The Communist Party has destroyed the greatest aspect of Chinese culture - how many people in PRC today can speak their real mother tongue?
My shift supervisor (couple of years back) was from Fukien Province, can't utter a single word of Hokkien. I presume the other regional languages are no longer spoken except by a few very old folks.
One thing good though is a lot of young PRC can speak English better than Singaporeans.
Cheers!
Sorry to pour cold water on your fiery post.
You presume wrong.
There are more than 20 dialects in the province of Fu Jien (Hokkien). There is no such dialect/language as 'Hokkien' in China.
What most people are familiar with is
Min Nan Hua, which is what the Taiwanese, Singaporeans and Malaysians speak.
We broadly termed it as 'Hokkien' which is wrong. It is Min Nan Hua. There is also Min Bei Hua and many other dialects being spoken.
Almost everyone in China speak their own dialect amongst each other, except those in the North - Dong Bei, Beijing etc whereby
their dialect is mandarin or putonghua (common language).
For your information, there are more than 100 million people residing in Sichuan. If you go there, you will discover that the people will speak Sichuan Hua mostly.
Out of courtesy to outsiders, they will switch to mandarin/putonghua. Otherwise, they prefer to speak their native tongue.
If you go to places like Shenzhen in Guangdong, almost everyone is an outsider. The people in Shenzhen are from all over China.
Thus, you will hear mandarin being spoken mostly. Maybe, that is what gave you the impression that local dialects are being exterminated.
This is very very far from true.
