Cantonese is a Chinese dialect with an uncertain future. Meet those working to preserve it through podcasts, documentaries, and even rap
- With an unclear future and unique challenges involved in teaching it, Cantonese is making international scholars get creative in how they promote the dialect
- Through a Cantonese conversation podcast, a documentary on an elderly rapper, improv comedy and more, the dialect is finding new fans in unexpected places
Cantonese, a southern Chinese dialect with a long history but an uncertain future in China, is being championed around the world in some surprising ways and some unlikely places.
At Palacky University in Olomouc, a city in the Czech Republic, Chinese-born, associate professor Joanna Ut-Seong Sio enjoys describing to her students what it’s like to live in Hong Kong, and over time her words have inspired some of her students to start learning Cantonese.
While there are many students at the university learning Mandarin – the standard form of Chinese – “they are also interested in learning other Chinese [dialects], including Cantonese,” says Sio, a linguist raised in Macau and Hong Kong.
She soon realised that teaching Cantonese from scratch was going to be challenging. In Olomouc, a city that has a population of just 100,000 and very few Cantonese speakers, it’s hard for students to practise their language skills in an everyday setting.
Whereas Mandarin learners can take advantage of pinyin – a standardised romanisation system that helps with pronunciation of words – Cantonese learners must deal with multiple different romanisation systems, which presents an additional challenge, according to Sio.
She works with Luis Morgado da Costa, a computational linguist who has been using his computer programming skills to help learners overcome the challenges of learning Cantonese. He has created an online dictionary called WordNet, and so far has inputted around 6,000 Cantonese words.
