With more speakers of Mandarin than Cantonese in Canada now, what future for the southern Chinese dialect there?
Within 50 years, Cantonese may no longer be spoken in Canada. Blame the steady fall in immigration from Hong Kong and Guangdong in the past 20 years, and a steep rise in migrants arriving from the rest of China
If you took a time machine back 50 years to Vancouver and told Toishan speakers their dialect was heading for extinction, they would have laughed at you. So says Zoe Lam, a linguistics researcher and PhD candidate at Canada’s University of British Columbia (UBC).
Spoken by natives of Taishan, a city in Guangdong province with a population of about one million, it was then Vancouver’s dominant Chinese dialect. Today, it’s rarely heard spoken on the city’s streets.
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The question now is whether Cantonese could suffer the same fate. Data from Canada’s 2016 population census confirms what immigration data would suggest: the country has more Mandarin than Cantonese speakers – 592,040 versus 565,270.
In British Columbia, the province where Vancouver is located, the number of Mandarin speakers has almost caught up to – and could soon overtake – the Cantonese-speaking population. In a region that has long been a Cantonese stronghold, the census found there were 186,325 Mandarin speakers compared to 193,530 residents who spoke Cantonese.
Lam isn’t surprised. “If you look at the statistics from 1991, 1996, 2001, 2006, Hong Kong was the top origin of immigration from 1991 to ’96. Since then it’s changed to China,” she says.
In Hong Kong, you have to speak Mandarin in order to have a future, both economically and socially