The War Against Cantonese – Now They Are Using Children

I spent last weekend in Zhongshan, birthplace of Sun Yat-sen and the original bastion of Cantonese. Not sure about the numbers but an incredible amount of immigrants to the various gold and hard-work slave-conditions hellholes on earth at the time, came from here, spreading Cantonese around the globe.

That was before the communist party decided to make Mandarin, the dullest of stick-in-the mud languages … cool. I don’t know how they’ve managed this incredible feat; the language has hardly moved at all since 1949, it has only half of the vocabulary of Cantonese and it’s a communist speech-language for Christ’s sakes. It’s even been simplified so that idiots can read and write it, instead of lifting the idiots up to normal level. Talk about dumbing down.

The little boy in the photo above was a skilled unicyclist and whizzed around the square like a motorised vehicle with several more wheels. I noticed he talked Mandarin with his sister and had a chat with them after his performance. They could both speak Cantonese, being natives of Zhongshan and all, and yet, they conversed with each other in Mandarin. This is significant, because so far I’ve been hearing “we address strangers in Mandarin because it’s more convenient, and speak Cantonese at home”. “It’s just easier to speak Mandarin at once with people you don’t know instead of going through the ‘Can you speak Cantonese’ thing”.

But these were siblings.

I started listening more closely to children and the whole time I was there I didn’t hear a single child speak Cantonese. Not with his classmates, not with his parents.

Is this it? Has the government really won, making children think Mandarin is somehow better? (Or, as numerous posters strung up around the province say: Speak the civilised language, speak Mandarin.) I wonder what subtle threats they’ve made at the schools to make this come about. Something like in Britain 100 years ago when children were severely beaten/reprimanded for speaking Welsh or Gaelic? It’s 2012!!!

The parents must share the blame; they are in on it. They are very comfortable speaking two languages themselves, so why do they deny their children the advantage of being polyglot? It’s good for the brain, you lemmings!

I decided to increase my efforts to make Cantonese a world language. I’m taking the fight into China.