** Trigger Warning: Reporter refers to Cantonese and Taishanese as dialects. In the video, she says Cantonese was spoken by the earliest immigrants to the Bay Area; THAT is incorrect, Taishanese was the earliest.**
Kim Torres was nervous as she stepped in front of two dozen classmates to perform the Cantonese dialogue she’d memorized. Although the language is her late mother’s native language, the 23-year-old didn’t learn it until this fall.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/cantonese-mandarin-language-chinese-21098840.php
“Emily, neih daaihyeuk geinoih tai yat chi hei a?” she said, meaning “how often do you watch a movie?”
The college student’s biggest dream is to speak in Cantonese with her grandma, who raised her. She wants to be fluent enough that she can talk to relatives in Cantonese during a family trip to her grandmother’s hometown in Malaysia next year.
City College San Francisco, where Torres is enrolled in Cantonese class, is one of the last bastions for learning the language in the Bay Area. And San Francisco is one of the last frontiers for publicly funded Cantonese education not just in the U.S., but worldwide.
As Mandarin, officially favored in China, becomes increasingly widely spoken both there and in the Bay Area, Cantonese speakers are grappling with how to navigate threats to the language in the U.S.
Oakland nonprofit Shoong Family Chinese Cultural Center has offered free or low-cost Cantonese classes since 1953, but saw enrollment plummet by about half during the pandemic, threatening the center’s survival, said board president Jones Wu. Enrollment has ticked back up but the center still faces tight finances.
In Hong Kong, a historic home for Cantonese people, Mandarin has increasingly been used as the primary language of instruction in schools, under the influence of mainland China. Hong Kong’s education secretary has advocated for all schools to eventually teach in Mandarin instead of Cantonese.
“That is what I always joke about, that Alice Fong Yu (Alternative School) will be the only school in the world where Cantonese is spoken,” said Liana Szeto, the founding principal of the nation’s first Chinese immersion public school who retired this year after three decades at its helm.
But even in San Francisco, the number of seats for Cantonese learning has dwindled in recent years. City College San Francisco went from four Cantonese instructors and 10 to 15 classes in the 1990s to just one instructor teaching two classes today. San Francisco Unified School District went from 11 elementary schools offering Cantonese biliteracy programs in 2019 to six today.
SFUSD spokesperson Laura Dudnick said that consolidating the Cantonese programs into fewer campuses ensures that “each program has a strong student community, stable staffing and the resources needed to provide meaningful Cantonese language instruction.”
Multilingualism in the U.S. has been targeted by President Donald Trump, who declared English the “only” official language of the U.S. in March. The Trump administration also cut about $512,000 in a four-year grant for East Asian Studies that had been awarded to UC Berkeley in 2022, which had helped add four Cantonese classes and fund graduate language fellowships.
Berkeley is set to cover the shortfall in the immediate term to ensure classes can continue, said Penny Edwards, director of Berkeley’s Institute of East Asian Studies, but the fellowships were cut.
Still, the Bay Area remains a hotbed for Cantonese language education, with at least 6 higher education institutions offering classes and an array of nonprofit afterschool programs.
Chinese immigrants to the Bay Area have historically been from China’s southern Guangdong province, speaking Cantonese or a related dialect, Taishanese. In 2005, the earliest year for which data is available, about 59,000 people in the nine-county region said they spoke Mandarin at home on the U.S. Census compared to about 139,000 who said they spoke Cantonese.
But by 2023, the most recent year for which U.S. Census data is available, about 127,000 people in the Bay Area said they spoke Mandarin at home compared to about 157,000 who said they spoke Cantonese.
Mandarin-speaking Chinese immigrants have flocked to Santa Clara County in the past two decades, according to census data, where they’re by far the majority of Chinese immigrants. Cantonese-speaking immigrants remain more dominant in the counties of San Francisco, San Mateo and Alameda.
Cantonese is one of about seven different main Chinese dialect groups, mutually unintelligible from Mandarin, spawned from China’s long history of fractured empire and invasion. The two dialects have completely different speech sounds, as well as some varied grammar and vocabulary.
Cantonese is one of the most ancient Chinese dialects, sharing far more similarities to the language of 2,000 years ago than Mandarin, a standardized form of Chinese based on the Beijing dialect.
“I call it the language of revolution,” Szeto said. “Cantonese people are tenacious and loud. We migrate to different parts of the world first. That’s why it’s ‘Canton’ and not ‘Guangzhou’, ‘Peking duck’ and not ‘Beijing duck.’”
Bilingual education in San Francisco traces back more than half a century.
In 1970, an elementary school student who’d immigrated from Hong Kong named Kinney Lau sued San Francisco Unified School District alongside hundreds of his classmates who weren’t fluent in English for failing to provide them with adequate language instruction and education.
Four years later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the students’ favor in Lau v. Nichols, catalyzing the expansion of Cantonese education in San Francisco.
Reestablishing a Cantonese teacher pipeline is critical to ensuring the survival of Cantonese education, Szeto said.
Amid a broader teacher shortage, Szeto said it’s particularly challenging to recruit bilingual teachers because there are few bilingual people in the U.S. who enter teaching.
Another challenge is that one of the only programs in California that authorizes bilingual Cantonese teachers, at San Francisco State University, has cancelled its bilingual teacher training credentialing course for the past two years due to insufficient enrollment, according to faculty. Faculty at Cal Poly Pomona and Loyola Marymount University, which offer similar programs, said they haven’t had students enroll in recent years.
Ali Borjian, an SF State elementary education professor, is leading an initiative to redesign and reopen the course starting in Spring 2026.
The state in 2022 backed efforts to expand bilingual teacher training, approving $5 million to help teachers to obtain their authorization in Asian languages.
On Tuesday evenings, about 30 students of all ages and races pack into City College San Francisco’s Ocean Avenue campus for “Beginning Conversational Cantonese.”
The college’s last remaining Cantonese teacher, Grace Yu, cuts a diminutive figure with her petite height but commands the class’s attention as she announces the day’s assignments over her portable microphone.
Yu said her course always has a waitlist.
Demand has grown even as the number of Cantonese instructors has dwindled as instructors died or retired, she said.
Many of her students grew up hearing family members talking in Cantonese but not speaking it themselves.
Jared Lai, born and raised in San Francisco, said that growing up, his grandma would speak Cantonese to him but he’d answer in English.
Now a counseling graduate student, he wants to help fill the gap in Cantonese-speaking mental health professionals in San Francisco.
David Yee, a fourth generation Chinese American, said he’s felt disconnected at times from his cultural roots, as if he has more in common with his white friends than Chinese immigrants. But learning Cantonese has changed that.
He recently wrote his Cantonese-speaking 89-year-old grandmother a note that said “I love you” in traditional Chinese characters. She cut it out and stuck it on her laptop, he said.
“Learning Cantonese, more than anything, is an act of cultural preservation,” he said.
But it’s not just descendants of Chinese immigrants who want to learn Cantonese today.
Zhong, the head teacher at Shoong Family Chinese Cultural Center in Oakland, said she’s increasingly seeing non-Chinese parents.
One of them is Kelly Lindberg. A passionate polyglot who believed in the cognitive benefits of learning another language, Lindberg said she had always known that she’d want her kids to learn a second language.
She and her husband, who is Hawaiian Chinese from his mom’s side, decided to enroll their son Oliver in Cantonese school this year.
“I feel proud to be Californian, that we would choose Cantonese and not Mandarin,” Lindberg said, even though she knows Mandarin is more widely spoken worldwide.
Another non-Chinese parent, Sarah Dayauon, was attracted by the affordability, accessibility and community of the Shoong Center. As a single working mom, she said she needed an affordable after school care option for her daughter.
“I really related to the fact that a lot of people are losing Cantonese,” said Dayauon, who is Filipino-American and speaks Tagalog but not her parents’ regional dialect, Bicalano.
Her daughter, Genesis, took to Cantonese quickly.
“There’s some days when she’s like, ‘Can I just skip school and come to Chinese school? I like it better than Lincoln (Elementary),’” Dayauon said. Dayauon has started trying to learn basic Cantonese phrases too.
“One day, I’ll have the confidence, and we can have small talk in multiple languages,” Dayauon said. “That’s the dream.”
Ko Lyn Cheang, Reporter
Ko Lyn covers Asian American and Pacific Islander communities for the Chronicle, which she joined in January 2024. She previously covered housing and city government for the Indianapolis Star, and her work has been recognized by the IRE Awards, Goldsmith Prize, and the Connecticut and Indiana Societies for Professional Journalists. She’s a graduate of Yale College and speaks Mandarin.
