Standard Cantonese

Standard Cantonese is a variant of Cantonese, generally considered the prestige dialect. It is spoken natively in and around the cities of Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Macau in southern China. Standard Cantonese is the official Chinese spoken language of Hong Kong and Macau, and a prestige dialect and lingua franca in Guangdong province and some neighbouring areas. It is also spoken by many overseas Chinese, especially those of Cantonese descent, in Singapore, Malaysia, Canada, United States, Australia, Europe, and elsewhere. Traditionally, Cantonese was the lingua franca of overseas Chinese communities in the Western world, although that situation has changed with the increasing importance of Mandarin in the Chinese-speaking world as well as immigration from other provinces.

Cantonese versus Mandarin

The so-called "Battle between Cantonese and Mandarin" started in Hong Kong in the mid-1980s, when a large number of mainland Chinese people started crossing the border into Hong Kong during Deng Xiaoping's Reform & Opening Period. At that time, Hong Kong and Macau were still under British and Portuguese rules respectively, and Mandarin was not often heard in those territories. Businesspeople from the mainland and the colonies shared a mutual dislike and distrust of one another, and in magazines in China in the mid-1980s, they would publish polemics against the other's language - thus Cantonese became known on the mainland as "British Chinese" -and Mandarin became known as "Liu Mang Hua" - which literally means, "outlaw speak."

Related Topics:
British - Portuguese

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

In Singapore, the government has had a Speak Mandarin Campaign (SMC), actively promoting the use of Mandarin Chinese at the expense of Cantonese and other Chinese dialects. This was seen as a way of creating greater cohesion among the ethnic Chinese. But the Singaporean Government has gone too far in its endeavour. Some Taiwanese songs in some Taiwanese entertainment programmes have been singled out and censored. Japanese and Korean drama series are available in both languages on TV to the viewers, but Hong Kong drama series are always dubbed in Mandarin and the original Cantonese track is not available, causing the series to sound very unnatural and lose much of its flavour. Korean and Japanese have a better standing than the local dialects of Singapore itself. Up till now, television programmes from Hong Kong are dubbed into Mandarin, although now Singapore residents can watch them in the original Cantonese on cable. One offshoot of this campaign is the curious Pinyinisation of certain terms which originated from southern Chinese languages. For instance, Dim Sum is known as Dianxin in Singapore's English language media. The campaign has made most of the young Singaporeans unable to even understand Cantonese, let alone speak. The situation is very different in nearby Malaysia, where even most of the non-Cantonese speaking Chinese can understand the dialect to a certain extent (and some very proficient). A Hong Kong tourist who has been to Kuala Lumpur and Singapore once commented: "I do not feel that KL (Kuala Lumpur) is very much different from HK since I can use Cantonese extensively. But I can tell my secrets in Cantonese rather openly in Singapore since most of the Singaporeans do not even understand what I am saying." In other words Singaporeans are now quite deprived of their opportunities to learn Chinese dialects. A good news is that while most non-Cantonese Singaporeans do not speak their own dialects at home, many of the Cantonese in Singapore still speak Cantonese as their mother tongue. The SMC and its consequences are to fend off influences of dialects on Mandarin, but it has been noticed that some Singaporean Chinese do not even speak Mandarin Chinese as well as their Malaysian counterparts, who usually have a more varied vocabulary and are mostly proficient in several other dialects as well.

Related Topics:
Singapore - Speak Mandarin Campaign - Cable - Pinyin - Dim Sum

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~