Why Canadian university’s Cantonese language course is 85% Mandarin speakers
Originally targeting heritage speakers, the University of British Columbia’s language programme is proving more popular among another group
When the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada, launched its Cantonese language programme in 2015, it was geared towards heritage speakers – second- or third-generation Chinese-Canadians who wanted to learn how to speak to their parents and grandparents in their mother tongue.
By the following year, lecturer Raymond Pai, the director of the programme, observed that a third of the students were native Mandarin speakers.
“What we did not fully anticipate was the scale of that interest. Over time, the classroom became a space not only for heritage language maintenance, but also for cross-regional Chinese linguistic engagement.”
There are around 950 students enrolled in Cantonese courses for the 2025-26 academic year, and 85 per cent of them are native Mandarin speakers. As a result, Pai has hired three more part-time instructors to teach the Mandarin speakers. Meanwhile, there is only one class of heritage speakers.
Dr Zoe Lam Wai-man, who began helping Pai teach Mandarin speakers in 2018, says a lot of her students were born and raised in Shenzhen. Shenzhen is located in China’s mainly Cantonese-speaking Guangdong province but is a new city that grew rapidly in the 1980s and where Mandarin is the predominant language. Because the millions of people who flocked to the city over the last four decades came from different parts of China, all speaking different dialects, Mandarin became the lingua franca.