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It doesn't help that Beijing is actively discouraging the use of Cantonese and all other non-Mandarin dialects of Chinese. Schools in mainland China are allowe

It doesn't help that Beijing is actively discouraging the use of Cantonese and all other non-Mandarin dialects of Chinese. Schools in mainland China are allowed to only teach in Mandarin, not the local dialects and almost all TV media is Mandarin. Even in HK, most local schools don't teach Cantonese formally anymore and it's hard to find Cantonese specific written materials like textbooks etc especially for kids. To the author's point, in US cities with large Chinese populations like SF or NYC, there are many bilingual English-Mandarin or Mandarin immersion schools to pass on the language to kids, but few or none Cantonese ones. Without that supporting academic ecosystem, it's just a oral language spoken by less and less each generation.

zetazzed 5y ago
I think you're accurate about mainland China, but SF is preserving Cantonese education. There are 10-ish public schools in SF with programs that teach a fair amount in Cantonese: https://www.sfusd.edu/learning/language-pathways-by-language/cantonese-language-pathways https://www.sfusd.edu/learning/language-pathways-by-language...
emodendroket 5y ago
That seems completely irrelevant to the story at hand. It is also pretty easy to see why the Chinese would wish to have a standard national language that everyone understands and not just people speaking a hodgepodge of mutually unintelligible ones, if you give it honest consideration. Japan, their model for building a modern state, as well as Europe, just had the good fortune to get through this process before modern sensibilities made it taboo. Even US states have taken action to prevent bilingual education and education in nonstandard English dialects such as AAVE.
- ggrrhh_ta 5y ago
  Underrated comment. So easy to point out what we think others are doing wrong when we are a result of those same actions and within our own lifetimes.
- United857 5y ago
  Speaking a national common language and another mother tongue doesn't have to be mutually exclusive. Singapore is a good example of this: they adopted English as the common national language, while having a bilingual education system that preserves the mother tongues.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    Is it? I’ve heard of them mostly stamping out most of them, eg here https://www.economist.com/asia/2020/02/22/singapore-has-almost-wiped-out-its-mother-tongues https://www.economist.com/asia/2020/02/22/singapore-has-almo... I’d also say it’s not like they’re really going around saying you can’t speak Cantonese at home. The issue is that there is natural attrition when school and official things are in one language (not that different from what the article describes).
  - bmn__ 5y ago
    There is no preservation of mother tongues. Languages are assigned along ethnic lines in the name of nation building. yellow → standard Chinese native → Malay brown → Tamil If the father is a Fujian Hakka, the children will learn standard Chinese in addition to English. If the father is from New Delhi, the children will learn Tamil in addition to English. If the father is from Lisbon, the children will learn English only.
- ginko 5y ago
  > Japan, their model for building a modern state, as well as Europe, just had the good fortune to get through this process before modern sensibilities made it taboo. Can't speak for Japan, but most European countries still have regions where minority languages are spoken. Take Catalonia for instance.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    Yes, of course they do, but everybody must be educated in the national language. There aren’t really many monolingual speakers of Aragonese walking around. Consequently it’s less important than Castilian Spanish and probably many people have a worse command of it than their grandparents did. Catalan is unusually strong in this sense but still something like half of Catalonians consider themselves native speakers of only Spanish. And in the relatively recent past measures like punishing students for speaking minority languages in school were commonplace. You might even make an analogy between Catalan and Cantonese, in the sense that it’s mostly historical circumstance that makes Cantonese have such a privileged position compared to most other Sinitic languages. Wu and Min languages each have almost as many speakers as Yue languages but you wouldn’t know it by English-language coverage of the topic.
    - ginko 5y ago
      As far as I can tell though the problem isn't that Cantonese isn't the primary language taught in Chinese schools, it's that it's not taught at all. Being part of a recognized language minority in Europe usually gives you the right to education in that language.
  - tester89 5y ago
    Yes, but just look at France. Before it had many regional patois, but after the revolution they were suppressed in favour of French.
- United857 5y ago
  India is a example of a country that has a national language (actually two, Hindi and English) but still recognizes the 20+ other regional languages spoken. Schools in India are allowed to teach the local language in addition to Hindi/English. As a result a educated Indian from a non-Hindi speaking state is generally trilingual in English, Hindi and their mother tongue.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    Well, true. But there’s a difference between being allowed to teach a language and making it the primary language of instruction. And India’s current government also seems to favor policies to promote Hindi at the expense of local languages. Consider: https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/india-news-language-politics-will-indians-soon-become-hindians/359432 https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/india-news-langua...
throw665434 5y ago
> Schools in mainland China are allowed to only teach in Mandarin, not the local dialects This is not exactly true. Core subjects, like math, history, and science must have a unified curriculum taught in Mandarin. However, there are language, art, and humanities classes that teach and preserve other Chinese dialects/languages.
hnfong 5y ago
> most local schools don't teach Cantonese formally anymore You probably already know the nuances, but just to be clear, schools have probably never taught Cantonese "formally" at all - instead, schools taught "Chinese" (i.e. a localized version of written Mandarin) using Cantonese. And now some schools in HK are teaching Mandarin using Mandarin. > it's hard to find Cantonese specific written materials like textbooks etc especially for kids. True. Please consider supporting one of the few projects out there trying to fix this problem: https://hambaanglaang.hk/ https://hambaanglaang.hk/ > Without that supporting academic ecosystem, it's just a oral language spoken by less and less each generation. Cantonese has been "taboo" for various reasons. Learned people traditionally shunned it for Classical Chinese (pre-1950s) and for Written Mandarin (post-1950s). We're trying to fix that. It's crazy to think that a language spoken by at least 20+ million people never had any proper monolingual dictionary (until we made one...)
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
China has for the majority of it's history been a northern Mandarin Chinese oriented country. So it's not exactly a shock they'd push for this.
- bmn__ 5y ago
  > China has for the majority of it's history been a northern Mandarin Chinese oriented country. That claim is incompatible with historic records and linguistic scrutiny. Northern Mandarin developed only in the recent ca. 500 years, so that cannot be a majority. Middle Qing until early Republican era was oriented around eastern (i.e. Nanking) Mandarin. The process of displacing eastern with northern started in ca. 1850 and was complete a hundred years later.
  - MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
    ...There was about 4000 years of Chinese history based around the Yangtze river valley, particularly north of it, as well as the main hub of the Qin dynasty. China has been a northern focused entity for almost it's entire existence, especially since Qin. That also includes the Qing and Yuan. Even the Ming were centralized in Beijing for a large portion of it's existence.
    - bmn__ 5y ago
      You are confusing a geographic region with a language.
      - MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
        I meant Han Chinese. My bad.

zetazzed 5y ago

I think you're accurate about mainland China, but SF is preserving Cantonese education. There are 10-ish public schools in SF with programs that teach a fair amount in Cantonese: https://www.sfusd.edu/learning/language-pathways-by-language/cantonese-language-pathways https://www.sfusd.edu/learning/language-pathways-by-language...

emodendroket 5y ago

That seems completely irrelevant to the story at hand. It is also pretty easy to see why the Chinese would wish to have a standard national language that everyone understands and not just people speaking a hodgepodge of mutually unintelligible ones, if you give it honest consideration. Japan, their model for building a modern state, as well as Europe, just had the good fortune to get through this process before modern sensibilities made it taboo. Even US states have taken action to prevent bilingual education and education in nonstandard English dialects such as AAVE.

ggrrhh_ta 5y ago
Underrated comment. So easy to point out what we think others are doing wrong when we are a result of those same actions and within our own lifetimes.
United857 5y ago
Speaking a national common language and another mother tongue doesn't have to be mutually exclusive. Singapore is a good example of this: they adopted English as the common national language, while having a bilingual education system that preserves the mother tongues.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Is it? I’ve heard of them mostly stamping out most of them, eg here https://www.economist.com/asia/2020/02/22/singapore-has-almost-wiped-out-its-mother-tongues https://www.economist.com/asia/2020/02/22/singapore-has-almo... I’d also say it’s not like they’re really going around saying you can’t speak Cantonese at home. The issue is that there is natural attrition when school and official things are in one language (not that different from what the article describes).
- bmn__ 5y ago
  There is no preservation of mother tongues. Languages are assigned along ethnic lines in the name of nation building. yellow → standard Chinese native → Malay brown → Tamil If the father is a Fujian Hakka, the children will learn standard Chinese in addition to English. If the father is from New Delhi, the children will learn Tamil in addition to English. If the father is from Lisbon, the children will learn English only.
ginko 5y ago
> Japan, their model for building a modern state, as well as Europe, just had the good fortune to get through this process before modern sensibilities made it taboo. Can't speak for Japan, but most European countries still have regions where minority languages are spoken. Take Catalonia for instance.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Yes, of course they do, but everybody must be educated in the national language. There aren’t really many monolingual speakers of Aragonese walking around. Consequently it’s less important than Castilian Spanish and probably many people have a worse command of it than their grandparents did. Catalan is unusually strong in this sense but still something like half of Catalonians consider themselves native speakers of only Spanish. And in the relatively recent past measures like punishing students for speaking minority languages in school were commonplace. You might even make an analogy between Catalan and Cantonese, in the sense that it’s mostly historical circumstance that makes Cantonese have such a privileged position compared to most other Sinitic languages. Wu and Min languages each have almost as many speakers as Yue languages but you wouldn’t know it by English-language coverage of the topic.
  - ginko 5y ago
    As far as I can tell though the problem isn't that Cantonese isn't the primary language taught in Chinese schools, it's that it's not taught at all. Being part of a recognized language minority in Europe usually gives you the right to education in that language.
- tester89 5y ago
  Yes, but just look at France. Before it had many regional patois, but after the revolution they were suppressed in favour of French.
United857 5y ago
India is a example of a country that has a national language (actually two, Hindi and English) but still recognizes the 20+ other regional languages spoken. Schools in India are allowed to teach the local language in addition to Hindi/English. As a result a educated Indian from a non-Hindi speaking state is generally trilingual in English, Hindi and their mother tongue.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Well, true. But there’s a difference between being allowed to teach a language and making it the primary language of instruction. And India’s current government also seems to favor policies to promote Hindi at the expense of local languages. Consider: https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/india-news-language-politics-will-indians-soon-become-hindians/359432 https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/india-news-langua...

throw665434 5y ago

> Schools in mainland China are allowed to only teach in Mandarin, not the local dialects This is not exactly true. Core subjects, like math, history, and science must have a unified curriculum taught in Mandarin. However, there are language, art, and humanities classes that teach and preserve other Chinese dialects/languages.

hnfong 5y ago

> most local schools don't teach Cantonese formally anymore You probably already know the nuances, but just to be clear, schools have probably never taught Cantonese "formally" at all - instead, schools taught "Chinese" (i.e. a localized version of written Mandarin) using Cantonese. And now some schools in HK are teaching Mandarin using Mandarin. > it's hard to find Cantonese specific written materials like textbooks etc especially for kids. True. Please consider supporting one of the few projects out there trying to fix this problem: https://hambaanglaang.hk/ https://hambaanglaang.hk/ > Without that supporting academic ecosystem, it's just a oral language spoken by less and less each generation. Cantonese has been "taboo" for various reasons. Learned people traditionally shunned it for Classical Chinese (pre-1950s) and for Written Mandarin (post-1950s). We're trying to fix that. It's crazy to think that a language spoken by at least 20+ million people never had any proper monolingual dictionary (until we made one...)

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

China has for the majority of it's history been a northern Mandarin Chinese oriented country. So it's not exactly a shock they'd push for this.

bmn__ 5y ago
> China has for the majority of it's history been a northern Mandarin Chinese oriented country. That claim is incompatible with historic records and linguistic scrutiny. Northern Mandarin developed only in the recent ca. 500 years, so that cannot be a majority. Middle Qing until early Republican era was oriented around eastern (i.e. Nanking) Mandarin. The process of displacing eastern with northern started in ca. 1850 and was complete a hundred years later.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  ...There was about 4000 years of Chinese history based around the Yangtze river valley, particularly north of it, as well as the main hub of the Qin dynasty. China has been a northern focused entity for almost it's entire existence, especially since Qin. That also includes the Qing and Yuan. Even the Ming were centralized in Beijing for a large portion of it's existence.
  - bmn__ 5y ago
    You are confusing a geographic region with a language.
    - MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
      I meant Han Chinese. My bad.