Organisers have called on supporters via Facebook to help protect their mother tongue, after hundreds protested in support of Cantonese in the city of Guangzhou last Sunday, defying government orders.

Many of the protesters were young people wearing T-shirts reading, "I love Guangzhou" written in Cantonese, while shouting "Protect Cantonese, Love Guangzhou" and singing popular Cantonese songs, the Global Times reported.

"I believe we can gather 100,000 people to stop China's evil act of promoting Mandarin and destroying Cantonese!!!" the organisers wrote on the event's Facebook page.

"Protect Chinese heritage. Against the extinction of our culture by dictators," a supporter wrote on the site.

Such instances of mainland protests spilling over into Hong Kong, a former British colony returned to China in 1997, are rare since China's 1989 Tiananmen crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators.

Sparking ire among Cantonese speakers, the People's Political Consultative Conference in Guangzhou wrote this month to the province's bureaucrats proposing that local TV stations broadcast their prime-time shows in Mandarin instead of Cantonese ahead of the Asian Games in November.

Adopting China's official language, also known as Putonghua, would promote unity, "forge a good language environment" and cater to non-Cantonese-speaking Chinese visitors at the huge sporting event, authorities were quoted as saying.

Su Zhijia, a deputy Party secretary of Guangzhou, was quoted as saying there were no plans to dilute Cantonese.

"The city government has never had such a plan to abandon or weaken Cantonese," he said, according to the state-run Global Times.

Guangzhou TV has responded by saying it would refuse to change its mix of Cantonese and Mandarin programming, The Yangcheng Evening News said last week.

But many Cantonese speakers still worry about the future of a language that is the mother tongue for the majority of people in Hong Kong, Macau and China's southern Guangdong province, and widely spoken in overseas Chinese communities.

Mainland China made Mandarin the country's official language in 1982, leading to bans on other dialects at many radio and television stations.

China has long been a patchwork of often mutually unintelligible dialects, but Mandarin -- which is based on the traditional dialect of Beijing -- became the lingua franca of the nation beginning with the Qing dynasty (1644-1911).

Mandarin's strength has increased since the 1949 Communist takeover as authorities sought to promote its use as a unifying force for the nation.

That has caused impatience in areas with their own strong language traditions, such as Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia -- and Guangdong.

TV stations in Guangdong, which has about 110 million people, are allowed to broadcast in Cantonese only because of the province's proximity to Hong Kong, according to the South China Morning Post.

By Tuesday noon, about 150 visitors to the Facebook protest page said they would join the pro-Cantonese rally and some Guangzhou residents said they would travel to Hong Kong to attend the upcoming protest.

"We will try to protest again on July 31 in Guangzhou. Not sure if we will be kicked out again by the (police)," a teenage Guangzhou resident wrote on Facebook.

"If so, we will rely on you all in Hong Kong."

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