The rationale seems to be that "Ebil CCP wants to censor anti-gov't protestors while at the same time, homogenizing their national identity"
If anyone close to China can confirm or debunk it, it'd be good
On the other hand, I'm skeptical of this idea
I'm pretty sure Cantonese is still living as the lingua franca of 85 million people out of 1,500 million Chinese people worldwide.), which makes it over 5% of the population's native tongue able to speak it, mostly in the region itself, though I suppose 60 million of them might be outside China
Meanwhile, languages like Occitan in France and Celtic languages of Britain and Ireland are little to match like that, let alone fucking United States of America, with its Native American languages
In fact here's an example of this sort of shit...
I still wonder why...
I don't speak Chinese but i like to think i have some common sense. I see that this video is over a year old. I see that all articles about this same topic are from 2022 and all seem to be copies of an article in Radio Free Asia (massive red flag!). I see that Douyin is still being used in China, including in the Cantonese speaking Guangdong province. From that i can only conclude that Cantonese was not banned and this was just sensationalist clickbait.
Sorry, sometimes, I just get emotionally winded up with things like this...