A friend who has settled in Vancouver, Canada, was chatting recently and mentioned a very interesting detail: in his Chinese circle, except for the elderly, almost no one communicates in Cantonese anymore, and they have switched to Mandarin.

So, is Cantonese still the most powerful Chinese dialect overseas?

How Cantonese went global In the past, Cantonese was indeed the most powerful dialect among overseas Chinese groups. This depended on two points: one is that the Cantonese people are the largest among overseas Chinese.

Before 1949, overseas immigrants mainly came from Fujian and Guangdong provinces. Geographically speaking, the tendency of overseas immigrants in these two provinces is also very easy to understand.

Fujian and Guangdong are located on the southeast coast, with many mountains and little land. The traditional Chinese farming means of livelihood have limited space in Fujian and Guangdong.

However, the two provinces face the ocean directly, and can communicate with Southeast Asia, India, and even Africa through the monsoon. Therefore, Fujian and Guangdong have a tradition of overseas trade throughout the ages. Guangzhou and Quanzhou were great ports in the East more than a thousand years ago.

The vision of the Fujian and Cantonese people has never been limited to the one-third of an acre of land in front of them.

When local hungry people are desperate, it is a natural choice to go overseas and break out of a new world.

During the Republic of China, the Central Radio Station of the National Government specially set up so-called Xiamen dialect and Cantonese dialect programs as the standard pronunciation of Hokkien and Cantonese, broadcasting to overseas Chinese.

How Mandarin inherited the status of Cantonese. Today, Cantonese is indeed no longer the most powerful dialect among overseas Chinese. Its status overseas is gradually being replaced by Mandarin. This also depends on two points.

One of them is that after the reform and opening up, especially after the new century, the main source of my country's overseas immigrants has changed.

Take New York in the United States as an example. In the past few decades of the last century, most Chinese immigrants to the United States came from southern provinces.

But now, more and more immigrants are coming from the north, and a large part of them have settled in Flushing, a suburb of New York.

Today, Flushing has surpassed New York's Chinatown, which is dominated by Cantonese, and has become the largest Chinese community in New York.

In Flushing, you can almost seamlessly connect with popular domestic consumption places: milk tea shops, hot pot restaurants, nightclubs... In contrast, the "Dacheng Holy Confucius Statue" is placed, huddled in Chinatown in Lower Manhattan.

It already looks like a historical relic.

On the other hand, the layoff wave in the 1990s caused a large number of residents in the north, where state-owned enterprises were the main industry, to be laid off. With nowhere to make a living, they had no choice but to take a chance and work overseas.

At this time, overseas Chinese, from the top to the bottom, have been shuffled into a group that speaks Mandarin.

There is no need to lose sight of it. Cantonese may no longer stand at the center of the stage of overseas Chinese life, but its shadow is still cast long on the curtain behind the stage, and even on people who were originally outside the Chinese life.

, in the auditorium belonging to foreigners.

Cantonese, like pandas and Kung Fu, has become an almost unconscious and indispensable element in foreign imaginations and pictures of China.