posted by paglino9 on February 24, 2010 | 3 comments
A fun rebuttal to a NYTimes piece about the waning dominance of Cantonese in New York's Chinatown, and across the world.
http://daisann.com/2009/10/22/cantonese-is-dead.aspx
I'd love to learn more Cantonese, if only because it would make traveling through Hong Kong and southern China much easier. Probably more accurate to say that mandarin is becoming a lot more prominent rather Cantonese fading away.
That said, I can see where the defensiveness comes from. It's true you can get by as a foreigner in Hong Kong pretty decently these days if you have both English and mandarin. You still can't experience the city like a local but for simple communications the people who can't speak English generally understand enough mandarin for you to get by and vice versa. At least that's the case on the island in the city - I don't know about the New Territories.
I have a friend who has lived across the border from Hong Kong in Shenzhen for the past 5 years and he will occasionally run into issues where he can't get proper service at a restaurant despite being fluent in Mandarin because the waiter/waitress will primarily speak Cantonese. Mandarin is becoming more prominent, but there are still quite a few people in Southern China who speak mostly Cantonese.