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Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

The hypothesis never mentioned in the post, is i think that apple fears being kicked out of China for promoting cantonese or regional languages, going against the will of the CCP to make Mandarin the only official chineese language.

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If that were the case, input methods by Chinese companies like Sogou wouldn't support Cantonese either. The opposite is true: here's a description of how to enable Cantonese Jyutping input in Sogou for iOS: https://jingyan.baidu.com/article/60ccbceb100b7c25cab197c4.h...

I think the more likely explanation is that Apple has a small team supporting all of the world's languages, mostly focusing on widely-spoken ones, while Sogou has a small team focusing on languages widely spoken in China, so their Cantonese support is better.

Most likely the people who wrote the feature note didn’t know what they were talking about

Probably true. Half of the teens in the region dont speak the language anymore. So CCP is admittedly quite effective at it. Although Cantonese Voice recognition still works.

And somehow Apple Arcade still not available in HK and Mainland China?

Edit: Actually this brings back memory. About twenty+ years ago I made an English to Cantonese Translation with Romanization Input Method on Windows and later on Mac using VanillaInput / OpenVanilla so I could use it for IRC and ICQ. At the time voice recognition of anything was sci-fi stuff. Dragon speech recognition sucks no matter how much training time you give it. Twenty years later we are close to real time on devices speech recognition.

So basically in 50 years Cantonese will largely live on in its disapora, much like the forms of Sicillian and Napolitano and the hundreds of other endagered languages you can find in NYC

Yes. But there is a different. Between Natural Selection of language where it is gone and a planned deliberate attack to get rid of the language. Correct me if I am wrong I believe Sicillian and Napolitano are the former. Cantonese are the latter.

I mean, Southern Italians from Calabria and Sicily fled Italy precisely to escape what they perceived as an attack on their culture and society by Northern Italy, given the official government told everybody "you and your children will now be speaking Tuscan from now on, oh, and we're gonna fuck you with high taxes" (Tuscan, the regional language of Tuscany, was promoted to Official Italian by the Nationalist government). This schism between north and south still exists to this day in Italy (it even gets mentioned in The Sopranos!).

Perhaps the difference is one of degree rather than an absolute difference

I doubt this is the case here. Cantonese is an official language of Hong Kong and Macau and the mother tongue of tens of millions in Guangdong. Language politics is complicated but I don't think the CCP is so crudely trying to eliminate languages. Apple also has keyboards for Uyghur and Tibetan, which are probably more sensitive languages.

Do you live in Hong Kong? They are slowly but systematically and surely doing that to Cantonese.

As far as I know, there is a gradual trend to push Mandarin at the expense of Cantonese, and there is reason for concern, but I doubt there's a connection between this and Apple's decision here. (There's a reason I said "crudely".)

> I don't think the CCP is so crudely trying to eliminate languages

They are doing it. Sources: few HK friends that were really worried about the future of their language and culture. And this was before the security law.

> "...but I don't think the CCP is so crudely trying to eliminate languages."

Last time I checked, less than half of the population in Guangzhou knew how to speak Cantonese.

Don't read this as me trying to defend CCP's policy to discourage non-Mandarin languages in China: What you wrote is somewhat misleading to readers not familiar with the region. There has been massive internal migration to Guangdong province in the last 30 years. These migrants speak Cantonese at varying levels. It would be more accurate to make a comment about multi-generation Guangdong residents and their knowledge of Cantonese. (If you want to discuss Shenzhen, there is virtually zero Cantonese used there, because it was only a fishing village with ~25k people when it was opened for trade. It is nearly 100% internal migrants -- mostly from outside Guangdong province.)

It's not just recent migration to Guangdong province. The eastern half of Guangdong is traditionally Hakka-speaking. Most Hakkas don't speak Cantonese, and that shouldn't be surprising.

I am confused by this comment. Are you talking about Chaozhou (潮州)? That city is on the border between Guangdong and Fujian (but lies in GD), but the locals are overwelming Canto speakers. There are many who have migrated to Hongkong over the last 75 years.

Isn't Chaozhou mostly Teochew-speaking? Wikipedia claims there are 10 million Teochew speakers in Chaozhou while listing the total population as 2.7 million, which obviously doesn't add up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaozhou#Language (My guess is metropolitan area vs. city boundaries.) But given that Teochew is named after Chaozhou (modulo romanization) I would've expected it to be locally dominant over Cantonese.

But what I was actually talking about were Huizhou, Heyuan, Meizhou etc. Basically, Cantonese extends as far east as Hong Kong and further east of that is marked as Hakka territory in the Language Atlas of China https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Map_of_s... Meixian Hakka from Meizhou in particular has a prominent position within Hakka culture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meixian_dialect

Yes, one can speak their own first Sinitic language on the mainland (and they do, and many even speak more than 2) and that is not banned.

But they can't buy a textbook on their first language because the official policy is that everything that is not Mandarin is a «dialect», and dialects can't be studied (as in «are impossible to study due to not deserving to be studied»), therefore there is no need for textbooks.

Jingdong has a large selection of Cantonese textbooks: https://so.m.jd.com/ware/search.action?keyword=%E7%B2%A4%E8%...

Have you tried to buy one?

In or from mainland China? No. I converse with native Cantonese speakers from Gwong Dung on a regular basis, and they have told me that teaching materials were not available on the mainland. I am either misinformed, or the situation with textbooks has vastly improved in recent years.

I have had no problem buying Cantonese teaching materials, including the Robert Bauer's comprehensive Cantonese dictionary, Victoria Yip's Cantonese grammar book and a quite a few more obscure ones from Western online book sellers.

Why was this downvoted? It makes no sense. I am not an apologist for CCP but this is a terrific retort!

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.

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.

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.

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