Hong Kong's awesome. Love the food, love the people, love the incredible cityscape, love everything :)
I heard that Beijing's trying to phase out the Cantonese language in Hong Kong. Has it been enforced?
I heard that Beijing's trying to phase out the Cantonese language in Hong Kong. Has it been enforced?
No politicians would say outright that they want to eliminate a major language, but they could drastically reduce its usage by imposing specific restrictions. And not just on spoken Cantonese, but variations of written Chinese other than the official simplified characters.
I wish I could post an original article here with more details, but for some reason even the bilingual news sites don't cover this story in English. Wikipedia gives a pretty good summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Anti-Cantonese_regulations. The sources are all in Chinese (the only English link appears to be dead) but Google's translations weren't too bad.
Mandarin use has increased in Hong Kong in recent years, but for economic reasons, as mainland visitors and businesses have flooded our small city.