Richmond's Chinese speakers navigate multiple dialects within one community

For many Chinese speakers in Richmond, a casual conversation with another Chinese person can feel like encountering a foreign language entirely. The reason: what outsiders call "Chinese" is actually an umbrella term for dozens of distinct languages and dialects, and Richmond's Chinese community spans nearly all of them.

Jojo Dong, a Kwantlen Polytechnic University student who grew up in Richmond, learned Taishanese first from her grandparents who immigrated from Taishan county in Guangdong province. She later picked up Cantonese from her mother, who grew up in Guangzhou, and studied Mandarin at language schools in Richmond and Vancouver starting at age three. But when someone speaks pure Hakka to her — another dialect from her family's home province — she cannot understand anything. "As a Taishanese person, I can only understand the tiniest bits," she said.

According to the 2021 census, 92,930 of Richmond's roughly 209,000 residents speak Chinese languages. Cantonese — known as Yue in linguistic terms — is the most common with 44,985 speakers, followed closely by 44,060 Richmond residents who speak Mandarin. The census also noted that Hakka, Min Dong, Wu (Shanghainese), and Min Nan — which includes Chaochow, Teochow, Fukien and Taiwanese — are spoken in the community, though many dialects not counted separately in the census remain present.

Dr. Zoe Lam, a lecturer in Cantonese language and culture at the University of British Columbia, explained that in the linguistic sense, Chinese is an "umbrella term" for all Sinitic languages. These are considered different languages rather than dialects because of their significant differences in sentence structure, vocabulary, and pronunciation. According to Ethnologue, China has a population of about 1.4 billion and more than 280 living languages, though Mandarin is the most widely spoken with more than 1.1 billion speakers — about 80 per cent of China's population.

Lam cited a common saying: "Language is a dialect with an army and a navy," suggesting political and social power can impact whether a variation is recognized as a language or a dialect. Even the names languages carry have political overtones — "Mandarin" is called "Guoyu" in Taiwan but "Putonghua" in mainland China to be "politically correct." The word "Chinese" itself carries different meanings depending on who uses it: when Taiwanese people ask if you "speak Chinese," they are asking whether you speak Mandarin, but in Hong Kong, the same question typically means whether you speak Cantonese.

Ronald Zhang, a Cantonese speaker born in Guangdong province who has lived in Richmond for 13 years, said he encounters a wide variety of Chinese dialects in the community, reflecting Richmond's position as a multi-dialect Chinese hub within Canada.