part of the process

my father's side of the family used to speak hakka when my grandmother was still alive. i didn't understand a word of it. my mother's side of the family speak cantonese. i only understand bits and pieces of it.

all of my grandparents only speak dialect and a bit of mandarin (and english and malay for my grandfather). this means that we have quite a lot of trouble communicating, and so i am not particularly close to any of them.

i have a better relationship with my maternal grandparents than my paternal, which is in part due to both my paternal grandparents being dead, but unfortunately i seriously have never EVER had a proper conversation with any of them.

when we talk it's always the same things like how are you, have you eaten, etc. i have also never EVER taken the initiative to speak to them before, partly because i have no idea what to say and also i lack the linguistic ability to do so.

i think it's quite strange that my parents never really tried to teach myself or my siblings to speak in dialect, despite knowing that their parents speak nothing else. maybe they didn't think it was important or they thought we'd just pick it up along the way.

but as the story goes, this didn't happen so we're all handicapped in a sense. the only dialect we know is hokkien, and even so, only the words that are truly important like nahbei cheebye etc.

it has been said that dialects would disappear within a generation or two, and that it is quite sad for this to happen. i think that dialects will definitely disappear but it wouldn't be sad at all because they would be quite obsolete by then and it's just part of our evolution.

this evolution is expected to homogenise the human race into a group of brown-skinned, black-haired people who speak only one language. no one knows what that language will be, but i doubt it will be hakka or cantonese. hokkien stands a big chance though.