Save Cantonese at Stanford – Petition | Hacker News Reader

Save Cantonese at Stanford – Petition

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The enforcement of one language or dialect over others is a pretty common tool among nation-builders; the sharpest example in my mind is Parisian French taking over France [0]. Xi's CCP is definitely pretty nationalistic, so it's not surprising that they'd attempt to promote the speech patterns used around Beijing as the true form of Chinese.

It remains to be seen whether Cantonese has enough critical mass to resist being displaced by Mandarin, although Wikipedia suggests that ironically it has been prospering at the expense of smaller Southern Chinese tongues [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_shift#China

So Cantonese is different in that as of right now there is still a lot of media in Hong Kong and in the diaspora that is produced in Cantonese. And the Yue family of languages is so large it’s bigger than most countries.

Then again, if you said 50 years ago that Shanghainese might get wiped out that would’ve been laughable.

OP, are you personally involved in this and/or go to Stanford?

Not personally involved with the petition, though I did use to be a student.

I speak cantonese and it's a dying language imo. Most schools teach mandarin over cantonese. Also most people who speak cantonese speak English or another common language. And the learning resources out there for it aren't very good compared to mandarin. Most of my nephews and nieces don't speak it either. With every new generation I see less and less native speakers. It's kind of a shame

As someone who is second generation, I would like to learn it, but the main roadblock is that there are several forms of romanization and none of the resources are particularly consistent with each other.

Where's the petition to save Cantonese in Hong Kong?

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