omg i totally hear you. well some what. my scenario's a bit different from yours. there were these two girls who kept giving me a hard time about where my family's from - one was Mandarin and the other was Cantonese too (but from HK)! they would both tell me that my family is from Hong Kong and not anywhere in China because everyone in China speaks Mandarin. psht, um, i think i know my family history better than you. i'd tell them my family's from Guangzhou, and they'd just keep saying EVERYONE in China spoke Mandarin no matter WHAT part of the country they were from. uh, helloooo, Guangzhou is Canton. notice how similar CANTON and CANTONESE are? a lot of ppl think my family's from HK instead of Mainland China too because we look 'clean'. that makes me so mad.
hahaha i usually speak mando to them if they dont understand cantonese but most of the time they end up laughin~ id never really met anyone that says cantonese isnt real chinese O_O i would be piss too ~
i have never encountered a situation like that before but i would laugh at such a incompetent comment and just ignore this person who obviously havent done her or his homework about chinese history.
North and South China have never really seen eye to eye for a long time. The people who speaks Mandarin considers the Cantonese speakers outsiders and the Cantonese speakers outsiders...this have been going for centuries. i find it very annoying whenever the Mandarin speakers comment that Cantonese speakers are "lesser Chinese" because we don't speak the offical language of China. there's this white guy in my class, he's really into Chinese culture and history...but he always comments that i'm inferior to Northern Chinese because i speak Cantonese and i am from the south...it really pisses me off that a white dude is telling me that i'm not Chinese because of my language...anyways what can we do really when the capital of China is in Beijing and all the officials are corrupted...
YEah..Its annoying.Canto is part of chinese..thing that pisses me off is the taiwan people think they are one country.Acting as if they're not chinese.-angry But we cant do nothin about it besides ignoring them-shrug
yeah..i totally hate it when people who speak mando act like canto isnt chinese. like this italian guy in my skoo had the nerve to tell me that im not speaking chinese. HELLO?! i think i know what's chinese and what's not, besides, he's not even chinese. so stupid...
Language is just a medium to interact and to get messages across. So as long as we are Chinese, it doesnt really matter whether they say we are Chinese or not. This just shows how silly they are and downgrade their own ethnic.
hahaha...then there's Taiwanese but we shouldn't get into that or we may draw ourselves into a political fiasco. But ya it surely pisses me off when people say they're Shanghainese or what not. If the person is part of a province in "China" then he's a Chinaman hands down no argument.
I think it's a little simplistic and glib to boil down an entire culture into just a language. I think when many posters here refer to mando vs canto speakers, they are also subconsciously referring to the subculture behind the people who speak each respective language. So no, I don't think it's silly for people to talk about the subgroups of Chinese by referring to them based on the language they speak.
First off, your statement is irrelevent if you don't back it up with a reason; just blurting out something like that doesn't give it much substance. And if they are not Chinese, then what are they?
How's that different than Americans subdividing themselves by state, and identifying himself as "Californian," or "Texan," or a "New Yorker?" Just because someone lives in a country doesn't mean they are prohibited from subdividing themselves into a smaller unit; especially if there are major cultural differences between those subunits.
First of all, my statement is not irrelevant. Secondly, you don't need facts to back it up, it's common sense - if you're Chinese. There is no such thing as "Mandarin people" or "Cantonese people." They are not ethnic groups. I find it laughable to see some people here referring to the whole of mainland China as "mando." In case you didn't know already, there is another dialect group with more speakers than Cantonese, and that being the dialect used in areas surrounding Shanghai (e.g. Zhejiang/Jiangsu provinces, etc.). As well, there is a large number speakers of Min/Min Nan hua in Fujian and Taiwan provinces. The reason why some "Mandarin" speakers - as you put it - do not like Cantonese is because of it's association of British colonialism (HK, Canton, etc.), and the fact that much of Chinese stereotypes in the U.S. originates from Chinese settlers from Guangdong province in the 19th century.
