Cantonese is a Chinese dialect with an uncertain future. Meet those working to preserve it through podcasts, documentaries, and even rap
- With an unclear future and unique challenges involved in teaching it, Cantonese is making international scholars get creative in how they promote the dialect
- Through a Cantonese conversation podcast, a documentary on an elderly rapper, improv comedy and more, the dialect is finding new fans in unexpected places
Cantonese, a southern Chinese dialect with a long history but an uncertain future in China, is being championed around the world in some surprising ways and some unlikely places.
At Palacky University in Olomouc, a city in the Czech Republic, Chinese-born, associate professor Joanna Ut-Seong Sio enjoys describing to her students what it’s like to live in Hong Kong, and over time her words have inspired some of her students to start learning Cantonese.
While there are many students at the university learning Mandarin – the standard form of Chinese – “they are also interested in learning other Chinese [dialects], including Cantonese,” says Sio, a linguist raised in Macau and Hong Kong.
She soon realised that teaching Cantonese from scratch was going to be challenging. In Olomouc, a city that has a population of just 100,000 and very few Cantonese speakers, it’s hard for students to practise their language skills in an everyday setting.
Whereas Mandarin learners can take advantage of pinyin – a standardised romanisation system that helps with pronunciation of words – Cantonese learners must deal with multiple different romanisation systems, which presents an additional challenge, according to Sio.
She works with Luis Morgado da Costa, a computational linguist who has been using his computer programming skills to help learners overcome the challenges of learning Cantonese. He has created an online dictionary called WordNet, and so far has inputted around 6,000 Cantonese words.
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The traditional Chinese characters of each word are shown, and users can listen to the pronunciations and how the words are used in sentences.
Morgado da Costa is hoping volunteers will record themselves pronouncing words and speaking sample sentences.
“I think maybe 10, 15 years ago people resorted to community solutions where you would find a few friends with the same problem and take turns finding solutions. But if you want to look at the long-term vitality of the language, we want more permanent solutions you can give to your kids anywhere in the world,” he says.
As part of their shared mission, Sio and Morgado da Costa recently visited the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, to learn teaching techniques from Cantonese instructors, and acquire more teaching materials.
They met Raymond Pai, the director of the university’s Cantonese language programme. He told the visiting academics that most of the students he teaches are “heritage learners” who have some Chinese background. But Sio’s challenge is teaching people Cantonese from scratch.
I don’t see why you can’t do it … I think maybe there’s some kind of mental block because we are not used to teaching Cantonese as its own language
“I don’t see why you can’t do it. There are also many other foreign languages that you can learn. So you could do the same in Cantonese. I think maybe there’s some kind of mental block because we are not used to teaching Cantonese as its own language,” she says.
Pai is also keen to promote the dialect to a wider audience, and hosts a podcast, called Chatty Cantonese, with Cameron White, a fluent Cantonese speaker.
In the podcast, Pai and White interview a different guest in each episode who is either a Cantonese instructor or learner.
The first episode aired in September 2021, and since then the podcast has been downloaded more than 22,000 times, with listeners from the United States and Canada, Germany, Netherlands, South Africa, Russia, and even Zimbabwe and Madagascar.
“I had no clue [about] who’s listening … except [from what] the stats [revealed],” Pai says. “It took us by surprise … This started as a passion project and turned out to be quite well received.”
White, who is from Chicago in the US, started learning Mandarin in primary school, and continued to study the language in college. In 2009 he visited Hong Kong with his mother and, after being taken with the city, resolved to return – which he did in 2014, after graduating from college.
“I took a Cantonese class for Mandarin speakers at Chinese University and it was full of mainland [Chinese] or Taiwanese wives who had married Hong Kong husbands and wanted to interact with their in-laws,” White recalls.
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In Chatty Cantonese, White purposely makes mistakes when speaking Cantonese. “It’s helpful sometimes when I make mistakes … I say things wrong and Raymond corrects me … but that’s very intentional, because we want people who are listening to have me as that proxy person who’s making the mistake.”
In San Francisco, Laura Garber and Xu Wangyuxuan are two more people aiming to promote Cantonese, despite having no personal ties to the Chinese dialect.
One of those people is David Wong, a third-generation Chinese-American, who immerses himself in traditional Chinese poetry and music.
“His grandmother introduced him to the traditions and the language, and would speak with him. I think from there, he kind of found a love for it and studied [in college]. He got a degree in China and then came back [to the US],” Garber explains.
The documentary also features a group of retired women called Grant Avenue Follies. The group’s leader, Clara Hsu, writes Cantonese rap, and teaches her fellow performers how to speak the language through her witty lyrics.
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Julia Quon also features in the documentary. She learns Cantonese online and uses it to communicate with old people to encourage them to take self-defence classes.
“It’s just such a predominant language in Chinatown in San Francisco … So it was a no-brainer to discover Cantonese. And then when you see how much effort is behind the movement, it was amazing to see,” says Garber.
In making the nine-minute documentary, Xu found parallels between the Cantonese learners and herself, as her parents never taught her Suzhounese – the dialect her grandparents speak – and so she has relied on her mother as a translator throughout her life.
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“I found that even though I can still understand the dialect … I’m still not able to really communicate with people, especially the older generation … Also, I know some of my friends from the minority ethnic groups in China, and they are losing their own language. They are facing the same struggles,” Xu says.
Back in Olomouc, professor Sio uses improvisational comedy to encourage her students to get out of their comfort zones and speak in class. A stand-up comedian herself, she says improv forces people to say whatever comes to mind, and from there they become more comfortable speaking a new language.
“When I started teaching, I thought it would be nice to do improv for language teaching because it’s fun for people to come and play. You need to communicate and that’s a really good way to practise,” she explains.
“Regular improv games are at a very high level, even native speakers find it really hard to play improv games because … you have to think on the spot … But you can make the games simpler and that is interesting, especially if you have graded levels of games targeting skills you might want to train.”
