It is clear that Cantonese is defined as a dialect under the political power of the CPC. The ultimate purpose of the CPC is to eliminate all the ‘dialects’ and finally leave only one Chinese language, Mandarin, to represent the PRC as one unified nation.
Feel like the article is too radical. Reminds me of times reading headlines accusing the CPC's movement on border and territory issues on Wall Street Journal recently.
I would argue that spoken communication is the primary purpose for a language. Every person speaks a language but not everyone is literate. Using writing language as a primary standard is against the primary purpose of language.
This reminds me of Hebrew. Remember there's something special about pronunciation in Hebrew but not so sure.
Under the need to communicate with the ‘barbarians’, a new form of speech was created. Later, it was developed into Cantonese (Li 1990). Therefore, Cantonese is not a regional variation of Mandarin, but a very different language.
This is very insightful. Didn't know the history before.
Cantonese is the main language in Hong Kong.
I was curious about why Cantonese is Hong Kong's official language. Here are some excerpts from Wikipedia:
"After the British acquired Hong Kong Island, Kowloon Peninsula and the New Territories from the Qing in 1841 (officially 1842) and 1898, large numbers[quantify] of merchants and workers came to Hong Kong from the city of Canton, the main centre of Cantonese. Cantonese became the dominant spoken language in Hong Kong.
In 1949, the year that the People's Republic of China was established, Hong Kong saw a large influx of refugees from mainland China, prompting the Hong Kong Government to close its border.[citation needed] Illegal immigration from mainland China into Hong Kong nevertheless continued.
Movement, communication and relations between Hong Kong and mainland China became very limited, and consequently the evolution of Cantonese in Hong Kong diverged from that of Guangzhou. In mainland China, the use of Mandarin as the official language and in education was enforced. In Hong Kong, Cantonese is the medium of instruction in schools, along with written English and written Chinese."
Despite various debates, seven main groups are conventionally agreed upon: Wu 吴, Gan 赣, Xiang 湘, Yue 粤 (‘Cantonese’), Hakka 客家, Min 闽 and Guanhua 官话 (‘Mandarin’)
Later in the essay the author pointed out one way to differentiate language and dialects is whether the speakers can understand each other. However, as someone living in Jiangsu Province which mainly speaks Wu吴, I find it hard to understand other dialects such as Min 闽 and Xiang 湘.
I think whether people can understand each other or not depends on the frequency of their communication and how much exposure one has gotten to one language. Few people understand Cantonese may be that they seldom travel to those Cantonese-speaking regions or they have few relatives speaking Cantonese.
two main forms of dialects,
I looked up online. Wikipedia shows that there are four dialects in Cantonese:
Guangzhou Cantonese; Xiguan Cantonese; Hong Kong Cantonese; Malaysian Cantonese
since Cantonese is one of the most commonly spoken Chinese languages outside China.
Cantonese presence in the US started in 1850 with the California Gold Rush and quickly grew to 10% of California's population before declining with immigration restriction. Mandarin speakers did not settle in the US in significant numbers until after the 1965 immigration reform.
My assumption is that because people living near the coast (such as Guangdong and Fujian province) were easier to migrate through the seaway, so they were the first group of people to leave China and start a life somewhere else (in Southeast Asia or the US).
Reference: https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Cantonese-so-famous-outside-China