They’re doing the same thing they did back in the 90s with Shanghainese, this time on a much larger scale. Disgusting.
the essay that police asked to be taken down was “Our Time” by Siu Gaa, which imagines Hong Kong in 2050 after a government crackdown on linguistic and ethnic minorities as well as freedom of religion in the city
It’s not about Cantonese. It’s they hate this essay for some reason. Whether that’s better or worse is up to your judgement.
I have a hunch this language suppression meme is fake news. I’ll get back to you guys in a decade or two to see if I was right.
Suppressing the local language. Happened in Australia, the Americas, and so many other places. It’s a symptom of the overall racism.
How insecure do you have to be that you find it necessary to suppress a language?
You owe it to yourself to read the article and realise that there is literally nothing in the claim. The headline is bollocks.
Chaak-ming Lau, an assistant professor of linguistics at the Education University of Hong Kong, believes that despite increased use of Mandarin in Hong Kong society, the city is not at risk of losing Cantonese. In Hong Kong’s 2021 census, over 6.3 million people aged 5 and up still have Cantonese as their usual spoken language. The Hong Kong government’s official stance is promoting biliteracy in English and written Chinese, and trilingualism in English, Putonghua, and Cantonese. And in the Ethnologue, the world’s most comprehensive catalog of languages, Cantonese—as part of the Yue Chinese family—has “institutional vitality,” which means communities and institutions use it extensively. “Cantonese is very far from being endangered,” Lau tells TIME.
6.3 million out of 7 million people still use it as their main language. I can see how calling for the “preservation of Cantonese” could be viewed as a separatist dogwhistle. The essay that caught the attention of the government was one that described the future of Hong Kong as one where Cantonese and local culture is all but wiped out by the mainland government in 20 years. One character in the story calls the protagonist who grew up in England “more qualified to be a Hong Konger than any of us” because they were saved from the see see pee mind virus. It’s very funny.
It’s worth noting as well that there are shit loads of languages spoken across China and that Mandarin is essentially the Esperanto of China, allowing communication across the country.
This really is just sensationalist rubbish.
