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> 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 t

• 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.