It's crazy that in some ways cantonese is a dying language, or at least one that's being sidelined by the government, esp. as Hong Kong is being fully transitioned back to China.
But just as many people speak cantonese as speak italian.
It won't die as long as we keep using it. Use it or lose it pretty much. I do think there are a lot of people that might want to learn Canto but since it doesn't have any official standardization and there being an active push by greater forces to suppress it, it would be difficult for anyone outside of Hong Kong to learn it. This is where my 粵卷 comes in. I want to continue improving and refining my teaching strategy over the years and create a standard that people can use to learn the language.
The Cantonese Scrolls is designed to run directly in your web browser (thus cross platform), portable (in that it's conveniently located anywhere you have a computer - small mobile phone, or a desktop), so you can study on the train, but most importantly it's designed to be offline and downloadable. I want the 粵卷 to be a Cantonese learning resource that is freely available for anyone in the world that view/download it, for anyone that has the desire to learn, and for it to outlive me. I do see this being a life long project so I hope I can continue improving this project over the course of my life.
Cantonese is hardly a dying language as there are approximately 110 million native speakers of Cantonese across Southern China, South East Asia and Malaysia. Its status in Hong Kong, on the other hand, is indeed changing due to the HK government having to appease to the central government.
But just like most people in Gwong Dung learn to speak Cantonese as their first language despite having to speak the national language (Mandarin) too, the same will continue in Hong Kong as well. There is just too much history and cultural legacy associated with Cantonese that will keep the language going strong for generations to come, 咁…加油啦！
- Country that speaks it (only Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macau, and the Overseas Diaspora speak it).
- Learners of the language are primarily within the above territories and learn it through exposure, not through actual proper education in Cantonese itself. But rather learn Standard Chinese writing in school, and just "auto-translate" to Cantonese in their mind. I would even say most Cantonese people don't know how to write Cantonese given the "defaulting to Standard Chinese". A lot of the times when I ask a Cantonese speaker how to write something in Cantonese, they don't know. This is due to many reasons which I won't elaborate atm in order to not make this post longer than what it already is. While this is good in "getting away with being able to write Chinese and communicate with the broader Chinese speaking world", it is not good for Cantonese itself. This is why we have so many words in Cantonese that don't even have a character. It also explains why eventually people did want to create more and more characters and luckily we were at least able to get the Hong Kong Supplementary Set standardized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_Supplementary_Charac...
There has never been a point in Chinese history where the Chinese government has had this much power, and we already have plenty of evidence that they suppress and would like to eliminate the language from existence, and create their own view of what a "Chinese Person" and "Chinese Identity" is. Furthermore, we've already lost and mostly lost a lot of other Chinese languages. Hakka being one of them. It would be extremely difficult to find a Hakka speaker and Hakka learning resources at this point in time.
My time line for when Cantonese will die is far into the future, outside of my life time. But I would put it within the next 300-500 years or lower. Given this context, it is better to start the preservation and education efforts as early as possible.
I'm not expecting you to agree with me, but I wanted to give you some context. I'm not alone in my views.
But just as many people speak cantonese as speak italian.