[ksec]

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.

[throwaway2037]

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.

[ksec]

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.