Overseas Cantonese Speakers Unite!
大家一齊講廣東話！
Oh wait, shit, the 2nd Gens are already abandoning the language…
Oh well… 🤷♂️
Rip, it was fun while it lasted.
There will be one day no one will be able to listen to 海闊天空 and actually understand the lyrics with their ears.
So sad…
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Oh btw. I think some variants of Yue dialect are already near extinct. Taishanese (台山話 Taishanese, not to be confused with Taiwan) My parents are from Taishan and we were born in Guangzhou, so my parents never spoke Taishanese to us… cuz we lived in Guangzhou. Like… Cantonese had a higher “Prestiege” than Taishanese… I mean Guangzhou is a City, it urban. Taishanese is rural, its a bunch of villages. So yea… they only speak Taishanese to my grandparents and I think my parents sometimes speak Taishanese to each other. Then they turn to me and my brother and they just speak Cantonese. I later noticed that and it felt kinda odd lol. Like a different social circle, like the older people are people I can’t relate to, they have a different tongue. Like when I was younger I didn’t even notice the distinction and sort of mixed some Taishanese sounds into my Cantonese, but then I later realized it was two different languages lol. Apparantly my brain didn’t really distinguish it and I thought they were mutually intelligible.
Anyways, I could underatand Taishanese, but don’t feel comfortable speaking it. I never spoken it, because I just speak Cantonese and my maternal grandmother would understand it anyways. So… yeah… that’s how languages die. They never taught me, there is not much materials. Not really any TV Shows like Hong Kong TV and Movies. So… yep… Taishanese is a dying language. And anyone speaking Taishanese is rural… so… very conservative… and I don’t like conservatives… so… yeah… oopsie, language dead…
Cantonese, however, I’m more warm towards Cantonese compared to Taishanese. HK people are very progressive. So I like it more. HK loves freedom, so… in a way… using Cantonese is defiance against the CCP.
But I think my parents didn’t speak Cantonese to me because on my dad’s side, there are relatives from Hong Kong… so maybe they didn’t want them to think of us as rural peasants? But then again, we did live in Guangzhou, so that was probably already a reason enough in of itself. Some immigrants to western countries don’t even teach their kids their native tongue… so there’s that.
Pat_Riot@lemmy.today 1 day ago
So tell me something, do you also speak English or do you use translation software? Your English to me, an American in a southern state, seems flawless, possibly better than my own. No judgement from me, by the way, just curiosity.
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I grew up with it as an immigrant to the US. I arrived in Brooklyn, NY at 8 years old and started public school there. I’m basically a native speaker of Cantonese, Mandarin, and English, no translator tools necessary lmfao. English is actually my primary language, I’m a US Citizen now.
As for Cantonese and Mandarin, I can express my self using basic 2nd-grade level words + some vocabulary I learned while looking up the online dictionaries for some terms. I can recognize most of the basic characters. But if I read a text from someone that has more education than I did, and they use higher level vocab or like colloquel terms, then I’d actually be stuggling to reading Chinese and might have to read very very slowly or have to use Google translate to verify I understand it correctly.
Pat_Riot@lemmy.today 1 day ago
Ah, well then hello fellow American! It’s great that you have retained understanding of your childhood languages. I took German in highschool and probably know about enough now to get myself arrested, or more likely just laughed at and I know none of the Irish Gaelic my family would have spoken when they emigrated in the mid 1800s.