the lemur
Senior Member
You rarely hear about these other Chinese languages in Canada or the US it seems. I don't think I've ever heard the Wu language or would know what it sounds like, though I can tell that Mandarin sounds very different from Cantonese. The only Chinese-origin languages I've really heard about and heard spoken in real life are Mandarin, Cantonese and Taiwanese.
I also hear that non-Mandarin languages in China are on the decline, as Mandarin replaces all the other tongues as a unifying language the way English did with Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh etc. or the way Parisian French replaced languages like Occitan, Alsatian, Breton etc. Linguistic diversity on a whole worldwide seems on the decline. But perhaps there are a lot of people still speaking the diverse Chinese languages because they are large populations in their home areas, even if they don't emigrate overseas to places like Toronto.
Do people speaking these local Chinese languages feel strongly about keeping them, or are they more eager to switch to Mandarin or English? I've heard that in some parts of India such as the southern parts, people strongly resent Hindi being imposed and would rather speak languages like Tamil or Bengali, or even just English plus their local language.
By Taiwanese do you mean Hokkien or the Taiwanese variant of Mandarin?
Mandarin replaces all the other tongues as a unifying language the way English did with Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh etc. or the way Parisian French replaced languages like Occitan, Alsatian, Breton etc.
I'd be careful with those kinds of comparisons; Welsh is actually in a pretty strong position in terms of the number of speakers and the use of some regional languages in France is being encouraged after decades of being erased/suppressed.