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Comment by fearedbliss

Comment

Comment by fearedbliss

Cantonese has no:

- Standard

- Country that speaks it (only Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macau, and the Overseas Diaspora speak it).

- Learners of the language are primarily within the above territories and learn it through exposure, not through actual proper education in Cantonese itself. But rather learn Standard Chinese writing in school, and just "auto-translate" to Cantonese in their mind. I would even say most Cantonese people don't know how to write Cantonese given the "defaulting to Standard Chinese". A lot of the times when I ask a Cantonese speaker how to write something in Cantonese, they don't know. This is due to many reasons which I won't elaborate atm in order to not make this post longer than what it already is. While this is good in "getting away with being able to write Chinese and communicate with the broader Chinese speaking world", it is not good for Cantonese itself. This is why we have so many words in Cantonese that don't even have a character. It also explains why eventually people did want to create more and more characters and luckily we were at least able to get the Hong Kong Supplementary Set standardized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_Supplementary_Charac...

There has never been a point in Chinese history where the Chinese government has had this much power, and we already have plenty of evidence that they suppress and would like to eliminate the language from existence, and create their own view of what a "Chinese Person" and "Chinese Identity" is. Furthermore, we've already lost and mostly lost a lot of other Chinese languages. Hakka being one of them. It would be extremely difficult to find a Hakka speaker and Hakka learning resources at this point in time.

My time line for when Cantonese will die is far into the future, outside of my life time. But I would put it within the next 300-500 years or lower. Given this context, it is better to start the preservation and education efforts as early as possible.

I'm not expecting you to agree with me, but I wanted to give you some context. I'm not alone in my views.

Replies fearedbliss · 2025-02-04
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