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

“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 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.