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Mother tongue or other tongue?

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I suppose I should go down on bended knee and risk being shot in the back of my neck for such a counter-revolutionary idea. It certainly is late in the day - seven years short of a century - to right what many Chinese perceive to be a scholarly oversight and a slap in the face for their linguistic legacy.

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But making Cantonese the national language of China, instead of the Putonghua now in use, still has a lot of appeal. That is particularly true among Chinese in the southern part of the country, who speak it as their mother tongue - and for their friends and relatives who emigrated. They make up the bulk of overseas Chinese communities in the United States, Britain and many other parts of the world.

Cantonese lost out to Mandarin - as it was called then - by only one vote in a historic poll taken in 1913 to decide on a unified spoken language for China. Two years earlier, the government of Sun Yat-sen had overthrown the Qing dynasty and founded the first Chinese republic.

Officials found themselves governing people spread across a vast country. The saving grace was that, unlike the Indian sub-continent, they wrote the same script. But alas, they talked in a babel of tongues, barely intelligible outside their own confines - and gibberish to ears from afar. A scholarly committee was formed to look into the matter and, as things turned out, the northern school - favouring the court dialect of the Beijing area - prevailed.

It evolved into what we now know as Putonghua, which is more refined and easier on the ear than the earthy Cantonese. But the wisdom of the decision is open to debate, considering that no less a person than chairman Mao Zedong had trouble speaking it. Mao could barely make himself understood at times, mainly because of his thick, native Hunan accent.

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To be fair, his Nationalist Party counterpart, generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, fared no better with his version of Mandarin. There is even an anecdote about a bodyguard being mistakenly taken out and shot because Chiang mispronounced two words of Mandarin. Although it's recognised as the official national language, it is open to question whether it is actually the 'popular language' (the meaning of putonghua) by edict from on high or by the choice of the masses.

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