I guess this was bound to happen sooner or later: Rise of Mandarin Changes the Sound of Chinatown. Sure, Bruce Lee spoke Cantonese, as did Anita Mui, as does Jackie Chan. But there are just too many Mandarin speakers in the world with Mandarin being the official dialect of China and Taiwan. And with there being a trend of people moving out of Chinatowns across the country, the shift was going to take place anyway.
When I was a college freshman, I was going to study Cantonese since it was the closest thing to the mother tongue for my family. In the end, however, my paternal grandfather, who was Teochow and who spoke at least three other dialects of Chinese and English, told me to study Mandarin because, as he said, everyone was going to speak Mandarin in the future.
I’ve posted about endangered languages before. There’s always loss that comes when a language is no longer spoken, but for Chinese people, I think it’s good to have a common language. Even if Mandarin is taught in schools, the people of Hong Kong and Guangzhou will keep Cantonese alive.
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When I was in Guangzhou in 2007, I was delighted that I could get on a polite pleasant conversation with someone over age 30. But when I spoke to younger store clerks, they looked at me like I walked out of Imperialist China. I don’t think HK and Canton will keep Cantonese alive. I think the language will die with us. It’s too bad. It is a clear and beautiful language.
When making business cards in Chinese, I opted for the Beijing/Mandarin version of writing “Oregon” as opposed to the traditional Taiwanese or HK style. If you Google the characters, both will come up, but as defference to the PRC, we went with the way they write things.
Hopefully the language stays alive. Maybe it can live on the internet. I suppose there will always be people interested in what Cantonese pop stars are singing about.