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Bernice Chan

When the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada, launched its Cantonese language programme in 2015, it was geared towards heritage speakers – second- or third-generation Chinese-Canadians who wanted to learn how to speak to their parents and grandparents in their mother tongue.
By the following year, lecturer Raymond Pai, the director of the programme, observed that a third of the students were native Mandarin speakers.
“Vancouver is linguistically diverse, and many students quickly recognise that Cantonese carries significant cultural, social and even professional value,” he says in an email.
“What we did not fully anticipate was the scale of that interest. Over time, the classroom became a space not only for heritage language maintenance, but also for cross-regional Chinese linguistic engagement.”
There are around 950 students enrolled in Cantonese courses for the 2025-26 academic year, and 85 per cent of them are native Mandarin speakers. As a result, Pai has hired three more part-time instructors to teach the Mandarin speakers. Meanwhile, there is only one class of heritage speakers.

Dr Zoe Lam Wai-man, who began helping Pai teach Mandarin speakers in 2018, says a lot of her students were born and raised in Shenzhen. Shenzhen is located in China’s mainly Cantonese-speaking Guangdong province but is a new city that grew rapidly in the 1980s and where Mandarin is the predominant language. Because the millions of people who flocked to the city over the last four decades came from different parts of China, all speaking different dialects, Mandarin became the lingua franca.
“I find it super interesting because a lot of my students were born and raised in Shenzhen, but their parents are not Cantonese as they come from another province in China, so they speak Mandarin at home,” Lam explains.
“They spent 17 years [growing up] in Shenzhen in Guangdong province, but they cannot speak a word of Cantonese. So it’s interesting that they learn [it] in Canada.”
This includes students like Ella Dong Xintong, who was born in Hong Kong and raised across the mainland China border in Shenzhen. She speaks Mandarin at home, as her father is from Xian and her mother was born in Henan but grew up in Xinjiang.
“Since I was born in Hong Kong, [hold] a Hong Kong passport and a Hong Kong identity card, I am supposed to speak Cantonese,” Dong, 20, says. “I also grew up in Shenzhen, which is in Guangdong. Every time people meet me, they say, ‘Oh, then you mostly speak Cantonese?’ I reply, ‘Unfortunately, I don’t.’
She explains that she can speak neither of the regional dialects spoken by her parents, nor can she speak English as well as her brother.
“It’s culture that makes me want to learn Cantonese, so I can belong to a group. I feel like I need to learn [Cantonese].”

When it comes to studying Cantonese, there is a big difference between heritage learners and Mandarin speakers, Lam says.
“Heritage speakers already speak conversational Cantonese. They learn it from their family, so their pronunciation is really good because they were exposed to Cantonese at a young age. Their listening and speaking are very good, but they don’t know how to read [Chinese characters],” she says.
“Mandarin speakers are the opposite. They can read Chinese very well, but they cannot understand spoken Cantonese, they cannot speak Cantonese, so we put them in different streams.”
Mandarin speakers need to “unlearn their Mandarin because the expressions are so different”, Lam says.
“A lot of Mandarin speakers are affected by what they already know in Mandarin, and they may use sentence structures that are funny in Cantonese, because [they try to do a] direct translation from Mandarin, but no one speaks like that. So it’s more about learning the differences between Cantonese and Mandarin.”
Nevertheless, their eagerness to learn Cantonese is evident through their interest in the culture. Many cite Cantopop singers, watch Cantonese-speaking films, and enjoy food like dim sum and Hong Kong-style milk tea.

Michael Li Jiazheng, 22, a native of China’s Liaoning province, came to Vancouver when he was 13 years old. He did not think about learning Cantonese until he started studying economics at UBC, when his then girlfriend, who was taking the Cantonese course, told him about it. He joined it last spring.
“In the beginning it was hard because the words are the same, but Jyutping [a romanisation system for Cantonese] is harder for me. There are so many tones compared to Mandarin with four tones,” Li says.
The syllabus gives the students in the beginner class practical vocabulary, such as how to introduce themselves, how to bargain in a shop, how to order food – including slang for black coffee (zaai fei) – and what to say when visiting the doctor.
After a few classes, Li began practising his Cantonese with his Hong Kong friends.
“At the beginning, my pronunciation was really funny [to them] because that’s their first language; when I speak to them, they don’t even want to speak Cantonese to me, they speak Mandarin,” he says. “And I said, ‘We have to speak Cantonese because I’m taking this course. This way you can help me.’
“Even though it’s weird because I spoke Mandarin to them for like five, six years, even though it’s embarrassing, it’s a very good way to practice by speaking to my friends.”
Li’s course project was to make a video. He and his partner discussed Cantonese rap and wrote their own song, which Lam highly praised.


Dong tested her Cantonese during a trip to Hong Kong to renew her identity card. She plans to live and work in Hong Kong or Shenzhen after graduation.
“I feel more confident after I took this class, because I feel I know how to speak Cantonese way better than before,” she says.
In addition to classes, Pai and Lam invite notable Cantonese speakers to talk to their students. Past speakers include members of Hong Kong band The Hertz, comedian Vivek Mahbubani and actor Anthony Wong Chau-sang.
Lam says her main aim is to create a space for her students to socialise in Cantonese and to make it fun.
“I emphasise the social aspect of language learning in the classroom, because language is for communication. So I create scenarios, and invite the students to be creative and write a dialogue in Cantonese and have fun with that.”


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Originally targeting heritage speakers, the University of British Columbia’s language programme is proving more popular among another group


Originally targeting heritage speakers, the University of British Columbia’s language programme is proving more popular among another group.


Cantonese

Asian diaspora

Chinese overseas

Canada

Why Canadian university’s Cantonese language course is 85% Mandarin speakers

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Originally targeting heritage speakers, the University of British Columbia’s language programme is proving more popular among another group

Originally targeting heritage speakers, the University of British Columbia’s language programme is proving more popular among another group