Cantonese KMT: Linguistic AH

[Ming777]

When the Republic of China was founded in 1912, the government had debated which dialect of Chinese to adopt as the official Language. In the end, it was decided to continue the use Mandarin. But they nearly decided to adopt Cantonese, common in Southern China, along with Macau and Hong Kong. As well, it was the most used dialect of Chinese expatriates around the world.

What if Cantonese was adopted instead? Perhaps is the Chinese civil war still played out, the fighting between the KMT and CPC may have also been over Linguistics alongside ideology.

 

[LeX]

I forget the exact reasoning but I've read that this is basically the Chinese version of the "German almost became the official language of America" myth; i.e. it never really happened that way.

IMO any contender for centralized modern Chinese government is going to institute some form of Mandarin as the national language. By the 1900s, Mandarin dialects are already dominant in north, NE, NW, central, and SW China. The six other major languages are large, but none of them cover more than a province or two, or are prestigious enough to trump Mandarin.

An interesting possibility would be the federalization or outright Balkanization of China with a PoD in the 1920s or earlier. No strong KMT or CCP, but lots of regional political movements, of course with local languages and dialects being given official or semi-official status. China could look structurally more like India or even Europe.

 

[Linbot]

Interestingly, Chiang Kai-Shek himself was a Wu speaker, and many warlords that interacted with the KMT were very much tied to their provinces. Chen Jiongming, the warlord of Guangdong in the early 1920s, had a plan to create the “United States of China”, which might have involved the sanction of local dialects.