I've been silently lamenting the slow demise of Cantonese. I fight it in vain; feebly attempt to rescue it; and witness some doing the same.

But when a wave of decline is that slow, its death will be certain. I'm just a curmudgeon not getting with the program.

I suspect the anglosphere doesn't get to experience the death of a language. The closest thing is an accent not being spoken anymore. And I'm guessing the Indian world is also experiencing the same with dialects being overtaken by mainstream ones.

Which leads me to think about why and how a language wins and gains usage. It's absolutely not because a given language is superior in features or even embeds rich stories and anecdotes.

Traction is definitely not achieved through top down social engineering like a language governing body. People speak what they want to speak not matter how much they fear the government.

Here's how I think a language wins: when it's used by the rich. Not the rich handful but the top 20% (roughly) of society.

It's not because these are the role models of the bottom 80%. Far from it, they may not even interact at all. The answer is in media.

Media chooses the language

See, the rest of them needs to consume media in some language. Media needs to chase after money in order to sustain. Even if a piece of cultural product is made to appeal to the masses, they are compelled to collect revenue from people with purchasing power.

The rich gets more cultural product created to appeal to them, in the language that they understand. These media content proceeds to strengthen the reach of that language, fed to the rest of society who wouldn't have consumed them otherwise. A virtuous cycle is in place.

Above a certain point of traction it makes no sense to produce any cultural product in the non-mainstream language anymore, cementing its win.

The sheer amount of products of a given language in no way speaks of their quality. But in the midst of volume allows for breakthrough works of classics to take shape.

Cantonese vs Mandarin

Within this framework, the reason Cantonese is losing ground to Mandarin becomes simple: Mandarin speakers have superior buying power.

There existed a time when Chinese movies were only done in Mandarin. And then they started making Cantonese ones.

That was a direct reflection of the buying power of Hong Kong Cantonese speakers. Until it isn't true anymore, and even Stephen Chow doesn't make movies in Cantonese now.

Any forceful effort to reverse this trend is simply cringe. The only real way is to get the population rich again.

Malaysia's language landscape

This points to why Malaysia's base level language stack is so difficult to resolve.

In order to be on the same page, people need to be using the same language. Officially that's Malay, in practice that's largely a joke.

The buying power is with the Chinese. Unlike their parents, these folks can speak nothing but Mandarin.

Everybody could've compromised and use English but apparently that's too uncool.

Counter points

Be that as it may, I can think of two counter cases. Chinese are rich in Indonesia but even they don't speak Chinese. The history behind this is complicated.

Another is the Manchus in China during Qing dynasty when they were the ruling class. What I heard was that Beijing Mandarin makes the r-sound because folks back then tried to mimic the Manchu accent for status. There was no mass media then so my equation doesn't apply there.

How programming languages gain traction is quite different from how human langauges do. But how they do not are rather similar.

The features of a language don't get to determine its traction. Maybe that's why people tend not to think of langauges as technologies even when it's the most fundamental of technologies.

It's the features though that would come to affect culture in the long run. The tool end up shaping the users, invariably.