Is Cantonese a dying language?

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Is Cantonese a dying language?

Postby rdearman » Tue Sep 27, 2022 5:38 pm

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Re: Is Cantonese a dying language?

Postby Le Baron » Tue Sep 27, 2022 6:13 pm

about preserving the language, spoken by some 85 million people worldwide.


Welsh is still jealous.

4 tones versus 9 tones is perhaps tempting as a deal-breaker for an L2 learner, so someone learning Cantonese would need a motivating factor. Mine was Dorothy Pang (must be a popular Cantonese name) who sat next to me in the sixth form.
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Re: Is Cantonese a dying language?

Postby RyanSmallwood » Tue Sep 27, 2022 6:25 pm

As already mentioned there's plenty of languages in much worse shape holding on. Its good people are being cautious and I hope it stays being as widely spoken as it is and parents are able to keep passing it on to their kids. Still, even in a worse case scenario where it died out completely, it would still be in a better position than say, Latin, for learners interested in enjoying and possibly reviving the language.
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Re: Is Cantonese a dying language?

Postby Saim » Wed Sep 28, 2022 4:11 pm

It seems unlikely that it'll die out anytime soon in Hong Kong unless patterns of use or transmission start changing radically, but it seems exceedingly likely that it could in Guangdong if the current trend isn't reversed, at least from what I've read and from what this AP article suggests.

The fact that it has 89 million speakers doesn't mean it's not threatened, just as the fact that Japan has nearly 126 million inhabitants doesn't mean it's not an aging society. Patterns of use and crucially intergenerational transmission are more important than the sheer number of speakers.

RyanSmallwood wrote:Still, even in a worse case scenario where it died out completely, it would still be in a better position than say, Latin, for learners interested in enjoying and possibly reviving the language.


Latin never went extinct in the first place, that's a bit of a different case.

AP wrote:While Cantonese is not dominant in people’s lives as it used to be, it’s too early to say the language is in crisis in Guangzhou. It’s still spoken in homes and among friends


The second sentence is evidence that the first sentence is true, not counter-evidence. One stage of language shift is when the language is no longer used with strangers.
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Re: Is Cantonese a dying language?

Postby lichtrausch » Wed Sep 28, 2022 4:25 pm

I've met two young people from Guangzhou over the past few years. Both spoke fluent Cantonese.
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Re: Is Cantonese a dying language?

Postby anitarrc » Thu Sep 29, 2022 11:30 am

Acording to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese#North_America

there are Cantonese speakers in the US (And Malaysia etc) than speakers of Luxembourgish in Luxembourg.

So.. why would it be dying?
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Re: Is Cantonese a dying language?

Postby leosmith » Thu Sep 29, 2022 1:38 pm

Le Baron wrote:4 tones versus 9 tones is perhaps tempting
There are many reasons why Mandarin may be more tempting than Cantonese to an L2 learner, and although this is one of the most common reasons given, most high level speakers of both languages feel that tone difficulty (quantity?) is more or less a wash. Here is an example of what I've seen posted:
redditor EagleCatchingFish wrote:my experience is that it's easier for me personally to deal with Cantonese tones than Mandarin. Cantonese has three tone registers: high, mid, and low. The tones themselves have three movements: flat, falling, and rising. I can tell immediately which register the tone is, and it's not difficult to tell if it's falling or rising. I have a hard time with Mandarin's third tone. I studied Cantonese first.

So in my experience, it sounds like Cantonese has a huge handful of tones, but when you get to using them, they're not particularly harder. I also find Mandarin tone sandhi to complicate manadrin tones a bit, but as a gwailouh, nobody is expecting me to be great at tones anyway.
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Re: Is Cantonese a dying language?

Postby nooj » Thu Sep 29, 2022 2:17 pm

anitarrc wrote:Acording to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese#North_America

there are Cantonese speakers in the US (And Malaysia etc) than speakers of Luxembourgish in Luxembourg.

So.. why would it be dying?


Because what principally matters is not the number of speakers, but whether those speakers are transmitting the language to their children. You could also include domains of usage (where the language is used, in what circumstances etc), which have a direct impact on whether speakers end up transmitting the language to their children.

A language with only 500 speakers but all of the speakers transmit the language to their children, and those children to their children, and those children to their children etc could conceivably outlast and survive a language with 50 million speakers if the speakers of this community don't speak the language to their children.
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Re: Is Cantonese a dying language?

Postby leosmith » Thu Sep 29, 2022 3:10 pm

rdearman wrote:https://apnews.com/article/china-education-united-states-7377532823f77160fc467a874f2e81fe

Diminishing, not dying. Isn't that the trend for most languages though? Contracting due to the pressure from a handful of titanolanguages?
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Re: Is Cantonese a dying language?

Postby Saim » Fri Sep 30, 2022 9:06 am

leosmith wrote:
rdearman wrote:https://apnews.com/article/china-education-united-states-7377532823f77160fc467a874f2e81fe

Diminishing, not dying. Isn't that the trend for most languages though? Contracting due to the pressure from a handful of titanolanguages?


I wouldn't necessarily say it's just a handful of titanolanguages, but languages that are dominant in a nation-state. Latvian is absorbing Latgalian and has already killed off Livonian, despite being far from a "titanolanguage", and Tok Pisin only has at most a couple million speakers (and perhaps less than a million L1 speakers), but is on its way to supplanting many of the languages of the by far most linguistically diverse country in the world, Papua New Guinea. In some cases, languages without official use, like Pashto, are supplanting other neighbouring languages.

It is probably true that most languages are threatened, but most of those languages are spoken by fairly small communities. Pretty much all the threatened languages with many tens of millions of speakers are spoken in China or India (and maybe Indonesia?), and I'd argue that those would be fairly easy to save with minor changes in language policy. For the languages spoken by small communities I think you'd need a global socioeconomic shift.
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