oh good: an opportunity for me to rant about the lack of cantonese options in schools for expat kids.
i think we can all agree that, if you're living in hk for the forseeable future, cantonese is by far the most useful language to learn (yes, it's more difficult for an indo-european speaker to pick up than mandarin as an L2, but really you're comparing apples and oranges to a broom stick; any sino-tibetan language is going to be rough at first).
my beef is that there are so few cantonese opportunities in hk schools for expats' kids. my partner and i want our kids to have a cantonese-immersed education *and* we also want them to enjoy the same pedagogical standard of an international school. not happening. there are no international-type schools that teach in cantonese and no good cantonese-medium edb schools that don't treat kids like products on a factory line. please, someone challenge those sweeping statements; if it exists, i want to send my kids there!
as for being amused at keeping dying languages alive: languages are human-made. we're not talking about natural evolution; if a language is endangered, it's usually because of political (case in point: cantonese in guangdong) or economic (i.e. human-made) pressures. every language is of immense value. the welsh, basque, irish, nama, inuit, etc seem to understand this. when will hk?
oh, and while i'm ranting, i am tired to tears of hearing about how china will, at some nebulous point in the future, become so powerful that mandarin will become the pre-eminent language of the whole freakin' universe. the people who believe this either have a very poor grasp of geopolitics, neo-colonialism and just general history or they are 'singoists' who will say anything.
if you're conducting international-level business in china, it's neither cantonese nor mandarin that you need to know. at this moment, probably more mainlanders are learning english than westerners are learning mandarin (probably: i couldn't be arsed to wikipidia that). my point is, should the political climate change on the mainland, it will be very interesting to see how much staying power the common tongue - artificially imposed on a large portion of mainlanders - really has.
and! cantonese is not a dialect. it is a very different language from mandarin. the fact that they share a writing system counts for little if the writing system is logographic. even english could be written in kaishu, but that doesn't make them relatives by any stretch.