This hits hard so I’m just gonna write down my rant: 1. A cultural genocide is happening. As a 吴语 speaker I can say for certain that less than 20% of people under 20 can still speak it. A generation ago it was close to 100%. It’ll be in museum in another generation or two.(1/n) https://twitter.com/tanchunkiet/status/1314004955330539520

2. Even Mandarin itself is at stake for losing its diversity. Marginally Mandarin languages such as 江淮官话 is quickly dying. And many others are descending from language/dialect to accents, losing native expressions and grammar to become an accent of Standard Mandarin (2/n)

3. The role of propaganda is huge. When I was a kid, every school was filled with slogans such as 说普通话，做文明人, implying that our native language is barbaric. Even my grandparents were afraid of me not doing well in school to the point that they just speak Mandarin to me.

4. But if I have to pick one reason for the dying of sinitic languages, it is actually the industrialisation and Internet. Most sinitic languages are extremely diverse, never standardised with no official scripts. That makes them very vulnerable to modern times.

5. For example, within 吴语 itself, even the supposedly mutually intelligible dialect group of 太湖吴 is actually not. I had lots of experiences of Shanghainese failing to understand me. We can take some time and try to digest each other’s dialect, but mandarin is always easier.

6. Putting it to a larger scale, our consumption of information relies on standardised formats to be printed, typed out, and to be read. Without linguistic training it’s next to impossible to do that in anything other than standard Mandarin (recently also Cantonese maybe).

7. That lack of exposure to our native languages outside daily chitchat builds the cultural context into us, that our language is only suitable for very shallow words, incapable of conveying anything that carries subtlety and depth.

8. And that is the true reason people actually put up with the propaganda. Through various means the industrialised world does grant superiority to standard languages. “The West” is the perfect example of the lack of linguistic diversity for developed, modern societies.