Don't read this as me trying to defend CCP's policy to discourage non-Mandarin languages in China: What you wrote is somewhat misleading to readers not familiar with the region. There has been massive internal migration to Guangdong province in the last 30 years. These migrants speak Cantonese at varying levels. It would be more accurate to make a comment about multi-generation Guangdong residents and their knowledge of Cantonese. (If you want to discuss Shenzhen, there is virtually zero Cantonese used there, because it was only a fishing village with ~25k people when it was opened for trade. It is nearly 100% internal migrants -- mostly from outside Guangdong province.)
Yes, one can speak their own first Sinitic language on the mainland (and they do, and many even speak more than 2) and that is not banned.
But they can't buy a textbook on their first language because the official policy is that everything that is not Mandarin is a «dialect», and dialects can't be studied (as in «are impossible to study due to not deserving to be studied»), therefore there is no need for textbooks.
In or from mainland China? No. I converse with native Cantonese speakers from Gwong Dung on a regular basis, and they have told me that teaching materials were not available on the mainland. I am either misinformed, or the situation with textbooks has vastly improved in recent years.
I have had no problem buying Cantonese teaching materials, including the Robert Bauer's comprehensive Cantonese dictionary, Victoria Yip's Cantonese grammar book and a quite a few more obscure ones from Western online book sellers.
It's not just recent migration to Guangdong province. The eastern half of Guangdong is traditionally Hakka-speaking. Most Hakkas don't speak Cantonese, and that shouldn't be surprising.
I am confused by this comment. Are you talking about Chaozhou (潮州)? That city is on the border between Guangdong and Fujian (but lies in GD), but the locals are overwelming Canto speakers. There are many who have migrated to Hongkong over the last 75 years.
Isn't Chaozhou mostly Teochew-speaking? Wikipedia claims there are 10 million Teochew speakers in Chaozhou while listing the total population as 2.7 million, which obviously doesn't add up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaozhou#Language (My guess is metropolitan area vs. city boundaries.) But given that Teochew is named after Chaozhou (modulo romanization) I would've expected it to be locally dominant over Cantonese.
Except they actively discourage the use of cantonese even for those who have cantonese as their mother tongue and their parents who speak cantonese. To the point they communicate with their parents using Mandarin. Why? Because they have been taught at school speaking Cantonese in any circumstances were barbaric.
> Shenzhen
Shenzhen used to speak with Cantonese. All the way back from 70s to 90s after it was a fishing village. Everybody knew / learn how to speak with Cantonese because of Guangdong and Hong Kong.
Like I said above in another comment, most of the teens who were born from a Cantonese language family now dont speak the language anymore.
You wrote: <<most of the teens who were born from a Cantonese language family now dont speak the language anymore.>> Sorry, but I disagree from personal experience. I am not a native level Canto speaker, but I work with many! Chinese families that speak 'minority' languages (including Fujian province) work very hard to transfer this culture to the next generation -- inside or outside East Asia.
If you wish to dispute my comment, please provide anecdata or a peer reviewed study or poll/survey that supports your view.
Also, you wrote <<All the way back from 70s to 90s after it was a fishing village>> This statement makes no sense. Deng Xiaopeng did not 'open' Shenzhen until 1979. It was still a small, regional city well into the 1980s. It wasn't a multi-million person metropolis until the mid-1990s.
If you are working with those small minority then they are not teens anymore. Yes, they work hard to have their child speaking, that is why only half of those minority speaks the language and other half barely use it. I say barely as in they do understand and speak it, but no longer a native tongue and cant describe things without going back to mandarin.
Should have written 80s to 90s. Generally speaking we talk about Fishing village as before all the manufacturing investment going up to China. That was when the whole manufacturing industry in HK moved up north, where north meant across the border to Shenzhen.
