粤语和普通话 Yuèyǔ hé pǔtōnghuà — Cantonese and Mandarin

Why Cantonese is the exception

Lesson 56 said that most Chinese regional varieties are losing ground to 普通话, and that younger urban speakers are often less fluent than their grandparents. Cantonese is the conspicuous exception, and the reasons are worth setting out because they are not mysterious. First, the linguistic facts. Cantonese — 粤语, or 广东话, or 白话 to its own speakers — is a Sinitic language of the Yue group with something like eighty-five million speakers across Guangdong, Guangxi, Hong Kong, Macau and the overseas Chinese communities that emigrated from this coast. It has six tones by the usual modern count, or nine if you count the checked syllables separately, against Mandarin's four. It preserves final consonants that Mandarin lost, which is why classical poetry often rhymes better in Cantonese. And it is not mutually intelligible with Mandarin in any degree: 阿明's 无法听懂 is literally accurate. Officially it is a 方言, a dialect; linguists outside China generally class it as a separate language, and the disagreement is about the word rather than about the facts. Second, why it held. Hong Kong is the short answer. For several decades Hong Kong produced film, television and popular music that the whole Chinese-speaking world consumed, all of it in Cantonese, which gave the language enormous prestige and a modern register at exactly the period when other varieties were becoming things your grandparents spoke. Guangdong is also wealthy, which matters, and it is far from Beijing, and there is a large, well-off diaspora for whom Cantonese rather than Mandarin is the ancestral language. Written Cantonese exists and is used in print, which almost no other variety can claim. Third, the part that is genuinely contested. Mandarin is the medium of instruction and of broadcasting, its share of media time in Guangdong has grown, and there have been public arguments about that — most visibly in Guangzhou in 2010, when proposals to move provincial television programming to Mandarin produced street protests. Since then there has been recurring debate about Cantonese-medium schooling, about children who answer their grandparents in Mandarin, and in Hong Kong about the position of Cantonese alongside Mandarin and English. People in Guangdong and Hong Kong hold a wide range of views on all of this, from unconcerned to strongly attached, and it connects to politics in ways a foreign visitor cannot usefully adjudicate and should not try to. This course does not. What is worth taking away is practical. Everybody in Guangzhou under about sixty speaks Mandarin and will use it with you without hesitation. You will not learn Cantonese by accident, and you are not expected to. But 唔好意思 for excuse me, 多谢 for thank you and 早晨 for good morning, said once and badly, are received with real warmth — because, as 阿明 says, nobody here thinks the language needs apologising for.