Quote
Simon Pettersson
This is a forum about Cantonese. It's natural thad we'd be worried about and discuss Cantonese. Whether or not other languages are more endangered is hardly relevant. And even if Cantonese doesn't risk going extinct, having its geographical and cultural spread lessened is saddening to those who love it.
Fair point, perhaps I didn't express myself as well as I'd hoped. Allow me to clarify my intentions:
In my opinion, a pan-Chinese campaign to "save non-Mandarin Chinese languages from Mandarin domination" would actually be more effective than a localised campaign to "save Cantonese from Mandarin domination". I probably would have made a similar statement in a Shanghainese forum, for example, with the same intent. I think this pan-Chinese approach would be more effective and meaningful because the non-Mandarin Chinese languages are stronger united against the common threat than divided. Not to put words into anyone's mouth, but many Cantonese advocates (especially from HK) seem to have an attitude of "well, I don't really care about other Chinese languages necessarily, since they do not involve me, but at least save Cantonese since I/we speak it!".
Of course, realistically we cannot and should not actively preserve the common usage of every language and dialect (it's simply impractical), but we can at least unite in solidarity around some of the big ones like Cantonese, Shanghainese, Taiwanese, and Hakka (for instance), since they have a significantly large number of native speakers. So how does supporting these other Chinese languages help the Cantonese cause? Quite simply, it encourages large masses of speakers to fight for the validation of their own non-Mandarin languages. That's a lot of people indeed!