below_freezing
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this article claims about half of the population speaks mandarin..... can any one tall what the other half of population speaks??
The article is bullshitting again and counting Mandarin speakers as "Beijing standard" probably.
Mandarin Chinese - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Look at the map. Mandarin covers almost the whole map of China. The different versions are just "sounding" different but with different grammar; they are not dialects the way Cantonese and Shanghainese are, but why should 886 million people accomodate less than 1 million? If you add in dialects significantly influenced by Mandarin such as Xiang and Gan, then there are over 1 billion speakers.
Do you know how many people living in Shanghai right now, lived there 20 years ago? Maybe 5%. In Guangzhou, a city of 10 million, there are about 300,000 (3%) native Cantonese. Why should the lives of 95-97% of the residents be made more inconvenient by forcing them to learn non-Mandarin?
And what's even funnier is how the girl that claims to want to protect her "cultural identity" will protest to "protect" Cantonese, but has the English name Michelle.