Cantonese under threat in Vancouver

In 1957, Jim Wong Chu - then nine years old - was sent from Vancouver to Hong Kong. When he returned to Canada four years later, speaking what he called "Hongkongese", Wong says he failed to connect.

"I tried to speak to people on the street and they ignored me," he says. "There was a chauvinism about Cantonese and everyone else was speaking their village dialect [such as Taishanese or Hakka]. So for 10 years, I didn't speak any Cantonese."

It was only when the next wave of Hong Kong migrants began arriving in Vancouver, in the 1970s, that Wong felt he could return to the language.

As these Cantonese-speaking immigrants opened businesses, shopped and made Vancouver's Chinatown a destination, Wong noticed a shift in the kinds of foods served in restaurants and, more importantly, the language spoken on the street.

Last month, an exhibition titled "Transgression/Cantosphere" was held at a Chinatown art gallery to discuss the history - and future - of Cantonese in Vancouver. Organised by linguist Zoe Wai-Man Lam and a group of artists and academics, the exhibition saw Cantonese words projected onto a wall, then scrambled to make phrases such as "I want genuine universal suffrage."