 No, and then they'll even be like, oh, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Or like, oh, lady, lady, lady. Can you? There are many men, friends. So familiar. Is Cantonese officially a dying language? That's the conversation and the questions that are arising from this new piece of news coming out of San Francisco. Yeah, long story short, Andrew, the city colleges San Francisco is scaling back its two year Cantonese language certification program. And that's causing a little bit of a stir within the Cantonese community in SF. However, it's mostly because it fits into this larger narrative globally of like, is Cantonese a dying dialect? And it's everybody who's speaking Cantonese right now in one or two generations just gonna be speaking Mandarin. Some people are freaking out. Yeah. All right, everybody. We're gonna talk about, go through the comments section. Please hit that like button. Check out other episodes of the Hot Pop Boys as we go through it. Obviously, guys, San Francisco of the big cities in America, it is the Cantonese stronghold. It has over 10,000 limited English proficient residents there, people who essentially are not as good as English but better at Cantonese. Also, Cantonese is the most commonly spoken language by the city's Chinese population. So, yes, if the city college is scaling back one of the 16 course Cantonese certification, it obviously means something. There still is a nine unit course one, but the 16 ones gone for now. The 16 one was the one that I wanted to take. Yeah. I wanted to teach. Yeah, I mean, and obviously, guys, we are fathers from Hong Kong, so we are half Cantonese, half Mandarin, if you wanna say that, even though those are not ethnic groups, they're language groups. Right, right, right. Because even though it's sort of people think that Cantonese is an ethnic group and Mandarin's not, but even Cantonese is actually more used as a lingua franca in that region because you could be haka, you could be chill jiao, you could be Shanghainese that fled after the war to Hong Kong and became Hong Konganized, but you're not actually Kanto. So it's actually super complicated. But anyway, that stuff is for a way another video. Andrew, let us get into the comments section and then get into our own takeaways. And what I do wanna say before we get into the comments section is that there is actually some disagreement about whether Cantonese is dying. Some people are like, eh, it's okay, it's still in a good place. And then some people are like, no! Tom, say ah! Anyway, let's get into the comments section. Somebody said, 80 million people speak Cantonese worldwide and it is still a top 20 most spoken language in the world. Why is everybody freaking out? And then somebody said, yeah, that's true, but a language's stability is measured by more how many of its speakers are passing it on to the next generation. And that, I could imagine, is the one shrinking rapidly for Cantonese. Both of these and competing facts, both true. Yeah, so I do think, obviously there are a ton of people who still can speak Cantonese across the globe, but possibly they're older and possibly the proficiency is going down the younger you are. And does that mean the next generation, like even our generation, like the 25, 30 year olds, are we going to pass it down to our kids? That is the big question. So, my question for everybody watching, if you are a Cantonese speaker, how do you plan on passing it down? Yeah, I mean, it has to do with almost like the life you live. If you're mostly talking to family members or if you're looking for something to communicate with the globe, realistically Andrew, it's almost like the whole earth is either just gonna be like English, Spanish or Mandarin, right? Like if we're really gonna boil it down. I mean, I will say also though, that you could almost say this about any language that is not Spanish, Mandarin or English. Like Italian, like more people are not learning Italian. Italian is not growing because even the younger generation of Italians, they are using a little bit more and more English words in their speech. Actually, Italy, Andrew, implemented some very strong reforms recently to try to fight off the influence of the English language amongst the Italian youth. Also, I think Arabic might be coming in there as well. Somebody said, Cantonese by far, the best language to swear in. That alone should justify efforts to preserve and spread Cantonese. Guys, if people are not speaking Cantonese, they will be swearing in Cantonese. Ooh! Hey man, listen, anything that allows a language to stick around at least in some part, right? Somebody said Cantonese is also the funnest language you can learn out there. It's got nine tones and it just sounds a lot more colorful and less academic or less bureaucratic when you speak it more than Mandarin. Is it interesting though, David, that the Cantonese English accent is the most popular funny Chinese accent to do? I almost wanna argue it's the most funny as just Asian accent, period. People love to do the Hong Kong accent. Whether it is accurate or inaccurate, they think it's hilarious. Yeah, exactly. So I guess the accent is definitely gonna stick around at least in a comedic sense, but I don't know if the high level of the spoken language is gonna be around. Yeah, to be honest, I think there's a lot of structural things that you gotta take a look at and I'm sure you can argue this way, that way. Will it be a slow glide down or will it be a drop off? Who knows? Somebody said, interesting, but what will these certificates do to benefit the students? I mean, literally I'm just asking from a practical perspective. This is sort of back to the issue at hand, Andrew. What were people gonna do with the two year degree in the Cantonese language from the City College of San Francisco? Well, yeah, I mean, they could go back to maybe Hong Kong and do something or I guess they could teach, open up a youth Cantonese school, I guess. You know what I mean? I mean, yeah, I don't know. They could go to Penang, Malaysia. They speak it a lot there when I went to Penang. I mean, I think the truth is, man, when you really look at Cantonese, there's the linguistic and then the academic and the identity aspect and then there's the practicality because the thing is it is true that most people globally that can speak Cantonese even as their favorite language or their first language can also speak Mandarin. But a lot of people who speak Mandarin cannot speak Cantonese as a secondary language. Well, obviously Mandarin is being pushed as the lingua franca that everybody in China has to speak and even Hong Kong is starting to feel that too where less and less kids are speaking high-level Cantonese. And it feels like even something anecdotally, Andrew, as such as the Hong Kong Golden Age of movies, that's sort of over too. I know sometimes they're out of Hong Kong, they're making movies in Mandarin just to make more money and have more access to a global market. I mean, you get access to Singapore and Taiwan and things like that. Somebody said Cantonese really needs to get on the apps, man. It's all about getting Cantonese on Hello Chinese, Duolingo, they just got it on Mango languages. There's a lot of like, upstart sort of individual run IG pages teaching Cantonese right now. Dr. Candice Lin, outcast from the HK. Yeah, and they have to, I mean, essentially people have to find a use for it, man. They have to feel like Cantonese is useful to their life. Right, you're saying on a daily basis with people potentially in their own age range or cultural relatability, interest sphere. And I think one of the problems is that Hong Kong, which is also known as the epicenter or the hub of Cantonese culture right now, it's also heavily English. So a lot of Hong Kong Cantonese, even amongst a certain class of people, is using a lot of English. Are you talking about Pau Mathe, Happy Valley? Yeah. Yeah, a lot of Happy Valley kids like to speak English with each other. Like, yeah, you're saying the Konglish. Wah, Feng brother's a ho zhongyi rap music, you know. Somebody said, isn't Cantonese mostly just a spoken language? And someone said, yes and no. There is a formal Cantonese, Andrew, when you write it down that is a lot more similar to standard written Chinese or Mandarin Chinese, which is like kind of like how people were able to communicate in China all in the back in the days when everybody spoke different dialects, they would write to each other and they would have to know the formal version of their language. But there is a slang colloquial spoken version of language that is very difficult to write out for a Mandarin speaker to understand. Andrew, for example, terms like, in Mandarin, which doesn't mean anything, but it was like right here. Yeah. But that would be in Mandarin, I guess the equivalent would be like Tai Tuli. Right, right, right. Which would be completely written in characters differently. Ah, yeah. I mean, I don't know, man, it's complicated. I mean, somebody said one day only overseas Chinese will understand Cantonese, Hoken, Haka or Chiu Chiao. Yeah. I mean, these are all dialects that I mean, especially you're talking about Hoken and Chiu Chiao, like these are dialects that have been shrinking because they even a lot of they, their dialects got taken over by Cantonese speakers because Cantonese was kind of the Southern dialect, like the lingua franca of the Southerners. And some people in SF were like Boston Old School Toisan strongholds, like the older, older generations, they even felt some type of way about leaving Toisan or like Tsong San behind and learning Kanto. So then it's funny that only now the people who speak Kanto, it's almost like whatever happened to an even smaller sub-dialect within the Kanto umbrella is happening within Cantonese underneath like Southern dialects, like Fujianese or whatever. So it's true, like some people from Tsong Shan, which is another, you know, they essentially speak like a different type of Cantonese. 70% different in Cantonese. But then they're like, oh my gosh, like then we all whole family learn Cantonese. And now Cantonese is going away. It's just all languages keep going extinct. Somebody said there used to be a lot more material 20 years ago when the British still ruled Hong Kong. But over the past 20 years, they haven't been a lot of new materials. And somebody said all Cantonese learning materials, whether it's for English speakers or Mandarin speakers to learn Kanto always focuses on learning dim sum. There's gotta be more than dim sum. That's why the swearing aspect comes in, right? Yeah, swearing, dim sum, gossiping, those are definitely the most important. I'll never forget like the dim sum dishes. And I will never call dim sum dishes by the Mandarin name, all right? I do not feel comfortable doing that weird to me. Somebody said all non-mandarin dialects are pretty much fading more or less, some faster and some not as fast, right? Yeah, I mean there's dialects up North, obviously in like, you know, Shandong, Dongbei, you know, the way they speak. But they are more similar to Mandarin It's probably similar in Mandarin, but essentially those accents are gonna go out of style soon. Yeah, what's the Shandong-Yin? What's the Shandong-Yin? They're not gonna say it like that in next generation. Shanghainese, which is essentially kind of feels like a different language, it's getting phased out too with the younger generation. I mean, listen guys, things, they just change. I don't know, I mean, obviously some type of, I'm not gonna tell anybody that it's like, if you feel some type of way about it and more intensely than other people, I understand where you're coming from but things always change. But my question is like, how do you maintain culture? How do you maintain pride in it? And how do you maintain usefulness? Pride, usefulness, and appeal. Yeah, it's almost like those three bubbles on the Venn diagram got it all overlapped, right? How are you going to keep it relevant to people? This guy said, I wish that people will stop saying that Cantonese is dying because Cantonese people, they are so pragmatic. If they hear that Cantonese is dying, then they will not want to teach their kids because so we should say that Cantonese is thriving. And then that will convince the Cantonese parents to keep teaching that someone's dying. Oh, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy or kind of manifested. And it has to do honestly with sort of the pragmatism of Cantonese people, or just of any Chinese people. I guess I would say Cantonese people, if I had to say they are pretty practical in the sense like, they're just gonna learn whatever works, like work with whatever type of people, you know, I guess, I don't know. They're certainly not fundamentalists is the easiest way to put it, whatever the opposite of that is. Somebody said, I grew up speaking Cantonese and then I later learned Mandarin moving on older in my life. I also speak Spanish and French. I would say that Cantonese and Mandarin are about as close as Spanish and French are. For me, Andrew, obviously our parents are half-half, right? I got exposed to both simultaneously a lot growing up. I'd say it's almost like, to me, even closer than that. I'd say it's like Spanish to Portuguese. Whereas like, you know how they say a lot of Portuguese speakers can understand Spanish, but a lot of Spanish speakers cannot understand Portuguese, like organically. Interesting. Somebody said, any language without a distinct written form is doomed long-term. So I mean, listen guys, to me, I think you could break it down this way, you could break it down that way, you could bring in linguists, you can bring in just the practical people who are just trying to live a successful life in their daily spheres or whatever that they operate. And I'll say this, things always change, from ancient Chinese to middle Chinese Andrew, there was different forms of middle Chinese, which sounded super different. And those all sort of split off into the modern dialects, everything from Cantonese to Chiu Zhao to Fujianese to Shanghai Nese, which is Wu, all the way up to Mandarin. And then there's different forms of Mandarin. You know what I mean? Things always change, right, Sichuan, Hua? Yeah, I mean, my overall takeaway is that everybody just has to have the reason on why they wanna preserve Cantonese as a language. You have to find your real reason. If it's to speak with your grandmother or to go back to Hong Kong, great, you know? And I think Cantonese is gonna be around for generations to come. It really is, I don't think it's going away anytime soon. I do think it is in a constant decline, to be honest, but it's not like shooting down. Like it's not gonna get cut off because- It's like on a glide down. Yeah, and then also like the food is still gonna help, but at the end of the day in this capitalistic world, it's gonna follow the money, man. If the money and the flow and the power is with learning Mandarin, they're gonna learn Mandarin just like Shanghai Neese. Within Shanghai, guys, you're not gonna meet that many young Shanghai Neese people who speak Shanghai Neese very well. Yeah, it's a different dialect. So I'm saying like, everybody's worrying about their dialect going away, you know? And everybody's dialect, in a way, can go away of the smaller groups, you know? Like, what if you're a smaller Asian group, then you've been known that your language is gonna go away, you know? Right, like we had given the previous example of the sub-sub dialects within the Canton umbrella. Those have been washed away for maybe even 20, 30 years. I mean, I think how hard it is to continue like, you know, learning like the Hmong language, right? Like, you know, that's just gonna be tough. And then are you gonna learn Hmong green, Hmong blue, Hmong white? I mean, there's like different sub-sub dialects even within Hmong, right? Anyway, let's get into our takeaways, Andrew. Honestly, I think that YouTube is the best way to keep these alive, because you gotta take the coolest expressions and make sure that those get popular. Like in New York, they do such a good job of incorporating things, Andrew. Like, I don't know a lot of Spanish, but I know a lot of Spanish slang. Ah, tranquilo, tranquilo. Right, right. I know, I don't know Bengladesh, but I know Mata, because in the rap song, somebody said straight to the Mata, and I had to look into it. Mata means head in Bengali. So you know what I'm saying? Like, I guess, do you think that that's a good path? Like, you know, like things, they're like, even if they go away, they're never forgotten. They're never forgotten. It means- The Yucatan language, Andrew. The Mayan, the Aztec language in Mexico, people cannot speak it really, but they still say, like, nix them all. Nix them all is not a Spanish word. Right, right, right. You know what I mean? They still say, like, different things. Or in Black Panther, he brought it back because Neymar was speaking Yucatan, he wasn't speaking Spanish. Yeah, I think my, like, Cantonese is just, it's still gonna be around. It's still got a couple generations, but there does need to be a concerted effort by some people to keep it going. So don't just switch to Mandarin so quickly or don't, like, shy away from speaking. People cannot be shy about trying to speak Chinese. You have to continue to try to speak Chinese. Even if you're not that good at it, you have to continue to try or else- Would you use yourself as an example of this? I like to try to speak it. If people are willing to be patient enough and joke around about it with me, let's do it, you know? Is it the most efficient way to learn? Maybe not. It'd probably be more efficient if I went to China or if I went to Hong Kong and just stayed there for six months, you know? But ultimately, you know, do what you can within your life because everybody has to be practical about their life. And I guess at the end of the day, everybody wants to live the best life they can. So if speaking Cantonese makes your life better, it helps you meet the people that you want, helps you connect with the people that you want, then so be it. But if it's not useful to your life at all, then you're just not gonna speak it. You know, it's tough to say because I just went to, and we went to Mabu Cafe the other day and they were playing like old 90s and like 2000s canto movies. But does that kind of show you that none of the hyper-modern canto movies are that popular if you're always leaning back on like old Steven Chow catalogs? Yeah, man, I'm not gonna lie. I try to watch some Cantonese like action movies, like of the past like 10 years. They're pretty cringe, man. They're pretty cringe. They're not hearing like they used to, man. I don't know if the good guys went to go make stuff in Mandarin. I did look this up, Andrew. The only language that has ever been revived in world history and had a exponential leap in speakers is Hebrew. And there was a lot of religious things that went into that. Yeah, well, there was like a concerted like team effort, you know. See it has a strong need. You know what I think, Andrew? When I say gone but never forgotten, I'm talking about like 1990s Michael Jordan basketball. If you listen to rap music, they're still referencing Ginobli, you know, Rondo, Jordan, Pippin. But those guys haven't, you know, Jordan and Pippin didn't play in the league for 20 years. Right. So why is everybody still looking at the 90s? And like, if you watch, if you go into any sort of retro bar that's like cool and hyper contextual in New York, they're always playing like Nick's games or like old Jordan games, you know, and Amélie Andorre. They're not playing like modern stuff. So it goes to show you, you can make it a classic. David, are you trying to say that Guangdonghua is very iconic? Iconic. Very iconic. Wow, butterlil. I think it's true, man. Listen, the 90s, it's always going to be the classic NBA generation that is forever etched in a time. But modern day, it's Trey, Dame, and Steph running around Yokoch, Shangoon, and LeBron, right? All right, everybody, let us know in the comments down below what you think. Is Cantonese going away, actually? And how do you plan on keeping the Cantonese language tradition alive in this new world that is moving away from it a little bit, but not going away too fast? So let us know in the comments down below. Thank you so much for watching. We are the Hot Pop Boys. Or should I say the, what would it be? Doppin' Low Boys. Doppin' Low Types. Yeah, Doppin' Low Types. I'm going to leave some of my favorite Cantonese Instagrams down below if you just want a little, little hit, you know, a little nostalgia or learn, like keep up with the terms. Until next time, we're the Hot Pop Boys. We out, peace.