Why do Hongkongers care so much about Cantonese?

because, swearing and insulting people's mother in the Cantonese language is a poetic artform. The form and flow is unmatched by any other language.

I speak Cantonese and a bit of Mandarin. While learning Korean, I was surprised to find many vocabulary sounded more like Cantonese than Mandarin. It made more sense since I found out that Cantonese has a longer history than Mandarin which I thought opposite was true initially.

Somehow, watching Chinese gangsters movies in Mandarin doesn’t sound as fierce as when Cantonese is spoken.

I am a native Hongkonger and have been teaching foreigners Cantonese for almost 10 years. I am always so proud of my students who diligently learn Cantonese as they found Cantonese is a very beautiful, interesting and precious language which is over 1000 years of history.

You can never replace how glorious swear words sound in Cantonese

Cantonese is not just the language of Hong Kong it's the broader tongue of the Guangdong (Canton) area.

I am a native Hongkonger, and I believe that Cantonese is very important for us. It is wired in our genes, literally.

Cantonese should continue and be promoted all over the world! Is a beautiful language! Pray for Hong Kong...

The best way to increase the usage of Cantonese around the world is to make it easier to access Cantonese cultural media. Look at Japan and Korea. There wasn't a reason to learn Japanese and Korean until people started seeing Anime, Manga and K-pop. Now, the two languages have exploded in popularity around the world! I grew up in the UK but I listened to Hong Kong pop music and watched a lot of Hong Kong dramas and films when I was a child. Now it's so hard to get them. If they want to save Cantonese then they need to release Hong Kong films and music on popular streaming services like Netflix and Amazon.

Proud to be a Cantonese speaker! Such an ancient language which keeps the heritage and culture well.

What I like most about this video is that it categorizes both mandarin and cantonese as dialects. People from China always try to undermine the importance and value of cantonese by saying that it is a DIALECT, while mandarin is actually also a dialect.

Cantonese is my mother tongue. My ancestors are from Canton, China which is the home of the Cantonese language. They emigrated to Malaysia in the early 19th century. Hence Cantonese is widely spoken in big cities of Malaysia like KL, Ipoh & Kuantan besides other Chinese dialects like Hakka, Teochew & Hokkien. I'm proud to be a Cantonese speaker.

I am 3rd generation Taishanese (新宁)born and raised in Malaysia. Taishanese might sounds too minority ,my grandparents didn’t taught me how to speak. instead we speak Cantonese. It’s really sounds similar and it’s much more easier to communicate with others Chinese communities. We also influenced by Hong Kong TV show and pop culture for a few decades .That’s why Kuala Lumpur ,Ipoh and some townships are so familiar to Cantonese-speaker , no language barrier at all.😂

Somebody protect this teacher at all cost for her efforts to protect and preserve Cantonese. As a Chinese who is not fluent in Mandarin, one can't imagine the amount of subtle disdain and snark I get from Mandarin-speaking Chinese

Cantonese, Wu, and other southern Chinese languages have existed for longer than Mandarin, which evolved from the Middle Chinese spoken north of the Yangtze River during the Song Dynasty. Most of the "sound readings" (音読/音訓) used for Chinese characters in Japanese and Korean are based on Cantonese or other southern Chinese readings, with only some based on Mandarin.

The first time I travelled to China I went through Hong Kong. I was proud to have learned Mandarin. I remember the young guy at the travel company preferred to speak English than Mandarin. I was impressed with his pride in speaking Cantonese. It was a chance for me to understand culture on the ground is more important than culture in books. You need to listen to people.

0:48 you quote 17th century for Putonghua and 220AD for Cantonese. That is almost 1500 years, not a century and a half (150 years).

My parents were from Hong Kong, and they speak Hong Kong Cantonese, and taught it to me, despite me having been born and raised in Canada. It is a highly distinct form of Cantonese different than even the other forms of Cantonese spoken in Canton Province, due to the influence of British English. Until the 1990's many overseas Chinese communities, were vastly Cantonese speakers from Hong Kong, bringing the language to the international world and made its impact in pop culture of the age, thanks to the emergence of Chinese movie icons like Bruce Lee. Its also important to know, that the way Cantonese in Hong Kong works, there are actually two forms, written and spoken. For example on news broadcasts, they use a very formalistic way of speaking, while in day to day conversation like shopping or talking to friends, it is a much more casual type of language. In overseas Chinese communities like Vancouver, there is a very strong connection between Cantonese speakers, even if you do not know the person, but a sense of comradery between them, like they're from a bigger Hong Kong family. When I go to Hong Kong, many locals are surprised at my Cantonese proficiency in conversation, despite my brain being hardwired to English pretty much since a child, and they take it as a great compliment that I respect their language. Cantonese and Hong Kongers go together like Dim Sum and Milk Tea.

I miss Cantonese drama. I learned so much about life from them. And I find their language are easier to listen to ❤.

I don't speak Cantonese ( Vietnamese) ,but I do work for a certain large HK sauce company in the US branch. Funnily, during random office talk I can figure out some Cantonese because it more similar to Vietnamese than Mandarin. Y'all should do a video on Vietnamese-Cantonese!