Recently, a clip of a father berating his young son for not being able to speak Cantonese has been making rounds on the internet. Based on the video, both are native residents of Canton (Guangzhou), China—the origin of the Cantonese language, where Cantonese used to be the most commonly spoken language.
A bit of context: I was born and raised there, and, at the time, it would have been unthinkable that a kid born in Canton couldn’t speak Cantonese. Unfortunately, due to social and political factors (that are too much to get into in this post), Cantonese is no longer commonly spoken there, especially among the younger generations. It’s been a widely discussed topic that Cantonese is dying in Canton. As a result, many Cantonese people, including parents, have started to take action to protect their cultural heritage, and in this case, the father chose to yell at his kid.
The video is incredibly hard to watch, and it really shouldn’t have been shared for the world to see to begin with. That kid is probably traumatized for life. Berating your kid like that will only push them further away from Cantonese—the poor kid will now associate Cantonese with his dad’s outburst and probably won’t think of Cantonese positively for a long time.
For me, the video really hit me on a personal level: The room in the video looked very similar to my bedroom in Canton growing up, the kid looked like me when I was his age, and even the dad looked and dressed like mine. My parents (thankfully) never berated me like that, but I could imagine myself in the kid’s shoes 15 years ago (though it wouldn’t be able about me not being able to speak Cantonese).
When I was at that age, I was very rebellious and so whatever my parents really wanted me to do, I would absolutely not want to do it. If my dad berated at me like this for not doing something, I would swear off doing that thing for the rest of my life.
But also, when I was a kid, the Cantonese culture/language was never something that I thought was important. In fact, I was actually adamant that I texted my friends in standard written Chinese rather than written Cantonese (like most of my friends did) because I thought it was more “proper.”
Most kids just want to fit in, be cool and play with their friends. They don’t care about culture/language, and so it’s counter-productive to try to force/shame them to care.
From what I’ve heard through families still living in Canton, parents nowadays have an uphill battle to pass Cantonese to their kids because so many teachers in schools in Canton are no longer locals, and so they can’t speak Cantonese to begin with. There’s much more of a push for teachers to teach entirely in Mandarin now as well. Back then when I was in school in Canton, most teachers taught entirely in Cantonese even though they were supposed to teach fully in Mandarin—it was only natural because everyone’s first language was Cantonese.
Also, pretty much everything that kids in Canton consume on social media is in Mandarin. Content in Cantonese is much harder to come by in Chinese social media platforms. Most content creators want more views and likes and so naturally they are incentivized to create content in Mandarin, the lingua franca in China. Some content creators even say that Chinese social media platforms actually suppress content in Cantonese, so it’s really a double-whammy.
I think, as a start, parents need to pass Cantonese to their kids via positive ways—watch classic HK movies with them, introduce them to Cantopop from the golden era, chat with them in Cantonese, teach them all the fun idioms that Cantonese have, etc—create happy memories associated with Cantonese with them. People start to develop an interest in a culture/language because of fun things (e.g., anime/manga making Japanese a popular language to learn) and that should be the way to encourage people to care about that culture.
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