Even in China city once called Canton, Cantonese language Are still banned
GUANGZHOU, China - At first, Rao Yuansheng didn't even realize he was doing it. He was sitting in
the bustling newsroom of Guangzhou Television, worrying aloud about the declining use of
Cantonese here in the land of its birth, and he was speaking in Mandarin.
"I guess I'm just used to it," he said apologetically to the translator, who was also a native
Cantonese speaker. The translator, who had also slid into Mandarin, looked similarly embarrassed.
"I think it's because we are in an office environment," she offered as a half-hearted
explanation.
Though it is spoken by more than 70 million people worldwide, Cantonese is in trouble here in the
city formerly known as Canton.
Five decades of Mandarin being promoted by Beijing as China's unifying common language --
combined with the influx of millions of migrant laborers drawn to Guangzhou in recent years by
the city's economic success -- has helped Mandarin displace Cantonese as the lingua franca.
A similar shift has taken place in Chinatowns across North America, as communities once dominated
by Cantonese speakers with roots in Hong Kong adjust to an influx of Mandarin-speaking immigrants
from other parts of China.
In Guangzhou, however, Cantonese speakers are beginning to gently push back, hoping to preserve
their mother tongue. The Latest Trends in Cantonese, a four-minute spot Rao hosts during the
nightly news on Guangzhou Television, is part of the effort to save Cantonese from becoming just
another dialect in the land of its birth.
"It's very important to promote Cantonese, because I'm afraid future generations soon won't know
how to speak it," he said before taping a recent episode.
But Rao, author of a book on Cantonese idioms, admits he uses Mandarin -- known in China as
Putonghua, or "the common language" -- every day. "When I'm at work, or somewhere like a taxi or
a restaurant, I use Mandarin because it's not very convenient to use Cantonese."
The official push to promote Mandarin begins in kindergarten. While most natives of Guangzhou and
surrounding Guangdong province grow up in Cantonese-speaking households, schools have for decades
been Mandarin-only, and students are often punished for speaking Cantonese in class. "Speak
Putonghua, write standardized characters, use civilized language, be a civilized person," reads a
red banner that hangs outside many schools.
The switch to Mandarin accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s as China embraced market reforms and
opened itself to the outside world. Because of its proximity to Hong Kong, Guangdong province was
the first region opened up to international commerce, drawing an influx of Mandarin-speaking
migrants from other parts of the country.
As Guangzhou went through a prolonged economic boom, its population jumped from just over three
million in 1980 to an estimated 12 million today, many of whom are migrant laborers from other
parts of China. According to Rao and others, less than half that total speak any Cantonese.
But the past few years have seen the beginning of a backlash, with artists and writers making a
point of recording or writing in Cantonese. A campus organization to promote Cantonese was
recently formed at one Guangdong university, and the number of Cantonese-language websites has
exploded.
"I don't want to criticize the government, but the culture of a city is the most important thing
a city has," said Yao Zhuo, an artists' agent who is organizing what he believes is the first-
ever Cantonese language cultural fair in Guangzhou next year. "Guangzhou has Cantonese culture.
That's why people come here. If Guangzhou is the same as Shanghai and Beijing, who would come
here? How can you be a famous city if you're the same as everywhere else in China?"
Cantonese advocates insist that, rather than just another of China's many dialects, their
language is actually more flexible and precise than Mandarin, partially because it has 59 vowel
sounds to Mandarin's 23. They also argue that classical Chinese poetry, much of which was written
in Cantonese, only sounds right in its original Cantonese.
"Taking pride in speaking Cantonese has become trendy among teenagers. ... Not only are people
trying to protect Cantonese, they're discovering their culture," said Ching May-bo, a professor
of local history at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou.
Though she teaches the history of the Cantonese language in her courses, Ching does so in
Mandarin. "It would be more useful to also be able to teach students in their mother tongue," she
said. "But it's more realistic to have teachers teach in Mandarin, and have parents teach their
children their mother tongue."
To officials in Beijing, the campaign to promote Mandarin -- a mixture of Beijing dialect and the
Manchurian-inflected language used in imperial circles during the Ming and Qing dynasties -- was
about more than trying to push the local lingo on the masses. Coming up with a national language
was seen as critical to holding together a massive and disparate country that was home to 56
distinct ethnicities, according to the government's count.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service,
http://www.scrippsnews.com.)
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