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Comment by arghwhat | Hacker News Reader

Think of Mandarin like English. Many regions only have it as second language, with not everyone speaking it well (and just like with English, younger generations do better on average). In regions where it is the first language, it is usually a dialect differing from Standard Mandarin.

Canton (guangzhou) speaks Cantonese, Shanghai speaks Shanghainese, and so it goes, with none of these languages having much at all to do with Mandarin (The Shanghainese use of tones is closer to Scandinavian languages than other Chinese languages!). In Hong Kong, Mandarin would be your third language in school, unused in public except to communicate with visiting mainlanders.

Writing is basically isolated from the spoken language, so there the primary concern is that some areas use traditional Chinese, whereas others use simplified.

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Previously most Hong-Kong movies were in Mandarin (under the Shaw Brothers), but since the eighties they switched back to Cantonese. Only the state sponsored, politically correct Peking-film school movies and TV is mandarin, the popular movies are all in Cantonese.

To add to this (as a Hong Kong native): Hong Kong is definitely a weird, special case, having belonged to Britain until 1997 and basically most people growing up there on some level despise the mainland, communism, and the language. To this day there's a certain level of disdain and judgment against you if you speak Mandarin there, almost like you're branded as "the others".

It's also true that provinces with rich cultures far away from Beijing continue to have their local dialects thrive. This is very true of Guangdong and Sichuan/Chongqing (see Sichuan rap). Yunnan also is quite noted for having many minorities and dialects still being preserved. The same cannot be said for Shanghai, where the younger generation have been eager to adopt to just speaking Mandarin as the mainstream thing to do. I had a girlfriend from Wuhan, and she grew up listening to the dialect there but her parents never encouraged her to converse in it, so she only speaks Mandarin.

My wife is from Shanghai, but spent the later half of her life in Hong Kong, so she speaks Shanghainese, Cantonese, Mandarin, English fluently and now also Danish and Swedish intermediate. As I am Scandinavian, I am mostly just conveying her knowledge and my brief observations, all while she makes me feel horribly inadequate in the language department.

I recall a trip to Shanghai a while back where my wife mentioned that her Shanghainese was rusty, which she felt resulted in her being considered foreign. It would appear to me that people were still preferring Shanghainese, although she did mention that Mandarin words were used at random.

Are you talking about a younger generation yet, or might I have been misunderstanding something (very probable)? I'd ask her myself, but she's in Mainland doing research right now, and The Great Firewall makes communication patchy at best. :/

I've spent 2 years in Shanghai as an exchange student, and I think whether you get the impression that the "younger generation" no longer speaks Shanghainese depends a lot on whether you focus on people born in Shanghai to parents both speaking Shanghainese, or all inhabitants of Shanghai in that age group.

The former are likely to speak at least a little Shanghainese, but limited due to only using it at home and with some of their friends. The latter don't really have a need to learn Shanghainese, because Mandarin is the language used in school and for all kinds of business.

Personally, I only know one native Shanghainese speaker. Because my friends are university students from all over the country, the actual proportions are likely not as extreme, but I still think that Shanghainese speakers are a minority by now.

Similar to my wife, she's from Shantou and speaks her local dialect Teochew (pretty much used by everyone in her hometown), Mandarin and also Cantonese fluently.

According to her though, everyone in her city speaks the local dialect, and they only speak Mandarin if needed.

That's exaggerated, outside of Cantonese-speaking areas Mandarin is the native language of the younger generations.

That isn't true. Many people will speak their local dialect as a native language, even outside of cantonese speaking areas. My wife is from a town in Hunan, her mandarin is native, but that's because her mom and dad were from different places in Hunan. But there are still many kids in that area who speak Mandarin with a heavy accent...

Cantonese isn't very special as Chinese dialects go; e.g. Taiwanese/Fujianese (Min Chinese) are just as proud of their dialect (more so in Taiwan where the push for mandarin is not as strong as on the mainland).

I disagree, but I'd like to add that just like everywhere else in the world, the younger generations have a higher average level of education and linguistic skill, thus being better at both second and third languages than the previous generations.

Mandarin words are also adopted in local languages to fill gaps by the younger generations, just like English words are often put to use in the west. Not as fully incorporated loan-words, but just as a Mandarin word randomly injected into a foreign language sentence (Those speaking Cantonese use English words instead).

However, the native tongue of the younger generations is not Mandarin, at least not in any of the areas I have knowledge of.

Source: Married to a native Shanghainese (who is in the 20-30 range) who spend half her life in Hong Kong, and thus spoke Cantonese, Shanghainese, Mandarin and English fluently out of necessity (more western languages have been added to the list later on).

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