in US, life won't be pleasant, so I'm fully supporting PRC's policy of making every citizens to learn how to speak one common language, makes sense to me from every angles, cheers!
@@汤圆-y7f Well, having a common language like Mandarin for the sake of communication does not contradict the existence of Cantonese. Why they should not co-exist? Language itself is a tool to pass along the culture of a nation or ethnic group. When you wipe it out, the culture of that group cannot last long. Hence, the best way to kill a culture is to destroy its language. Do you know that the younger generation of Shanghai can't converse well with their grannies in Shanghainese because they are not allowed to speak Shanghainese at school? Similar situation happens in Guangzhou in the case of Cantonese. Your wife loves you enough to speak Mandarin so you don't have to make the effort to learn a different language. That does not mean Mandarin is superior in that sense. Cantonese is my mother tongue. There is so much cultural heritage in Cantonese and I believe the same for other languages too. When you believe Mandarin is the future, please also respect there are many more cultures on earth that deserve their existence.
To be fair, many Hong Kong films were originally dubbed into Mandarin before any other languages. They were filmed without sound back in those days. So no matter what language was added, it was technically a dub job. And usually was done with actors other than those who played the characters onscreen. Many Hong Kong actors spoke different languages or dialects from each other. Although Cantonese would be the most accurate to the region where HK films were made, it strikes me that either a Mandarin dub or a Cantonese dub could be considered equally valid, depending on your point of view. After all, they are both dubs. There isn't an original language track (that I'm aware of) where every actor speaks and is recorded as themselves.
If you watch an old Hong Kong movie and it's in Mandarin, it's probably the first or second dubbing of that film. Some films have only Cantonese and some have only Mandarin as their chinese language option. I don't think there's anything malicious behind the decision.
@@fahjie I never said Mandarin is superior, if those elites choose Cantonese as the common language for Chinese 100 years ago, I'm totally ok with that, I would not waste a second to learn Mandarin (it might not even exist today). Also in my opinion, most of those old Chinese "cultural heritage" are pure garbage as far as I see it, not a whole lot of values in them, unscientific, superstitious, illogical... I don't miss those in a nanosecond.
@@TheSamuraiGoomba that's not entirely true, the real reason why voices had to be rerecord again in the studios(the original actor/actress rerecording their own dialogues again in a studio) in the 80s/90s is because the mics couldn't pick up the actors voices very well on set. It is true some actors had to be redubbed the most famous is jet li but if you watch the rare hong kong movie hitman 1998 it is jet li original voice speaking mandarin and cantonese. Lam ching ying of Mr Vampire fame has his voice redubbed not because he couldn't speak cantonese but because his voice didn't sound good enough if you watch some lam ching ying interviews you can hear his real voice
Every language must be allowed to thrive. People who learn and speak multiple languages are smart. It generates the curiosity and diversity in ideas.
Knowing 2 languages decreases your chances of many forms of dementia, it helps rewire your brain so it can operate with more backup systems incase of emergencies like trauma or disease.
And India killed our major languages. In the next 10-20 years, India will kill to extinction a few more Asian languages. Not to mention that 1000+ languages of South Asia and SE Asia were killed by indians in 3000+ years.
Nah. We should document all existing languages but then switch to some common language with borrowings from many languages. English takes vocabulary from every language it interacts with. If there’s anything in your language that can’t be properly expressed in English, just throw that phrase into English and it will become part of English. Look at American English and the word “cilantro” for example. It’s the Spanish word for Coriander, but because Mexican food often uses the leaves, we took the word used by Mexicans and made it part of American English to refer to just the leaves, and then we made the old word, coriander, refer to just the seeds (the part of the spice used more in traditional English food).
So if there is something unique and special about your language, give it to us and let it become part of English. In the future, the whole world will speak a descendant of English called Babelish.
Beijing forbids Cantonese people’s children to speak Cantonese in schools. The children get punished if they speak Cantonese in schools.
School teachers persuade Cantonese-speaking parents to speak with their children in Mandarin even in their homes.
Funny thing is that Cantonese replaced my native dialect in many hakka families as we were persecuted for not being “native” cantonese speakers creating a sense of us and them.
Same thing with Toisan or other dialects of Guangdong
That's nature running its course for you lol
that’s like my family. my grandmother speaks a hakka language but I only speak know Cantonese.
i dont even live in guangdong, but as an ethnic hakka i only can speak mandarin and cantonese🥲
austroasiatic languages😢
Cantonese is also the funniest language you can learn out there, in the sense that you can come up with many puns and put them into everyday conservations casually. This is something relatively hard to deliver in most other languages, including Mandarin, despite it also has the property that a lot of words/characters have the exact same sound.
Well said. If you compare Mandarin with other languages that are closer to ancient Chinese pronunciation, you will find out significant differences between Mandarin and ancient Chinese pronunciation. There is an article that talks about this, the title is : Comparative Study on Chinese character pronunciations in Korean, Japanese, Cantonese, and Mandarin.
Yes! I agreed with you! Please watch the most famous and popular videos performed by Peters Russell.
My grandmother, her siblings and their parents who emigrated from Guangdong spoke Hakka.
That too needs preserving.
Languages are most fundamentally close to the hearts and minds of the people of each society and all countries.
People don’t give up these too easily. In 1952 on February 21st I was a second grader and went to the march for our language Bangla in Dhaka and on that basis in 1971 Pakistan split up in two, Bangladesh and Pakistan because the ruling class was unable to come to an amicable settlement.
Countries need to respect each languages and nurture their population.
Pakistan eventually made Bengali a co-oficial language in 1956. If that was really the reason to split apart, that's a pretty weak reason.
@@khansahb-o4e It started the split and made people aware of the step motherly treatment. At least that is what the research paper from some Pakistani Universities themselves say. The allocation of resources unfairly to West Pakistan etc made the issue acute.
India somehow escapes the issue with Tamil. Despite the push for Hindi and sometimes India ignoring Tamil concerns, when push comes to shove, New Delhi has backed off. Also, Tamil Nadu being reliant on the rest of India for its rivers plays a role.
And Bengalis, ganging up with their own, killed two of our major languages in 19th century.
That must have been so amazing (and scary at the time!) to be part of history like that and to watch as the change unfolded
Yet u speaks hindi
Thanks DW for raising up this issue
DW should worry why German is declining in europe.
@@johnkoh5207 And Germany should ask itself why local german Dialects are dissappearing slowly. Its happening everywhere, doesnt even have to be intentionally by the Central Gouvernments...
Why don't DW also why English is the main state language taught in UK. Why not make a program about Welsh, Garlic, etc disappearing. @Karen you should ask DW why not.
@@emilyblade9676 exactly. Gaelic and Welsh are disappearing very quickly
@@SdH76zhEU All minority languages should be cared. Most countries haven't been saint towards minorities
I don't think Cantonese people need to worry, just now.
I'm Swiss, I speak Swiss German.
We use the Germans' German to write (with some simplification because nobody cares about the eszett).
There's no schooling, no standard, no nothing, people just use it in their daily lives.
It's been like that for ages and Swiss German is alive and well.
And there are FAR fewer Swiss German speakers than there are Cantonese speakers.
so long as people keep using it, it won't disappear.
Cantonese will disappear. Shanghainese is disappearing because the CCP bans Shanghainese in schools and also bans Shanghainese TV and internet shows. The CCP does it quietly, but effectively, and Shanghainese is basically dead in the generation born after 2000.
The thing is, that’s a first world democratic European country not a bigoted communist country that sees anyone who is NOT Mandarin Han as lower than dirt, Cantonese is already banned on several Chinese social platforms
@@thepapistyourmotherwarnedy752 WTF you talking about Cantonese speakers regarded as lower than dirt and Chinese social media banning Cantonese language? What's your point of making rumors? I doubt that you've ever been to HK or Guangdong Province of China or ever used any Chinese social media
Belarus, Ukraine, and other ex-Soviet countries had our languages threatened by Russian during the Empire and Soviet Union times. We are still recovering and reclaiming our languages and cultures. My heart is with the Cantonese speakers. Don't let them take away your heritage.
we have the same problem in India with hindi being promoted officially :(
the govt can promote all it wants. we are never giving up our mother tongue, ever!
Not remotely true, me saying this as an Indian Bengali. Don't compare this situation with our situation in India, completely different.
ironically I think most Indians i know and hear while talking are Punjab.
@@RoseNZieg na punjabis are just 10% of population.
if you add the surrounding areas where it is spoken but official is hindi, then about 17-20%.
but it is the vibrancy of language and culture that makes it popular, not just lately but from 1950's.
most indians do not know how to speak punjabi.
I remember being in shock in my greener years to hear that hindi was the "official" language. the lost of the other languages in India would be sad if they were to try and force people to use Hindi instead.
As a native Cantonese speaker in Taiwan I advocate Cantonese and all indigenous languages.
Cantonese native speaker in taiwan? Really? Interesting, could you tell me more about that? Because as far as i know in taiwan the spoken dialects are predominantly hokkien and hakka.
@@MuhamadFarhanShiddiqthe prevailing dialects are what you stated. Fortunately I have had the luxury to adopt Cantonese and Hakka since I was born. Unfortunately I speak little Taiwanese.
Even in Guangzhou, locals also speak Cantonese.
多谢为广东话发声。广东不灭，粤语永存。广东话永远係广东人心中。
嘩 唯一嘅廣東話留言。。有親切感 !
留心中喺唔夠架，要盡力傳比自己嘅下一代。
然而你们这些广东人只提广东白话，从来不提潮汕客家话。。。难道他们不在广东人心中？
从来冇听过你地话客家话不灭，潮州话永存。依家有个对大家都公平嘅普通话出现忽然间又要“广东话”永远系广东人心中。
我都系广东人，但你嘅白话式微关我鬼事啊？
@@CjxJamie 廣府人企出来保衛自己嘅語言。客家人，潮洲人嘅語言自己保衛。我哋廣府人無義務保衛埋客家，潮州話。
Cantonese is much older than Mandarin, and a closer derivative of Middle Chinese. Hence, if you tried to read ancient Chinese poems using Mandarin it mostly wouldn't make sense because they were written in something much more similar to Cantonese.
As a Cantonese native speaker myself, I can say that Cantonese is dying fast within Hong Kong, Macau and Guangdong. Back in the 70s-90s expats actually tried to learn the language according to my parents. Nowadays mainlanders, expats and increasingly international school kids are unwilling to learn the language as they think its useless, old-fashioned and lame. And surprisingly enough, people with these attitudes only speak one or two languages at most which shows how ignorant they are about other cultures. One should never forget their native language. Like myself, I speak English and Mandarin fluently alongside Cantonese, and this really broadened my circles without abandoning my roots.
Do the English speaking expats learn Cantonese? Did they ever?
@@ilmanley The answer is yes. Despite the fact that colonial mentality is a thing in HK, there are a few cases of expats/non-ethnic Chinese speaking decent amount of Chinese. 陳明恩、何國榮、Vivek Madhubani、Jeffery Andrews、謝嘉怡 and more.
Cantonese will never die in HK
Outside of HK and maybe Guangzhou, Malaysia has probably the next highest cantonese speakers at least 3-4mil people especially in the capital, Kuala Lumpur.
As a native Cantonese speaker, I would argue that expats in Hong Kong and other regions are not as much of a problem as the Mainlanders. I have heard of many expats arriving in Hong Kong that do learn Cantonese. Whereas it is likelier for Mandarin-speaking Mainlanders to keep speaking Mandarin.
But still in the end of the day the main issue has more to do with governmental policies rather than the people themselves. There isn't enough institution of Cantonese that encourage people who come to learn and speak Cantonese.
And I would further argue that one of the reasons why Hong Kong and Macau were able to preserve Cantonese better than Guangdong is actually because they were colonies that weren't a part of China. This might sound controversial, but I think that especially with the example of Hong Kong, being a British colony made it escape the Chinese centralized administration which was promoting Mandarin throughout the entirety of China. While British Hong Kong might be a colonial institution, the British had a more hands-off approach to Hong Kong that has allowed locals to speak Cantonese, which makes Hong Kong a bastion of Cantonese speakers. Which explains why when Hong Kong was returned to China plenty of Hong Kongers actually opposed it. Which I wouldn't disagree, perhaps if Hong Kong remained as a highly autonomous British territory things would have fared better.
I am born in a cantonese speaking family in Kuala Lumpur. When my family is posted to china I used my understanding of cantonese to help me to speak mandarin. There are lot of words which are quite similiar between cantonese and mandarin.
Cantonese is such a wonderful language!!
It breaks my heart to hear this news. I hope Cantonese will able to endure thru these current trials!
There is an article that compares Chinese character pronunciations in different languages and explains ancient Chinese features. The title is : Comparative Study on Chinese character pronunciations in Korean, Japanese, Cantonese, and Mandarin.
This reminds me of Alsatian, a German dialect spoken in Alsace-Lorraine, France. Prior to the world wars, it was spoken by about 90% of the population, but ever since then, the French governments have made little effort to preserve the language, so much so that only about 30% of the population can speak it now, and even fewer use it as their first language.
I speak Mandarin and Taiwanese before learning Cantonese years ago while working in Hong Kong. Cantonese is a very colorful language and it's amazing how certain words (my favorite is water) can be used in so many different contexts. I can't say the same about the other 2, especially Mandarin. It would be a big blow to Chinese culture if Cantonese disappears. Hope all Cantonese speakers around the world unite and keep this awesome language for generations to come.
The truth is : Cantonese is not a language, it's just one kind of dialect in China. China has hundreds of dialect. Cantonese is just one of them and it's not even in top ten list if ranking by population.
Mandarin is the common dialect for the whole country and I don't see any excuse to not master Mandarin if you are a Chinese. For sure, if you don't want to go to other cities of China, that's fine.
And I also don't see any conflict since all other places in China, they keep their dialect pretty well.
@@pipilu3240 I am not sure if you saw the whole piece or not. There is a conscious effort by some Chinese social media to quash Cantonese. Why would they want to do that, unless there is a perceived threat that Cantonese poses?
Also, Cantonese may not have a population advantage, heck, I think more people speak Sichuanese than Cantonese, but which one has more influence culturally and globally? Like it or not, Cantonese has outsized influence. Why do people all over the world say dim sum, and not dian xin?
@@pipilu3240 Yue Cantonese is ranked #3 in the number of native speakers.
*No. Branch Native Speakers Dialects*
1 Mandarin 850,000,000 51
2 Wu 95,000,000 37
3 Yue 80,000,000 52
4 Jin 70,000,000 6
5 Min 60,000,000 61
6 Hakka 55,000,000 10
7 Xiang 50,000,000 25
8 Gan 30,000,000 9
9 Huizhou 7,000,000 13
10 Pinghua 3,000,000 2
@@psk888 You are too sensitive and you will imagine what you like or prefer. That's up to you. You can have the bias if you like to do that, but that's bias.
If explaining things in your way, then the US is the biggest country which try to eliminate other culture and language in the world.
There are 4 major cantonese dialects. If your referring to hong kong cantonese. Your gold. GZ cantonese is lame and not as fun.
Recently I've seen a lot of content for learning Mongolian, Cantonese and Tibetan languages rising on Douyin for some reason.. it's either just my algorithm or just more people are starting getting interested I'm not sure. I hope that China can preserve all their beautiful languages and cultures.
You are absolutely right, Cantonese is NOT a dialect. It IS a language!
I'm Cantonese, and there are many words in the Cantonese language that Mandarin doesn't even have a translation for it. Cantonese predates Mandarin, we Cantonese are not gonna let our language die off. Even Shanghainese is being eliminated, sad.
I’m Cantonese too. But no, Cantonese and mandarin branch off from medieval Chinese. Fujianese (minnan) due to its isolation still retains ancient Chinese and predates both Cantonese and mandarin.
Cantonese is a very old language, complex and unique. It’s a very important part of Chinese history and culture. Keep it alive.
Cantonese is spoken by more than 80 million people all over the world, including more than 60 million people in Guangdong Province, more than 10 million people in Guangxi Province, more than 7 million people in Hong Kong, more than 700,000 people in Macau, and 5 million in overseas Chinese communities. How many people. It's already as influential as some languages
As a people from South East Asia, we love to hear Cantonese language than Mandarin. It is nice to hear than Mandarin. I remember watching HK movies starting by Anita Mui, Lee Chin Hsia, and other HK star so emotionally attached to our heart. But when watching Mandarin drama series, it sounds so weird language and it is not enjoyable to watch it.
Best way to control people is to make them forget their roots.
their roots is Chinese only speak a different local tone
When you have zero clue about Cantonese, I suggest you go and learn before you put your commentary here 😂😂
How do you explain the situation in the US? Many Americans with immigrant backgrounds can't speak the language of their ancestral origins, plus they have very shallow roots in the old world. Yet Amercians are in/famous for their maverick attitudes and new identities.
@@amos325 It's not a different tone or accent, Cantonese is a different language on its own, it not mutually intelligible to Mandarin.
A person that only learn Mandarin cannot understand Cantonese & vice versa.
Cantonese to Mandarin is like English to German.
@@asyrafdanish3000 I am a Mandarin speaker who never learnt Cantonese but I can understand a big part of it. so what you said is completely fales
Way more than 80 million. There are 100 million in Guangzhou alone... if you factor in all of the Cantonese speakers in the entire world? Many many millions more.
I know most of the big Chinese populations in places like Monterey Park and Alhambra, CA - alone are Cantonese speakers.
As a Cantonese speaker that knows a little Mandarin and is learning Japanese, there are so many more onyomi words (Japanese words that have a pronunciation based on Chinese) that sound like Cantonese than ones that sound like Mandarin.
That's one of the reasons linguists have determined modern Cantonese is the Chinese dialect closest to middle/old Chinese. Korean vocabulary with Chinese origin also sound like Cantonese. Ancient Chinese poetry has better rhyming when read in Cantonese. There's also a 10th century Chinese dictionary of rhyming and alliteration words which are most consistent in Cantonese reading.
I thought Mandarin is like a creole language which came from mixing Han language with Manchurian language.
Anyways, Mandarin is the official standard language for Qing, ROC and PRC, regardless.
@@rollingdownfalling Mandarin went through a simplification, not creolization. For example, mandarin now has fewer tones than Cantonese.
@@rollingdownfalling I always thought Sun Yat-sen wanted Cantonese to be ROC's official language.
@@ArghyadeepPal Really, any sources?
Cantonese is the language of the beloved films of my youth, and the language of Bruce Lee! And like me, Bruce Lee was born in California, USA. So I consider Cantonese also an (adopted) American language, and it must be preserved!
the cantonese language and culture is so beautiful. it's so sad if it fades in the future...
There is an article that compares Chinese character pronunciations in different languages and explains ancient Chinese features. The title is : Comparative Study on Chinese character pronunciations in Korean, Japanese, Cantonese, and Mandarin.
Hokkien language had been spoken well across the globe for 400 years especially in S.E Asia and Mutual mutually unintelligible to other Chinese. . Same with Shanghai(wu) language
A number of people in the comments seem to think that it will be easier to have only one standardised language worldwide, but that is not possible. A first requirement for that would be a global government that could actually implement standardisation. Then, the global language should be chosen. If you choose an existing language, that will generate a huge amount of dissatisfaction. If you construct a language, which is the better choice, then its grammatical properties will still be based on certain languages over others, and there'd be no native speakers OR cultural identity for the language to actually be adopted as a tool for communication.
But let's suppose that those problems could be solved easily and a global lingua franca is implemented... then it would still be unethical of the global government to deny people education, news, road signs, you name it, in their own language. And IF as if by magic everyone in the world spoke a single language, then there's two possible futures. The first is that the standard language is artifically kept the same while the people in the streets locally innovate their own varieties, leading to a bilingual situation where people speak the official language in certain contexts and an increasingly divergent local variety in informal situation (as is the case with Arabic). The second possibility is that the standard language is constantly adapted in order to accommodate inevitable language change, but if >8 billion people are part of the linguistic community then that can never be done properly, it is doomed to fail. A multilingual global society is inevitable. A quest for a monolingual global society can only lead to a loss of identity, knowledge, and colour.
Wise words friend!
well, there won't be a monolingual global society, but history has shown via colonialism that having a common language that everyone uses for ease of trade/dialogue is totally a thing. Nobody's trying to actively wipe out Cantonese either, which btw is a Dialect. The language is the same, and written the same as Mandarin, only the sounding is different. Mandarin's main purpose is similar to English, many people know it, its used for trade and to communicate across broad borders. That doesn't mean the dearth of individual dialects no matter how bad the Canto speakers try to make it sound.
Why don't you go into our human history and learn the section call Human Linguistic History? Whatever denominated language widely spread across the word were due to their culture influence! Like the age of exploration, Spanish was the most widely spread language, later the British started their age of colonization, therefore English became wide spread, also followed by the same Anglo-Saxon's culture after WWII, therefore we are still mainly use English as a intermedia language for communication, this may slowly change if there is another culture has far more strong influence.
No matter we like it or not, the language always non stop evolving, changing, and developing base on the environment and human development.
@@verreal Were you talking to me? I can't tell. If so, that's what I already said in my comment, right? (Although I do know some speakers of Esperanto).
One language for the whole world is a Georgia Guidestones agenda.
As a Cantonese (Canton is the old English name of Guangzhou), I'm furious! We need to preserve our language, but the social environment prohibits young school kids from speaking Cantonese. Nowadays, even children, born into native Cantonese families, aren't able to converse in Cantonese fluently! It's SAD!
What China is doing is simply what the Franch state did after the French Revolution. Before the revolution only 15% of population spoke modern French. Now the French Laguge has become the only langauge spoken in France at the expense of other linguistic minorities (who have been wiped out). France enshrines the French language in the constitution and is the only EU country that refuse to ratify the EU charter for the protection of linguistic minorities.
Unfortunately, other Chinese dialects do not have these privileges or very limited in such like the way Cantonese has. Cantonese is the only Non-Mandarin Chinese dialect with widespread influence other than Mandarin. Hong Kong currently as a SARS region is what is encouraging Cantonese speaking communities in Guangdong and internationally to retain their culture and language and keeping it alive, but once Hong Kong is very likely to fully return back to China after 2047, Mandarin will be more fully enforced in Hong Kong and Cantonese entertainment and media will then start to decline and then at that point, that is when the Cantonese influence will really be in danger of dying out and will lose all of the privileges like other Chinese dialects.
2047 ? that’s like a light year away. plus Cantonese have over 80+ mils speaker in China and include outside would be 100+ mils in total. that’s more than the population of some European country and place in Asia like Vietnam. The language is not in danger of dying out anytime soon ! At least not for another 100+ years. you likely won’t live till then to be able to witness it. just because hk is going back to China does not mean anything. u realize the population of hk does not reflect on all over the world community that speak the ‘yue’ language
Never forget, China is also trying to suppress the Mongol language, which is different from the one used in Mongolia, since the Mongols in China still use their traditional alphabet to write their language while in Mongolia, they use the Cyrillic alphabet (that’s the same alphabet used to write Russian)
Not just China, basically most imperialistic countries do that. Be it US, France, Australia, NZ, etc.
Manchurian went the way of the dinosaurs after being the language of empire for over 400 years.
1 big question though, WHY Mongolia do not use their MONGOL traditional alphabet, it is China that preserves it all these years and still doing so. Are you Mongolian from Mongolia? If I were China, I would not preserve it, if you want to preserve it, then by all mean, do it by yourself, it is your language after all, the state would not interfere, but you will not see road signs , bank notes in your language. The same for Cantonese. It is for unity sake, just like what USA has done, the Germans, Dutch, Spaniard, you all speak English....Immigrants? learn how to speak it. I am a Hakka, we preserve our language ourselves, and it is not that we do not know someday our language will die too.
@@handaxia1251 Outer Mongolia was occupied by Russians since 1921 hence they were forced to switch to Cyrillic.
@@handaxia1251, Mongolia uses the Cyrillic alphabet because it was a puppet state of the Soviet Union. It adapted a lot from the Soviet Union. They’ve been using Cyrillic for almost a century now and the Mongolian alphabet is totally different so it would be hard to revert back for the government
As a Hokkien who speaks many dialects, I feel that Cantonese is the most beautiful of all.
I speaks mandarin and wife's native language is cantonese, after we met, she started to learn mandarin, I think she realized that mandarin is the future, there is no future for cantonese or any other local dialects in China, all the movies/shows/music nowadays are all basically in mandarin, why resist? life is short, no point to fight a battle you can't win. By the way, I've never forced her to speak mandarin, she enjoys of speaking it, she loves all the mandarin tv shows.
I am a speaker of Hokkien / Fujian too. But I hate Cantonese dialect. It sounds very noisy and rude.
@@汤圆-y7f That's hogwash. The creative TV and movie talents are in Cantonese. The young people, whether in mainland China or Taiwan, look towards Cantonese pop culture as being cool. Mandarin is the language of the hoi polloi -- a necessity for selling and making money as viewed by the Cantonese people.
@@brianplum1825 You are right if this is maybe 1990, but we are in 2022, few in either mainland or Taiwan think Cantonese pop culture is cool, because there isn't any, Hongkong is practically dead culturally speaking
@@汤圆-y7f The best HK entertainers now unfortunately work in mainland China where the audience is two hundred times bigger and money is much more. The HK people still look down on mainlanders as uncool and sophisticated. I'm sorry to tell you a few of your Cantonese in-laws may hold the same attitude about mandarin speakers. Look up the 2010 Guangzhou TV protests when the government tried to do away with Cantonese TV. The Guangzhou people won't let their language decline like Shanghainese.
I would love if many people know more or use Cantonese.i spoke Cantonese so it's easy to communicate
I'm vetnamese and prefer hearing/learning Cantonese, which pronounce close to vietnamese.
Ironically, Cantonese is closer to the real, ancient Chinese.
Poetry is better spoken in Cantonese.
2 of the languages I can speak are spoken by less than 400k in the world, I won't give up my native American traditions or languages if I can help it. I know a lot of people don't like learning new languages, but it's how a lot of people's kept stores going for generations.
This has already happened to my parents' Fujian dialect. Young people do not need to learn it and parents only speak Mandarin to their child at home. I hear more Fujian dialect outside China, due to overseas immigration pattern like the anchor said. Sadly, I knew this was going to happen in HK when I visited in 2004, just 7 years after the handover, I spoke with so many parents and others lamenting that they had to speak Mandarin in many situations as part of their daily life already.
what are you talking about? cantonese is almost exclusively spoken on the streets and in business settings. english is more used than mandarin in HK.
Supporting Cantonese!
I don't hear and see Cantonese native speakers any more. Pre-2000 many Chinese in the Western countries were Southern Chinese or Hong Kong, so Cantonese, who helped define North American Chinese cooking or chop suey food. Now is mostly Mandarin speaking people from rest of China.
I understand the desire for a common language, but also see the need to preserve culture. It seems that many countries want a common language to unify the people. That may or may not work, but seems to be the idea. It is a problem here in the Philippines. There are over 100 languages but the two official languages are Filipino and English. "Filipino" is very similar to Tagalog... and that causes issues in other parts of the country. So after years of complaints, the schools are now teaching Filipino and English, like they have been, but also the local area's mother tongue. Most people just speak their mother tongue at home, and in their city. So when we travel, even on the same island, my wife cannot speak to the people sometimes. They supposedly learn Tagalog & English in school, but never use them, and forget quite a lot (after all I supposedly learned Spanish & French is school and speak neither).
Yes that’s how it should be. China didn’t ban speaking Cantonese. It’s just that many parents are not responsible enough to make their children speak Cantonese outside of school to preserve it. Every country needs a common language to teach in school.
yes, we rectified this issue in indonesia.. we can now travel all over Indonesia using one language, Bahasa
Cantonese is facinating.
I'm glad she brought up that Cantonese is actually a very old language. You can hear a lot of the cognates in Korean and Japanese - the on'yomi and hanja-eo sound much more like Cantonese than Mandarin.
Strong Tang-era rhyme scheme influence on Korea and Japan. The other Middle Chinese 'dialects', from Hakka to Shanghaiese to Mao's own native 'Gan' Chinese tongue, descend from that. Korea received a strong second dose from the Ming era though, so I expect Mandarin cognates in Korean to major degrees.
The problem is China’s dialects varied greatly town by town. Without mandarin many people cannot communicate with people from neighboring towns. It’s a critical issue under the current background of mass immigration. It’s not possible to select a “standardized”dialect for each province without causing similar issue like choosing mandarin. So the current policy of formerly educating mandarin while preserving local culture, making most people bilingual is the best solution we have. Westerner’s fascination for Cantonese/Mandarin is just a result of their mindless fear over China’s scale as a whole.
Yes, but most of the school at least in Guangzhou they banned Cantonese, students must speak Mandarin only. If they respect and willing to protect the culture, would they do that?
The thing is that real Han people are those from Swatow. Mandarin speakers are descended from barbarian northerners.
@@andrewsitu3472 no, genetically almost all southern Chinese are more diverse than north because they are a mix of original Han settlers and local people, bit like Spanish colonies
@@tcxnt5442 are you saying Southerners are originally from Indochina?
@@andrewsitu3472 No, they are heavily mixed, if you check the result of genetic research. Southern people varied greatly, some share ancestry with people in Southeast Asia. Most southern ethnic groups already been fully assimilated, only small pockets still left. Some Southeast Asian ethic groups originated from southern China.
Why don't we get rid of English as the official business language then?
Mandarin has always been the nation wide Chinese official dialect going back centuries. It isn't an innovation by the current government. All these ways of speaking have the same written language. Having everyone speak Mandarin means everyone can understand each other. The Germans used to have upper, middle and low German. Now they have one official German. The French really had many variations, but more and more they speak the official French. Italian as a language was the invention of Italian nationalists. The Chinese are doing what nations do to be strong and be unified.
I taught Cantonese a few years ago. The language school was struggling to keep the classes since less and less family chose Cantonese. Not because the families speak Mandarin, but rather they think their kids would be able to do business with China years down the road. Many kids ended up quiting since they don't speak Mandarin at home. What's the point of learning a language when it's not used?
My wife is chinese and I've been learning both languages, mostly to speak to her relatives as all of her family don't speak english. We've been wondering which one to focus on, I think I'll go with Cantonese.
cantonese also part chinese language lol , do u even understand what u talking about
@@LOLLOL-kg4dz different language
cantonese is also way funnier to listen to, i doubt movies like shaolin soccer and kungfu hustle would be as funny if it was in mandarin
Also fun to curse someone or his whole family out using that language with such a rich vocabulary and in a poetic way . I love to hear Hong Konger especially the lower working class fight and curse at each other. This guy they just post in this video just cursr too in cantonese and they ahve to blep it out. Its too funny.
I'm all for preserving all varieties of Chinese, but it's just not true that Cantonese is closer to Ancient Chinese than Mandarin. Both dialect groups evolved from Late Middle Chinese (Tang-Song period) and each preserves some older features the other doesn't. Also there are many dialects of Mandarin and Cantonese, with Southern Mandarin being more close to Cantonese, e.g. "I" is "wo" in the Beijing dialect, but in the Chengdu dialect of Mandarin it is "ngo", just as in Cantonese. The only modern dialect group that evolved separately from all others is Min Chinese spoken in Fujian and on Taiwan.
Also it's not true that Mandarin was promoted by the Communists. It was declared the official language during the late Qing period and heavily promoted by the governments of the Republic of China. On Taiwan the Kuomintang party even banned Min Chinese to promote Mandarin from the 1960's on.
Guangzhou's Cantonese influence has waned a lot, but even in Guangzhou alone, the survival of Cantonese is still faring better than the other Chinese dialects due to their important cultural and business relationship with Hong Kong as currently a SARS region and the wide availability and popularity of Hong Kong entertainment and media; even Guangzhou is allowed to produce and broadcast some Cantonese language medias and entertainment, some schools in Guangzhou are allowing limited amount of Cantonese language classes to be taught including some are hosting Cantonese cultural appreciation events, the Cantonese families are placing way more emphasis now on their children to retain the language/culture and Cantonese. And if you add Hong Kong and other Cantonese speaking towns surrounding Guangzhou in Guangdong and with the large international Cantonese communities, the survival level is even higher.
The government can pick whatever language to use in official situation as they like, but the freedom of using dialect in daily life is a human right which should be respected.
they don't even have the right to unify the official language like that, because they govern over differing authentic languages which originated in those lands. The same as if Poland all of a sudden governed all of Europe and decided to make Polish the official language and force out nonpolish speakers into the daily life use only. Only when the country is ethnically and culturally homogenous can there be a moral right to have only one official language
Like Singapore, Mandarin is the mainstream media while its citizen can freely speak Hokian, cantonese...
@@user-fv5ol4or1b FYI Cantonese was an invasive dialect to Hong Kong and Macau! Before the British took over Hong Kong, and Portuguese took over Macau, the native dialect of HK and Macau was Hakka speak by the farmers, and Dengka speak by the fisherman! Could you kindly explain to me why is Cantonese is far more superior than native Hakka and Dengka of Hong Kong and Macau?
@@eveleung8855 The Cantonese speakers aren't the Communists who outlaw schools teaching in children's native dialects. You can also ask why English is so superior that HK Hakka people have to use it.
@Brian Plum English is superior? Why so double standard in one hand must promote the use of Cantonese, but bashing Hakka?
Can you tell me in your opinion, English or Cantonese which is far more superior?
as someone that speaks native cantonese, i really want more people to speak this language. it is such a beautiful language and i'm worried that in the future lesser people will be able to speak cantonese
mandarin is hasty to speak. use Cantonese
Cantonese is an ancient language very popular during Confucius time. The teaching of Confucius uses Cantonese. We should keep the language
regional Natives can speak their local langauge / dialects all they want. But they must know the common language 'Mandarin' to be able to communicate with all type of Chinese in China & overseas Chinese. China is a Huge Country with hundreds types of regional languages & dialects.
She said more or less the same as Portuguese and Spanish but that is not the case. Spanish and Portuguese have an 89% lexical similarity so basically 90% of the vocabulary is the same whereas in mando and Canto it’s much different with a lot less similarities. The similarities however lie in the mapping due to the characters. What I mean is when you hear a pronounciation in mandarin if you never heard the word in canto you can guess if you speak both languages. For example 人口 (ren kou) in mandarin meaning “population”’ I know that 人 in Cantonese is (Jan4) and 口 is (hau2) in Cantonese so I can guess that based off the mapping which is convenient if you know both languages
There are 4 major cantonese dialects. Spanish to Portuguese is bad comparison. You must compare to hakka, taishanese, gz, hk, guangxi, and yue hai Cantonese. Those are dialects. Even chinese don't know the god damn differences. Even my dialect taishanese has 4 different villages and we speak different.
I don't really think the comparison is that wrong, lexically they are similar, apart from the common basic vocabulary that's unique to Cantonese like 邊個，乜嘢，成日 and some minor grammar differences, the vast majority of the words are the same and you can fairly consistently guess how sounds change from one to the other with exposure. I agree that the sounds of the words are further apart though. So my best explanation would be that the difference Mandarin and Cantonese is like the difference between Spanish and Portuguese, if the person speaking Spanish was from Russia and the person speaking Portuguese was from India.
cantonese is such a fun language.
It really is!
I speak Mondrian and English, however I am learning Cantonese which is one of the real Chinese languages and is so beautiful.
what is Mondrian’s
I grew up watching Hong Kong movies, dramas and even operas. Cantonese is such a colorful language. It is sad that Hong Kong will one day become another Chinese city, losing its unique identity and culture.
"another Chinese city"
LMAO
If you think that all cities in China are the same, then you obviously have no idea what you're talking about
@@hiyukelavie2396 I had visited a few major cities in China including Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Beijing and of course, Hong Kong.. I also have relatives both in Hong Kong and Guangzhou. That is enough for me to know what I am talking about. Do you even know that in Guangdong, the younger generation Chinese are speaking mainly Putonghua instead of Cantonese. In Hong Kong, they are pushing schools to teach the Chinese language using Putonghua instead of Cantonese. Of course there are subtle differences in all provinces in China but here we are talking about Hong Kong slowly losing its uniqueness, language and identity.
@@veekwok5611 "Do you know that in Guangdong, the younger generation Chinese are speaking mainly Putonghua instead of Cantonese"
Lol, compare this to Chinese people who migrate to the west, many of whom stopped speaking any sort of Chinese within one generation
"In Hong Kong, they are pushing schools to teach the Chinese language using Putonghua instead of Cantonese"
I understand why you might feel emotional about this. But try to be rational
Do you know that there are literally hundreds of different dialects in China?
Like, literally hundreds. This is not an exaggeration
Knowing that, do you think that all schools in China should be teaching the Chinese language in their own dialects?
Take a moment to think about this
You know this is impossible
It's extremely difficult, not to mention inefficient, to train enough teachers to all teach in their local dialect. What you will end up with is a shortage of teachers. It makes practical sense to stick to Putonghua, in order to train enough teachers for a nation of 1.4 billion people
This is simply the reality of the situation
Now, understanding this, what makes Cantonese so special?
Why should Cantonese receive special treatment compared to other dialects?
If Hongkies get to teach in Cantonese, shouldn't the speakers of the several hundred other dialects in China all get the same treatment?
The reality is, the vast majority of people in China understand the practicality of schools being conducted in Putonghua and have no problem with it
It's actually mostly overseas Chinese like you who moan and groan about it the most
Considering how the CCP treated some cultural aspects of society in the past. The fact that they are pressuring to have Mandarin mainstream like this is just another way for them to destroy a culture. I am glad that DW talks about this topic. Despite being only about 10 mins, it holds significant relevance for me.
Well the cultural revolution or communism in general always emphasised on destroying cultures as it was viewed to be teaching followed by the rich and powerful, which I think is quite dumb in logic.
When my sister was born in 2008, our family stopped speaking Cantonese at home in favour of Mandarin, for job prospects/ practicality. I’ve lost my fluency almost completely over the years, and it’s sad seeing my culture in China dying within my own generation…
It may be sad but if you think about it, languages are simply mouth noises that we make with our vocal cords. We all know it would be much better for humanity if we all spoke the same language.
Language unification is seen everywhere around the world. Sometimes violent. Sometimes less so. In cases such as like this it becomes moreso the responsibility of the community to teach the language to the next generation.
Yes, Taiwanese won’t have a problem learning mandarin and Taiwanese. I don’t see why Cantonese language would die if mandarin is taught esp in hk.
@@rinahk3407 good that doesn’t mean they should just be speaking Cantonese and not learning mandarin in school.
@@rinahk3407 yes. That’s good. But a lot of hongkongers think that this is eliminating Cantonese culture. as a Cantonese myself, I don’t think learning mandarin would do damage to Cantonese as long as the parents and the community keep up with the local culture.
@@rinahk3407 yes I’m just saying those ppl exist and they should not have those mindsets.
@@quyenluong3705I find there is a common theme amongst you Taiwan people. Always making every topic about yourself.
It's also worth mentioning that many ancient texts, poems and songs make more sense and sound better in Cantonese even though they have been translated into Mandarin already. It would be a great loss to the Chinese history and literature.
Well said. Pronunciation plays a key role in ancient Chinese literature study. For example, poems and literatures written in ancient China follow a number of rhymical rules. Reading those ancient poems and literatures in Cantonese, rather than Mandarin, can better fit the ancient rhymical rules. and demonstrate the beauty of ancient Chinese literature beyond words and meanings. A person who knows only Mandarin can never truly understand the true beauty of ancient Chinese culture.
There is an article that compares Chinese character pronunciations in different languages and explains ancient Chinese features. The title is : Comparative Study on Chinese character pronunciations in Korean, Japanese, Cantonese, and Mandarin.
Orwell's playbook
many regional dialects have already been lost; even people who live overseas who try to teach them on youtube or the like can be targeted for harassment or threats; same reason they have come down hard on foreign language tutors who aren't employed by the state. After all you can't censor or control what you can't understand.
Sounds like every european country
Hong Kong is just about the only Chinese territory where Cantonese is used as medium of instruction for local schools. In HK universities English is the medium of instruction. So if there is any push it is only in Hong Kong (and Macau). Taiwan by the way uses Mandarin as instruction medium. Given Taiwan's very diverse ethnic background, it makes sense. Such ethnic diversity is less of an issue in Hong Kong.
Across China, Standard Chinese (Mandarin) is used in schools and bilingual education and local dialects are encouraged though I suspect it is mainly local community efforts.
If Cantonese or any dialect is under treat of preservation the very sizable community can easily raise to the occasion. Except for very uncommon regional dialects, it is not likely that any dialect be lost.
Languages and dialects are emotional subject. One should rightly understand the goal of any policy that involve this emotive subject.
The Touyin clip is not about suppression of the use Cantonese but one of monitoring online contents. It could easily be done without intrusion and was perhaps done by someone inexperienced, creating an incidence that upset a group of people unintentionally.
This is a good video. If we start off by seeing the Chinese government in a more positive light, we could avoid slanting the issue eh ... unfairly.
I am from Singapore where the very diverse Chinese community heeded the call to 学华语 in favour of our dialects. And English to connect to the world. I think we did rather well. And oh, we still retain our dialects and took an interest in where our forefathers hail from.
when my close friend who speaks cantonese as her mother tongue visited china with me and our asian studies class (has family from hong kong but parents immigrated from vietnam), she was constantly looked down upon when she revealed that shes chinese but had poor mandarin. it was like she wasnt even seen as chinese at that point to some people. i dont know and havent learned any chinese languages, but i know the difference when hearing them, and its always interesting that i associate cantonese more with chinese americans just because its rarer for me to find a chinese american who speaks mandarin.
taiwanese speak mandarin. They're chinese is self denial.
Even without government's suppression, dialects or local languages are slowly fading away due to high mobility and globalization, e.g. parents from different dialect groups tend to just speak standard language to their kids, and kids might avoid speaking dialects in order to fit in with other kids coming from different language background.
yeah its not just the government issue , its that some parents just straight up dont speak it to their children .
There's nothing wrong with having a national, official language.
Canada has two official languages: English and French.
Laws are written in these two languages.
One can understand standardisation in schools and universities. There's a lot of practical value to something like that. But to limit other languages online in like Tiktok... Why? That's a bit too overt to explain away as mere practical consideration. Online translation tools are amazing these days. There's zero need for it. To wilfully impinge on cultural identity like that reminds of the so called "cultural revolution" and what good came of that?
That is because whatever - limit other languages online in like Tiktok is pure lie!
The CCP sensors all media contents. If the CCP 50 cents media police cannot understand the contents, they cannot control/ sensors it. For example, organizing protest/revolution like the Arab Spring in Egypt
What are the chances those users were saying controversial things and the app just used that excuse to ban their videos/channel? I don't believe this story tbh
@V G I don't know about Chinese social media, but in the Western one, all of us at least no stranger to post being deleted for no reason
Cantonese forever!
I'm from Singapore, and I support the continuance of Cantonese. But I beg to differ with the information presented here. Cantonese is a dialect and not a language. The prove is seen in this video. The Cantonese farewell broadcast was automatically translated to Chinese characters. It is overstating the differences to call it a different language. There are differences for sure. I also disagree with the claims of the Cantonese community that their dialact is older. If you listen to Tang poems as spoken during that time, you will know it is neither Mandarin nor Cantonese. It is nothing like what we hear today. It is true that Cantonese based dialacts are dominant in America, but they are not dominant in South East Asia. The dominant Chinese dialect in SEA is Hokkien/Teochew (closely related). Hokkien is as old as Cantonese, and may be older. It is true Mandarin is a late comer. Chinese dialects have many expressions that are unique, and the tones are different from Mandarin. They are worth preserving. Communist China is trying to obliterate regional distinctives in their perpetual push for uniformity and control. The attempt to quash dialects is totally unnecessary. Guangzhou was the start of China's opening to the world and it is Cantonese. It has not slowed China's progress. China gives lip service to the 56 ethnic diversities, but tries to quash such a big group of people speaking Cantonese. It is apparent that Cantonese (Southern dialect) is too strong for the governing class (Northerners). Long live Cantonese. Long live Hokkien. Long live the dialects.
Please Singaporeans protect your mother tounge. As a southern Chinese I am shocked to learn you guys give up native language passsed from grandparents to learn Beijing mandarin. You guys have all the opportunities but choose the most utilitarian one instead of love for mother language
In Malaysia our children learned Mandarin at school but they are reminded to speak Cantonese or their mother tongue at home and we're proud of it. China can mandate learning of Mandarin like us here in Malaysia we learned Malay as national language but people should feel free to speak own cultural languages. Malaysian Chinese speak chinese Mandarin, Canto, Hokkien, Hakka and many other chinese languages.
Wow this lady seems to be so good at both Cantonese and Mandarin. Interesting video. The long history of Cantonese was particularly interesting.
lol, you heard her speak 1 sentence in each language.
I've always enjoyed the fact that the 'official' dictionaries of Putonghua (the government-endorsed variant of Chinese) are called 'Xin Hua' dictionaries. That's 'New Speak' dictionaries - exactly the same term used in the book 1984...
Orwell's use of "Big Brother" was also an obvious reference to "dai lou" (colloquial slang for gangster boss). In addition, Orwell seemed annoyed by the limitations of Chinese vocabulary, suggesting it was almost brainless to use the prefix "doubleplus" e.g. "doubleplus big" ("好好大" in Cantonese) when the apparently explicit "richness" of English vocabulary could offer precise synonyms like gigantic, large, enormous, vast, immense, huge, gargantuan... etc.
I think Orwell's blind spot masked the fact that the Cantonese use of "好" is similar to the English use of "very".
@@stevetong1969 As a limited Mandarin speaker, thanks for this tit-bit or nugget of information.
You don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s 新華字典, not “新話”.
@@stevetong1969 Orwell didn’t know that there are other ways to express “big” like 巨大 and 丕.
Both 1984 and the PRC are from 1949. Born together hand in hand.
If we know how the chronic problems of India resulted from many languages, we would appreciate how Emperor Qin ShiHuang has unified languages of China back in period 259-210BC. There must have one single language to avoid divided nation. Having said this critical importance, for cultural aspects, Cantonese and all other dialects have their importance to preserve. It is a matter of primary and secondary.
"There must have one single language to avoid divided nation"
Interesting. Switzerland has 4 official languages and no lingua franca. Despite of that, everyone feels strongly Swiss and nothing else.
Don't worry, Cantonese is like a 4th dialect to Vietnamese with a robust writing system that can articulate Cantonese. Even though China is trying to eradicate Cantonese, Vietnamese is not going anywhere.
Vietnam is a totally separate country from the People's Republic of China.
Even in Switzerland, they taught standard Germany other than local Germany. And everyone interviewed speaks perfect English! How ironic!
Mandarin speaking Chinese move around much more nowadays, globally and nationally to the south, Hong Kong. Mandarin is the language of the ruling party. Of course, this will keep them being dominant.
Mandarin is easier to sensors than Cantonese contents
Xi is Chairman Mao 2.0 and he lives up the mass murderer's legacy in destroying Chinese culture, languages, dialects, and traditional values. Chinese languages consists of hundreds of dialects and many are facing extinction. Cantonese is a very rich and sophisticated dialect, often carries intricate subtleties and humour.
Cantonese is not just a Chinese language to me- its in my heart and soul.
Cantonese forever...
I am not worried about that. Cantonese has been spoken for awhile in Guangdong and HK. Different dialects can exist in a country.
Cantonese is the authentic Chinese. Mandarin is a barbarised Chinese only that was heavily influenced by Mongolians and foreign non-Chinese tribes .