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From: deb5@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Re: Chinese dialect
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Date: Thu, 5 Dec 1996 19:56:56 GMT
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In article <32A7C5F4.135C@mailhost.net>, Madonna  <madonna@mailhost.net> wrote:
>K Tan wrote:

[no attribution]:
>> With Hongkong being absorbed by China and West now swarmed by Mandarin
>> rather than Cantonese speaking Chinese, Cantonese will be
>> a more of a dying dialect. Even proud Hongkong actors and actresses
>> are forced to speak Mandarin on their own accord.
>
>Naah... Cantonese is still the most spoken Chinese dialect in the 
>world, like it or not. 

	Like it or not, it isn't and never has been.  First of all, you
seem to be forgetting that Mandarin is a dialect (or, better put, a group
of dialects).  It wins out in number of first- and second-language
speakers and geographic spread.  Shanghainese is second in number of
first-language speakers, but it's not much spoken outside of mainland
China.  Given the growing size of the Taiwanese *and* HK diasporas, it's
hard to say whether Cantonese or Amoy comes second in geographic spread.

[snip]
>In the Chinatowns of 
>the West, Cantonese is still widely-spoken among the older
>generation of Chinese, although the national tongue, Mandarin is
>slowly encroaching these domains... 

	I think this is one of the points the previous poster was making
when he called Cantonese "a dying language".  Mandarin may be expanding
its domains at the expense of other dialects, but I hardly think that
justified calling them "daying".  Language use is *not* a zero-sum game
and it's perfectly possible that all Chinese dialects are "growing" (just
obviously not at the same rate).
-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
