Comment by dragonsh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragonsh | Hacker News Reader

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> Those who refer to themselves as Cantonese do not feel superior

People who call themselves cantonese and not chinese are mostly from Hong Kong. People in Hong Kong always thought of themselves as superior to mainland Chinese and not just that they openly discriminated against them and darker skin people from south asia many of whom hold Hong Kong passport.

If you want to talk about regional differences like Newyorker or Californian then it does exist in China today where Shanghainese consider themselves at top and mostly disliked by Beijinger or HongKonger and others.

Efforts for unification of China started in Qin empire (221–206 BC) [0], which includes language standardisation and still a work in progress given there are still large number of dialects and ethnic groups in China. Lucky for China many of its historical culture remains along with language, cannot say the same for native Americans, whose language is not even part of official languages in North or South America.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_dynasty

As someone who has lived, worked, and has family in Guangdong/Guangzhou, a large number identify as Cantonese. I feel like your idea of what people think in these regions is just repeating the same stereotypes repeated in China, stating perception of feelings as fact.

Language standardization was for the written form, not spoken.

Yes within China people from Shanghai also call themselves Shanghainese and their dialect is also very different like Cantonese so its nothing special. Shanghainese consider themselves, like New Yorker more cultured than anyone else in China including Cantonese.

But people of Chinese ethnicity will first always identify themselves as Chinese not Cantonese or Shanghainese or Beijinger or Fujianese except for some people who prefer to think they are superior then being Chinese.

Its like saying New Yorker is different from a Californian and they are not American. When they are outside USA they will prefer to be called New Yorker not American.

I'm assuming you're chinese.

Can you explain to me why chinese people - not just in the PRC but also Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia - seem so eager to eliminate every chinese language that isn't Mandarin?

It's truly bizarre to me. Even people who want the EU to become a super state don't do things like call Dutch and French 'dialects' and demand the whole thing standardise to one language.

Now I don't know enough about 'dialects' in the sinosphere but I think that a dominant 'national' language is an expected outcome of globalisation. For example, French threatening to wipe out Occitan, Corsican and Breton, Castillian Spanish with Catalonian and other Iberian languages, Hindi and Urdu in India and Pakistan, etc. That's not to say that it's a good thing, just that it has happened in other places too. French policy on language might just be as strict from what I've read.

Having a single language for Chinese diaspora functionally makes sense. Similarly (kind of), Bahasa Indonesia was created to help address the linguistic challenges of having an archipelago nation.

I've lived in Singapore for 10+ years. I work with a mix of Singaporeans (native and naturalized HK'r's) and Malay Chinese (coincidentally all from Penang). Day to day chats in the office is English/Singlish and hokkien. Calls with vendors in Penang are in English and Hokkien. Calls with Taiwanese vendors are in Mandarin. When we have calls with our Taiwanese vendors, one of my older Singaporean colleagues always attends because he has the strongest mandarin on the team.

Not OP. For the Singapore case. The main reason is practicality. Mandarin and English considered more important in Global Business. English educated political leaders assumed learning Mandarin was hindered by speaking dialect at home. Singapore is a young nation then.

In Singapores case my more cynical take is they wanted to ensure that Chinese formed a linguistic majority, not just an ethnic one. China was an economic backwater when the Speak Mandarin policy came about, and Singapore already had and continues to have a real lingua franca - English.

Many people in Latin America totally do this about every living native language which is not Spanish. I'd say the EU is the odd case rather than China here.

my understanding is that the written language is already standardized as Simplified Chinese, readable by almost all, but that Traditional Chinese written language exists, importantly in Taiwan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_on_traditional_and_simp...

And also Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and various 'china town' enclaves in other western countries

It's not elimination. It's called "having a standard language so people can communicate". People still speak their non-Mandarin mother tongues at home and in general. Local dialects are still used at the bank, at government service centers, etc. It's just that you must _be able_ to communicate in Mandarin in case somebody from another province walks in. Some local schools, especially for minorities, still teach their mother tongue in school as a subject, on purpose - e.g. schools in Xinjiang.

People still speak their non-Mandarin mother tongues at home and in general. Local dialects are still used at the bank, at government service centers, etc.

This isn't what actually happens in practice though. In practice, children speak the language their school tells them to speak. And generation by generation less and less people speak the other language, and in smaller and smaller areas.

I'm somewhat familiar with the situation in Taiwan. No one is actively suppressing Hokkien (or Taiwanese or whatever you want to call it) anymore, but the language of instruction is still Mandarin and so Hokkien is dying rapidly. Even in cases where both parents speak it, often their children can just understand it and don't speak it, and there's zero chance their children - grandchildren of hokkien speakers - will.

Used to work with some Chinese Malaysians from Penang. All under 30, all spoke Mandarin to each other because the level of Hokkien knowledge ranged from "fluent" to "none at all".

I mean for Malaysia, schoolchildren of Chinese descent already have to pick up at least 3 standard languages Mandarin <- standard malaysian mandarin English <- duh Malay <- the official language of Malaysia On top of that, you add on the dialect, now there are practical considerations 1) Penang <- dominant dialect hokkien, and a penang kid who isn't even hokkien is going to need to figure out which dialect to use, hokkien, his native dialect or mandarain or english 2) KL <- cantonese in general, BUT certain places have certain stronger dialects etc etc etc

For practical reasons alone most people are going to focus on those top 3. I know some people who are reasonably fluent in no less than 5 languages but it's not that common and you will obviously see at least two or 3 are passable at best. These are going to happen even if the schools could somehow teach 4-5 dialects + standard mandarin +_ english + malay!

Right, but that's what I don't understand. Why introduce mandarin into the mix at all?

Malay: National Language

English: International langauge

Hokkien: Mother tongue

Mandarin: ???

I genuinely don't understand why a brand new language that wasn't traditionally spoken into the area was introduced.

For starters, hokkien is only a majority dialect in Penang... In KL its Cantonese or Hakka, for example. Much like (British) English, if there was going to be formal education in a Chinese dialect it was going to be Mandarin in line with what both the ROC and PRC did, since the whole point is to eventually enable everyone of Chinese ethnicity to communicate in a common tongue ( that isn't English...)

And in those days of the early 20th century when the foundations of formal education were laid if one was an educated person it would have been either in Mandarin or English (that said HK Cantonese is/was a huge pop culture influence but I don't think it ever was in an pan-sino educationist sense)

since the whole point is to eventually enable everyone of Chinese ethnicity to communicate in a common tongue ( that isn't English...)

Yeah, the strong desire to do that is something I don't understand. But thanks for getting to the crux of it - it's all about having a chinese exclusive lingua franca.

This really isn't that hard to understand, much the same way English was adopted as a lingua franca, Malaysia's Chinese population is itself heterogeneous and so at the national level the lingua franca of the Chinese nation, mandarin, is adopted over that of the disparate dialects that only had local superiority at city level.

A unified Chinese identity takes precedence over the local one, this is even more so when you are at the mercy of divide and conquer techniques. The only other alternative was Cantonese but then why would the Hokkien buy into that and vice versa? Educational resources are thin enough as it is.

I should probably also add that myself, a english speaking Malaysian Chinese would probably have to use english or malay with a random group of penang people since I can't speak mandarin - so from a purely practical point of view, given Malaysia and Singapore are a mishmash of southern dialects, we again come back to

English Mandarin Malay Then one of the various major dialects - and even then once you start moving around the country the Penang hokkien speaker in KL has to either switch to english or mandarin and the KL cantonese speaker in penang has to switch to mandarin and english and at the end of the day, with both the PRC and ROC using Mandarin as the common tongue, and the same situation existing for any other sinophere country bar Hong Kong...there we go.

If you go overseas and meet a random other Chinese person, your heuristics of common language are again going to skew

English or Mandarin then Cantonese then only one of the others so...

I don't know what you're talking about. My family-in-law is from Mainland China. My wife's sisters are married to different provinces. My nephews and nieces all pick up their non-Mandarin mother tongues.

And they intentionally exclude it others. Kids in the 90s would get the stick if they spoke in Cantonese in school.

History teaches us that is is exactly how an authoritarian state goes about eliminating local cultural identity and language.

ah come on guys, let's take a step back before making comments such as this one.

Or open one’s eyes to the cultural engineering that is occurring. Am I wrong?

If you look at any language that got wiped out, or nearly got wiped out, the story is always the same:

"they punished us at school if we spoke $MOTHER_TONGUE instead of $NATIONAL_LANGUAGE".

> ah come on guys, let's take a step back before making comments such as this one.

Care to explain what part of the comment you take issue with?

Why do we have to bring Native Americans into it? This seems at best a non-sequitur, and at worst whataboutism to hide China's many issues with suppressing minority cultures. No one claims states in the Americas have a good history with this, why bring it up when it has nothing to do with the conversation? Both China and many other countries need to do better. Bringing up complaints about other countries does nothing but trying to distract.

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