Of abandoning mother tongues and shame

Now, a caveat before I go on. There’s a common narrative on left-leaning US-dominated social media that there’s a concerted effort by Beijing to stamp out native languages. This interpretation is false and propaganda, and this writer is not in the mood to educate or argue with these believers right now, and as I don’t want this thread to be hijacked by an agenda, I’ll be moderating the comments. This will be my only attempt at educating people on the subject: Even in Malaysia, Chinese dialects are fading, being replaced by Mandarin. There’s no concerted effort by the Malaysian government to stamp out Chinese dialects. This is all due to the power of peer and family pressure. Self-inflicted, almost. Kids feel pressured to adopt the perceived “elite language” at school or even at home. And if parents do not make a concerted effort to educate their children in the native tongue, it’ll fade. It happened in my family, with my siblings being total bananas, preferring to communicate most of…