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hidden12345 -

mandarin or cantonese? Question refers to both on the streets and in business.



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johnd -

Mandarin










flameproof -

Mandarin by far. It's even hard to find a cantonese speaker.










Quest -

Hakka and Cantonese before the development boom, Mandarin now.










taschenrechner -



Quote:

Mandarin by far. It's even hard to find a cantonese speaker.

No way. I live in Shenzhen and it's really easy to hear Cantonese here. Everyone can speak
Mandarin, though.










flameproof -

>No way. I live in Shenzhen and it's really easy to hear Cantonese here.

Not in a taxi. Maybe 1 in 20 drivers can speak it.










johnd -

A lot of taxi drivers seem to come from Hunan, and their accent was a bit confusing for me at
first. A lot of their 'h' sound like 'f'. I say Yinhu, he says Yinfu, I say Yinhu, he says Yinfu.
Then I just wait to see where we'll arrive!










flameproof -

johnd
You give me a chuckle here! It really confused me first when a girl told me she was from "Funan".

Ahhhh? Funan??? Hunan? - Dui! Funan!

As a side note: OK, taxi drivers don't speak cantonese. But the language they speak to the
operator amazes me often. I usually don't get a single word. Seems they build small language
clusters with their village people.










liuzhou -



Quote:

a girl told me she was from "Funan".

When I lived there it was more like "fulan." I remember arriving in what I took to be Hunan,
Huaihua and being welcomed to "Fulan Fuaifua!" Most confusing.



Quote:

Seems they build small language clusters with their village people.

That was certainly my experience in west Fulan. It was only relatively recently that the railway
and road infrastructure connected the various towns and villages in that mountainous area, so each
village and valley have different dialects. Also, there is a high number of minority people who
aren't even speaking Chinese!

I taught in a university there, and 1st year students, recruited locally, couldn't understand each
other for the first few weeks. Lots of note passing!










geraldc -

My family are from Huanggang, Shenzhen, and they were Cantonese speakers. However the kids of the
original Cantonese speakers, i.e. those mid twenties and below, apparently are better at Mandarin
than Cantonese (well according to my Gt Aunt anyway) as all their classmates and friends are
Mandarin speakers, and they only speak Cantonese with relatives.

Walking through dongmen I only came across 1 shop where the guy hawking his wares via the public
address system spoke Cantonese, every other shop used Mandarin.

The taxi drivers I came across in Shenzhen were much darker skinned than the locals and I had no
idea where they came from. They could understand Cantonese, but we had no idea what they were
saying.












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