answer:My understanding has always been that Chinatown in SF is generally Mandarin and the Chinatown in Oakland is generally Cantonese. I recently found out that there is a large Cantonese population in SF, but not in Chinatown. Then again, I don’t have terribly much to back this up, and the language spoken in SF is always too fast for me to pick out the features I know are one or another. The cool thing with the Chinese language is that the written language is unified throughout all the dialects, but the way those characters are pronounced varies regionally. Some of it is minor differences (similar to the Boston or Southern accents in the US), but the major regional shifts (Mandarin and Cantonese being the two most commonly spoken in the US) are enough that speakers cannnot understand each other.