In the U.S. and Canada, the primary dialect in Chinatowns is Cantonese. How did this come about, and has it shifted over time? Thanks!
Wild-ass guess: The southern part of China (where Cantonese is spoken) is poorer than the north (where Mandarin is spoken), and hence many more of its residents fled looking for a new life in the Americas.
In Toronto, at least, with a HUGE ‘Chinatown’, that’s no longer the case. Mandarin is now more common.
As an aside, do people of Chinese ethnicity feel that the term ‘Chinatown’ is demeaning or offensive?
In the NYC Chinatown, I believe that Fujianese is now more common than Cantonese, and many speak Mandarin as well, or only Mandarin. The NYT had an article on the shift recently.
I believe that is correct. And that Fujian province is especially well known as an exporter of people.
A bit of trivia (unless I have it completely screwed up): The oldest Chinatown in the US is Honolulu’s. However, the entire Chinatown burned down in a giant conflagration in 1900, so the buildings that are there now do not date as far back as in some others.
There are also Chiu Chow speakers in the South, and a lot of overseas Chinease, such as my wife’s family, are Chiu Chow.
In Peru, most Chinese immigrant spoke/speak Cantonese and some Hakka.
Mandsrin is a relative newcomer.
This is because they came from the south.
Because the Chinese diaspora came largely (but not exclusively) from southern China, and the majority from Cantonese-speaking areas. Though Fujian (and the Hakkanese) also contributed, as noted above.
I know nothing about the current language shift, though, but I will note anecdotally that Chinese-speaking people I know are adept at to picking up other dialects of Chinese, even though they are sometimes mutually unintelligible.
Is it possible for children in Chinatown, such as in NY to grow up not speaking any Chinese dialect at all and hence unable to communicate with their parents who speak no English?
I believe these things usually go another generation. You have the immigrants who speak only their native language. Then their children learn the parents’ native language and the local lingo. Then it’s the grandchildren who can’t communicate with the grandparents.
That’s my experience too in my current (non-Chinese) gf’s family, and my father relates something similar in our own family way back when.
But when I was in college, my gf, from NY’s Chinatown, youngest daughter, insisted that she spoke no Chinese. I never really met the parents or other family, and other evidence was inconclusive I guess. It’s a huge mystery to me how someone can’t at least speak enough to communicate with Mom and Dad (who were still alive at the time), or why someone would lie about it.
Has anyone else come across a similar situation?
Yeah, unless the family makes an effort, by the time the third generation rolls around the kids have little to no fluency in their grandparents’ native tongue. I’ve met second-generation Asian-Americans who can just barely speak enough to hold a conversation, and I’ve never met a third-generation kid who speaks more than basic words. Sometimes the parents actively discourage the kids from learning their native language, other times the kids don’t want to, or are too lazy to put in the effort.
Maybe some, but the Chinese community in Dublin has actively wanted to brand an area of the city Chinatown.
Thanks for the interesting replies. Also interesting news about Toronto’s Chinatown transitioning to Mandarin.
Side note - but given that not all Chinese “dialects” are mutually intelligible, why do we still call them dialects? I thought that mutual intelligibility was the sine qua non of dialects - it might take a bit of effort, but I can understand pretty much any other English speaker in the world, regardless of regional dialect. Even if the accent is very thick, a transcription will give me no problem that all, or very little.
I’m originally from Hong Kong and I’m ethnically Chinese. No, I don’t find the word ‘Chinatown’ offensive in anyway, nor do I know of anyone who may be offended by it.
Regarding kids and their parents, one thing to consider is that they may speak to each other in different languages. For example, even though I grew up in HK and I was surrounded by Cantonese speakers, my parents are originally from Indonesia and they are Mandarin speakers. I would speak to them in Cantonese and they would speak to me in Mandarin, and we can understand each other just fine. It may seem strange to people observing the conversation though. However, I’m going to have a very hard time actually speaking Mandarin myself. I even have a very hard time understanding most Mandarin speakers from China, since my parents have an accent that is quite different from the standard.
I can forget about speaking with my grandparents though. They only speak their dialects (Hakka and Hokkien) and Indonesian.
Sure, but in the case I mentioned, the GF insisted Mom spoke no English, entirely feasible in that neighborhood, and she herself spoke no Chinese. While she was studying languages in school, those were the sort that the US government is interested in (In a RealPolitik sense), not something Mom would be likely to know if you catch my drift. And even then, she was starting from scratch as a freshman.
Of course it is possible I was lied to, but then the question is why? What is the point of persuading me that you can’t converse with your own mother? OTOH, I have long heard she is a spy now 
The Chinese situation is complicated a bit by the fact that the written forms are mutually intelligible, even though the spoken forms aren’t. So if you’re talking about writing, then it’s one language with multiple dialects, but if you’re talking about speech, then it’s multiple languages.
Then there’s also the old saw about how a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. Since they’re all from the same country, there’s an inclination to think of them all as one language, even when that’s wrong.
Probably because of the unified written language. That and when linguists were making the distinction, the number that studied/understood Asian languages was very small compared to the European languages.
You might still call them dialects, every source on linguistics that I’ve read refers to them as languages and members of the Chinese linguistic family.
It is questionable whether the written forms would be mutually intelligible, as they don’t necessarily exist for all the different Chinese languages. A newspaper written completely in Cantonese, that is, an exact transcription of it as if it were spoken Cantonese with all the words and articles that do not exist in Mandarin, may still be passably legible to a Mandarin speaker, in the same way that a Norwegian could probably puzzle out written passage of Swedish, but he can definitely tell that it is a different language. Cantonese newspapers and magazines are still published in Hong Kong, but I’ve never seen such a thing on the mainland.
The thing about Chinese that most people, even native Chinese who aren’t linguists, miss is that there is a third “dialect” of Chinese, “Wen Yan Wen” or “Classical Chinese” , that served as a written liturgical language of sorts throughout the Imperial era. So the educated of Northern and Southern China of the 17th Century could correspond a “unified written language”, that is, Classical Chinese, in the same way their educated European contemporaries could in Latin. They could have been just as unintelligible in spoken correspondence as they would be today. Use of Classical Chinese was discontinued towards the end of the Imperial era, replaced with essentially the written form of Mandarin. Mao Ze Dong and Chiang Kai Shek could (and IIRC did) write to each other in classical Chinese, as they would have been amongst the very last generation to have been taught the liturgical written language. Neither of them would have been very intelligible in Mandarin and certainly neither spoke the other’s dialect. Few living people outside of academic specialists would be very familiar with it today.
Also, there’s an old-fashioned habit of referring to non-European languages as dialects, as though any non-European language was just some obscure little lingo that hardly counts as a language. This habit is now disappearing for obvious reasons.