10 most difficult dialects

[Lu]

It appears to me that Cantonese is a 'stronger' fangyan than most: it has songs, movies, other culture, entire tv channels, and having Hong Kong as a hub means it's used in all kinds of communications, high level to low level. Not to mention that it has a writing system that a significant proportion of the speakers can actually use. Most fangyan don't have any of those things. If someone wanted to learn Cantonese or improve their Cantonese, there would be all kinds of ways to do so. Speakers of Wenzhounese abroad would mostly only have their extended family to talk to.

[skylee]

I was a bit surprised when I heard Cantonese spoken on CCTV yesterday. Those were members of the public in the Guangdong area asked to express therir views on the new national law that imposes 20% tax on some real estate transactions. Not sure if it indicated relaxed control. But earlier on in that 舌尖上的中國 ethnic koreans also spoke in their mother tongue in the programme.

[Kobo-Daishi]

Skylee wrote:

I was a bit surprised when I heard Cantonese spoken on CCTV yesterday. Those were members of the public in the Guangdong area asked to express therir views on the new national law that imposes 20% tax on some real estate transactions. Not sure if it indicated relaxed control. But earlier on in that 舌尖上的中國 ethnic koreans also spoke in their mother tongue in the programme.

Here is a page from The Korean Language put out by the Cambridge University Press as part of their Cambridge Language Surveys series.

China has always been quite good as regards to the languages of her minorities. There are tons of books published in Tibetan, Uighur, Korean, Zhuang, etc.

They even had on China Radio International a few years back many Han Chinese dialect broadcasts on their web site. Cantonese, Hakka, Minnan, etc. in addition to the minority languages.

Now, there aren't anymore on CRI and the old links appear to all be dead now.

I think it was because of Taiwan and the independence movement when President Chen was in office. The Taiwan independence movement was closely aligned with the Minnan speakers (and the Presbyterian Church), so, I think it spooked the Chinese government so they did away with the dialects.

Maybe not did away with actually, but, they certainly don't promote them anymore. I don't think they actively supress people from using them. Maybe just suggest they use the standard Mandarin if possible.

Ditto with the minority languages. Especially with what's happening in Tibet with their independence movement and with the Uighurs.

Kobo.

[XiongNu]

Except some of them are considered different languages and not simply different dialects.