Despite the considerable overlap in vocabulary between Cantonese and Mandarin, as well as other varieties of Chinese, these Sinitic languages are not mutually intelligible. This is due to a combination of factors, including phonological differences and variations in grammar and vocabulary. Notably, there are instances where the sentence structure, particularly with regard to verb placement, differs between the two varieties. A noteworthy distinction between Cantonese and Mandarin is the manner in which the spoken word is written. Both languages can be recorded verbatim, yet a paucity of Cantonese speakers possess comprehensive knowledge of the written vocabulary. Consequently, a non-verbatim formalised written form is adopted, which bears resemblance to the written Standard Mandarin.[3][failed verification][1][failed verification] However, it is only non-verbatim with respect to vernacular Cantonese, it is possible to read Standard Chinese text verbatim in formal Cantonese, often with only slight changes in lexicon that are optional depending on the reader's choice of register. This results in the situation in which a Cantonese and a Mandarin text may appear similar but are pronounced differently. Conversely, written (vernacular) Cantonese is mostly used in informal settings like social media and comic books.[3][failed verification][1][failed verification]
In English,the term "Cantonese" can be ambiguous. "Cantonese" as used to refer to the language native to the city of Canton,which is the traditional English name of Guangzhou,was popularized by An English and Cantonese Pocket Dictionary (1859),a bestseller by the missionary John Chalmers.[3] Before 1859,this variant was often referred to in English as "the Canton dialect".[4][3]
However,"Cantonese" may also refer to the primary branch of Chinese that contains Cantonese proper as well as Taishanese and Gaoyang;this broader usage may be specified as "Yue speech" (粵語;粤语;Jyut6 jyu5;Yuhtyúh). In this article,"Cantonese" is used for Cantonese proper.
Historically,speakers called this variety "Canton speech" (廣州話;广州话;Gwong2 zau1 waa2;Gwóngjàu wá),although this term is now seldom used outside mainland China. In Guangdong and Guangxi,people also call it "provincial capital speech" (省城話;省城话;Saang2 seng4 waa2;Sáangsèhng wá) or "plain speech" (白話;白话;Baak6 waa2;Baahkwá). In academic linguistic circles,it is also referred to as "Canton prefecture speech" (廣府話;广府话;Gwong2 fu2 waa2;Gwóngfúwá).[5]
In Hong Kong and Macau,as well as among overseas Chinese communities,the language is referred to as "Guangdong speech" or "Canton Province Speech" (廣東話;广东话;Gwong2 dung1 waa2;Gwóngdùng wá) or simply as "Chinese" (中文;Zung1 man2;Jùngmán).[6][7]
Chinese dictionary from the Tang dynasty. Modern Cantonese pronunciation preserves almost all terminal consonants (-m,-n,-ng,-p,-t,-k) from Middle Chinese.
During the Southern Song period,Guangzhou became the cultural center of the region.[8] Cantonese emerged as the prestige variety of Yue Chinese when the port city of Guangzhou on the Pearl River Delta became the largest port in China,with a trade network stretching as far as Arabia.[9] Specifically,the mutually intelligible speech of the Sam Yap (三邑;Sānyì;Sam1 jap1),the Three Counties of Guangzhou,namely the historical counties of Panyu (番禺),Nanhai (南海),and Shunde (顺德),came to be heralded as the standard.[10] Cantonese was also used in the popular Yuè'ōu,Mùyú and Nányīn folksong genres,as well as Cantonese opera.[11][12] Additionally,a distinct classical literature was developed in Cantonese,with Middle Chinese texts sounding more similar to modern Cantonese than other present-day Chinese varieties,including Mandarin.[13]
As Guangzhou became China's key commercial center for foreign trade and exchange in the 1700s,Cantonese became the variety of Chinese interacting most with the Western world.[9] Much of the sources for this period of early Cantonese,such as the 18th century rime dictionaryFenyun Cuoyao (分韻撮要;Fēnyùn Cuòyào;Fan1 wan5 Cyut3 jiu3) and the 1828 Vocabulary of the Canton Dialect by the missionary Robert Morrison,were written in Guangzhou during this period of prosperity.[14]
After the First Opium War,centuries of maritime prohibitions (海禁;hǎijìn;hoi2 gam3) ended. Large numbers of Cantonese people from the Pearl River Delta,especially merchants,subsequently migrated by boat to other parts of Guangdong and Guangxi. These migrants established enclaves of Cantonese in areas that primarily spoke other forms of Yue or even non-Sinitic languages such as Zhuang,for example in the way the Yong–Xun Yue dialect of Nanning emerged.[10] Many Cantonese migrants sailed overseas,bringing the Cantonese language with the overseas Chinese to Southeast Asia,North and South America,and Western Europe. Such enclaves of Cantonese are found in Chinatowns across many of these major cities outside China.[10] During the late 19th century,the pedagogical work Cantonese made easy,written by James Dyer Ball in 1883,articulated the provenance of the prestige accent of Cantonese:that of the district of Xiguan (西关;西關;Xīguān;Sai1 Gwaan1) in the west of Guangzhou.[15] It is known for its distinctive use of an apical vowel (/ɿ/,or in more conventional IPA:/ź̩~ɯ~ɨ/) in some cases where modern Cantonese would use a /i/ final.[14]
Throughout the 19th century and continuing into the 1900s,the ancestors of most of the population of Hong Kong and Macau arrived from Guangzhou and surrounding areas after they were ceded to Britain and Portugal,respectively.[16] The influx of such migrants into Hong Kong established Cantonese as the main language of the city,supplanting local Yue Chinese varieties,which were closer to the dialects of neighboring Shenzhen and Dongguan,as well as the Hakka and Southern Min varieties of the region.[10] With subsequent waves of migration into Hong Kong,even as late as the 1950s,the proportion of Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong had not yet surpassed 50%;nonetheless,this figure has risen to above 90% since the 1970s.[10] On the other hand,the indigenous variety of Yue Chinese in Macau had been close to that of Zhongshan,and this has had an effect on the tonal phonology of the Cantonese spoken in Macau.[17][10]
As a significant proportion of the entertainment industry in China migrated to Hong Kong in the early decades of the 20th century,the Hong Kong-based entertainment industry underwent a transformation to suit overseas as well as domestic audiences.[18] With the bifurcation of the film industry into Cantonese and Mandarin,[18] the use of the Xiguan accent of Guangzhou as a conservative prestige accent of standard Cantonese was maintained in mass media,with films from the 1930s making prominent use of it. However,during this time many phonological changes can be detected,indicating the change from Early Cantonese to Modern Cantonese.[14]
In mainland China,Standard Mandarin has been heavily promoted as the medium of instruction in schools and as the official language,especially after the communist takeover in 1949. Meanwhile,Cantonese has remained the official variety of Chinese in Hong Kong and Macau,both during and after the colonial period,under the policy of 'biliteracy and trilingualism' (Chinese:兩文三語;pinyin:liǎngwén sānyǔ;Jyutping:loeng3 man4 saam1 jyu5).[19] Government and law still function predominantly in Cantonese in these jurisdictions,and officials speak Cantonese even at the most formal occasions.[10]
A similar situation also exists in neighboring Macau,where Chinese is an official language alongside Portuguese. As in Hong Kong,Cantonese is the predominant spoken variety of Chinese used in everyday life and is thus the official form of Chinese used in the government. The Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong and Macau is mutually intelligible with the Cantonese spoken in the mainland city of Guangzhou,although there exist some minor differences in accent,pronunciation,and vocabulary.
Mainland China
Distribution of Yue Chinese languages in southeastern China. Standard Cantonese and closely related dialects are highlighted in pink.
Cantonese first developed around the port city of Guangzhou in the Pearl River Delta region of southeastern China. Due to the city's long standing role as an important cultural center,Cantonese emerged as the prestige dialect of the Yue varieties of Chinese in the Southern Song dynasty and its usage spread around most of what is now the provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi.[8]
Despite the cession of Hong Kong to Britain in 1842 and Macau to Portugal in 1887,the ethnic Chinese population of the two territories largely originated from the 19th and 20th century immigration from Guangzhou and surrounding areas,making Cantonese the predominant Chinese language in the territories. On the mainland,Cantonese continued to serve as the lingua franca of Guangdong and Guangxi even after Mandarin was made the official language of the government by the Qing dynasty in the early 1900s.[21] Cantonese remained a dominant and influential language in southeastern China until the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 and its promotion of Standard Mandarin Chinese as the sole official language of the nation throughout the last half of the 20th century,although its influence still remains strong within the region.[22]
While the Chinese government encourages the use of Standard Mandarin rather than local varieties of Chinese in broadcasts,[23] Cantonese enjoys a relatively higher standing than other Chinese languages,with its own media and usage in public transportation in Guangdong province. Furthermore,it is also a medium of instruction in select academic curricula,including some university elective courses and Chinese as a foreign language programs.[24][25] The permitted usage of Cantonese in mainland China is largely a countermeasure against Hong Kong's influence,as the autonomous territory has the right to freedom of the press and speech and its Cantonese-language media have a substantial exposure and following in Guangdong.[19]
Nevertheless,the place of local Cantonese language and culture remains contentious,as with other non-Mandarin Chinese languages.[26] A 2010 proposal to switch some programming on Guangzhou television from Cantonese to Mandarin was abandoned following massive public protests,the largest since the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. As a major economic center of China,there have been concerns that the use of Cantonese in Guangzhou is diminishing in favour of Mandarin,both through the continual influx of Mandarin-speaking migrants from impoverished areas and strict government policies. As a result,Cantonese is being given a more important status by the natives than ever before as a common identity of the local people.[27] This has led to initiatives to revive the language such as its introduction into school curricula and locally produced programs on broadcast media.[28][29]
Southeast Asia
Cantonese has historically served as a lingua franca among overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia,who speak a variety of other forms of Chinese including Hokkien,Teochew,and Hakka.[30] Additionally,Cantonese media and popular culture such as cinema of Hong Kong is popular throughout the region.
In Vietnam,Cantonese is the dominant language of the main ethnic Chinese community,usually referred to as Hoa,which numbers about one million people and constitutes one of the largest minority groups in the country.[31] Over half of the ethnic Chinese population in Vietnam speaks Cantonese as a native language and the variety also serves as a lingua franca between the different Chinese dialect groups.[32] Many speakers reflect their exposure to Vietnamese with a Vietnamese accent or a tendency to code-switch between Cantonese and Vietnamese.
Although Hokkien is the most natively spoken variety of Chinese and Mandarin is the medium of education at Chinese-language schools,Cantonese is largely influential in the local Chinese media and is used in commerce by Chinese Malaysians.[34]
Due to the popularity of Hong Kong popular culture,especially through drama series and popular music,Cantonese is widely understood by the Chinese in all parts of Malaysia,even though a large proportion of the Chinese Malaysian population is non-Cantonese. Television networks in Malaysia regularly broadcast Hong Kong television programmes in their original Cantonese audio and soundtrack. Cantonese radio is also available in the nation and Cantonese is prevalent in locally produced Chinese television.[35][36]
Cantonese spoken in Malaysia and Singapore often exhibits influences from Malay and other Chinese varieties spoken in the country,like Hokkien and Teochew.[37]
The Singapore government uses Mandarin as the official Chinese variety and has a Speak Mandarin Campaign (SMC) seeking to actively promote using Mandarin at the expense of other Chinese varieties. A little over 15% of Chinese households in Singapore speak Cantonese. Despite the government actively promoting SMC,the Cantonese-speaking Chinese community has been relatively successful in preserving its language from Mandarin compared with other dialect groups.[38]
Notably,all nationally produced non-Mandarin Chinese TV and radio programs were stopped after 1979.[39] The prime minister,Lee Kuan Yew,then,also stopped giving speeches in Hokkien to prevent giving conflicting signals to the people.[39] Hong Kong (Cantonese) and Taiwanese dramas are unavailable in their untranslated form on free-to-air television,though drama series in non-Chinese languages are available in their original languages. Cantonese drama series on terrestrial TV channels are instead dubbed in Mandarin and broadcast without the original Cantonese audio and soundtrack. However,originals may be available through other sources like cable television and online videos.
Furthermore,an offshoot of SMC is the translation to Hanyu Pinyin of certain terms which originated from southern Chinese varieties. For instance,dim sum is often known as diǎn xīn in Singapore's English-language media,though this is largely a matter of style,and most Singaporeans will still refer to it as dim sum when speaking English.[40]
Nevertheless,since the government restriction on media in non-Mandarin varieties was relaxed in the mid-1990s and 2000s,presence of Cantonese in Singapore has grown substantially. Forms of popular culture from Hong Kong,like television series,cinema and pop music have become popular in Singaporean society,and non-dubbed original versions of the media became widely available. Consequently,the number of non-Cantonese Chinese Singaporeans being able to understand or speak Cantonese to some varying extent is growing,with a number of educational institutes offering Cantonese as an elective language course.[41]
Cambodia
Cantonese is widely used as the inter-communal language among Chinese Cambodians,especially in Phnom Penh and other urban areas. While Teochew speakers form the majority of the Chinese population in Cambodia,Cantonese is often used as a vernacular in commerce and with other Chinese variant groups in the nation.[42] Chinese-language schools in Cambodia are conducted in both Cantonese and Mandarin,but schools may be conducted exclusively in one Chinese variant or the other.[43]
Thailand
While Thailand is home to the largest overseas Chinese community in the world,the vast majority of ethnic Chinese in the country speak Thai exclusively.[44] Among Chinese-speaking Thai households,Cantonese is the fourth most-spoken Chinese variety after Teochew,Hakka and Hainanese.[45] Nevertheless,within the Thai Chinese commercial sector,it serves as a common language alongside Teochew or Thai. Chinese-language schools in Thailand have also traditionally been conducted in Cantonese. Furthermore,Cantonese serves as the lingua franca with other Chinese communities in the region.[46]
Indonesia
In Indonesia,Cantonese is locally known as Konghu and is one of the variants spoken by the Chinese Indonesian community,with speakers largely concentrated in major cities like Jakarta,Surabaya and Batam. However,it has a relatively minor presence compared to other Southeast Asian nations,being the fourth most spoken Chinese variety after Hokkien,Hakka and Teochew.[47]
Philippines
Despite the majority of Chinese Filipinos are Fujianese,there are also sizeable Cantonese population in the Philippines,with many of them mainly came from Taishan,Guangdong. Many of the Cantonese people and their descendants live in Baguio and its province Benguet,where the Cantonese made up the majority of the city's and province's Chinese Filipino residents,with some of them have residences in Metro Manila. They speak Cantonese and its dialects such as Taishanese at home or in their circles,though they also learned Hokkien—a community lingua franca among Chinese Filipinos—to interact with the majority of Chinese Filipinos for business purposes,even to the point of assimilating into their Fujianese neighbors. Like the Fujianese,newer generations of Chinese Filipinos of Cantonese descent barely speak Cantonese or Hokkien as their second or third languages or none at all due to assimilation into the local Filipino population over the years,making Tagalog/Filipino and other Philippine languages such as Cebuano and Ilocano as their first languages.[48] Additionally,most of the Chinese-run schools,colleges and universities currently employs Mandarin as the subject and medium of instruction for teaching Standard Chinese class subjects,often nearly replacing Hokkien and Cantonese,due to the mainland Chinese and Taiwanese influence in the country since the late 20th century.[49] However,there are efforts to preserve Cantonese Chinese culture and language in the Philippines by volunteers within the Cantonese community to teach it to younger fellow Cantonese.
Street in Chinatown,San Francisco. Cantonese has traditionally been the dominant Chinese variant among Chinese populations in the Western world.
Over a period of 150 years (from 1850 to the 2000s),Guangdong has been the place-of-origin for most Chinese emigrants to Western nations;one coastal county,Taishan (or Tóisàn,where the Sìyìor sei yap variety of Yue is spoken),alone may be the origin of the vast majority of Chinese immigrants to the U.S. before 1965.[50] As a result,Yue languages such as Cantonese and the closely related variety of Taishanese have been the major Chinese varieties traditionally spoken in the United States. In 2009,458,840 Americans spoke Cantonese at home according to an American Community Survey.[51]
The Zhongshan variant of Cantonese,which originated from the western Pearl River Delta,is spoken by many Chinese immigrants in Hawaii,and some in San Francisco and the Sacramento River Delta (see Locke,California). It is a Yuehai variety much like Guangzhou Cantonese but has "flatter" tones. Chinese is the second most widely spoken non-English language in the United States when both Cantonese and Mandarin are combined,behind Spanish.[52] Many institutes of higher education have traditionally had Chinese programs based on Cantonese,with some continuing to offer these programs despite the rise of Mandarin. The most popular romanization for learning Cantonese in the United States is Yale romanization.
The majority of Chinese emigrants have traditionally originated from Guangdong and Guangxi,as well as Hong Kong and Macau (beginning in the latter half of the 20th century and before the handover) and Southeast Asia,with Cantonese as their native language. However,more recent immigrants are arriving from the rest of mainland China and Taiwan and most often speak Standard Mandarin (Putonghua) as their native language,[53][54] although some may also speak their native local variety,such as Shanghainese,Hokkien,Fuzhounese,Hakka,etc. As a result,Mandarin is becoming more common among the Chinese American community.
The increase of Mandarin-speaking communities has resulted in the rise of separate neighborhoods or enclaves segregated by the primary Chinese variety spoken. Socioeconomic statuses are also a factor.[55] For example,in New York City,Cantonese still predominates in the city's older,traditional western portion of Chinatown in Manhattan and in Brooklyn's small new Chinatowns in Bensonhurst and Homecrest. The newly emerged Little Fuzhou eastern portion of Manhattan's Chinatown and Brooklyn's main large Chinatown in and around Sunset Park are mostly populated by Fuzhounese speakers,who often speak Mandarin as well. The Cantonese and Fuzhounese enclaves in New York City are more working class. However,due to the rapid gentrification of Manhattan's Chinatown and with NYC's Cantonese and Fuzhou populations now increasingly shifting to other Chinese enclaves in the Outer Boroughs of NYC,such as Brooklyn and Queens,but mainly in Brooklyn's newer Chinatowns,the Cantonese speaking population in NYC is now increasingly concentrated in Bensonhurst's Little Hong Kong/Guangdong and Homecrest's Little Hong Kong/Guangdong. The Fuzhou population of NYC is becoming increasingly concentrated in Brooklyn's Sunset Park,also known as Little Fuzhou,which is causing the city's growing Cantonese and Fuzhou enclaves to become increasingly distanced and isolated from both each other and other Chinese enclaves in Queens. Flushing's Chinatown,which is now the largest Chinatown in the city,and Elmhurst's smaller Chinatown in Queens are very diverse,with large numbers of Mandarin speakers from different regions of China and Taiwan. The Chinatowns of Queens comprise the primary cultural center for New York City's Chinese population and are more middle class.[56][57][58][59][60][61][62]
While a number of more-established Taiwanese immigrants have learned Cantonese to foster relations with the traditional Cantonese-speaking Chinese American population,more recent arrivals and the larger number of mainland Chinese immigrants have largely continued to use Mandarin as the exclusive variety of Chinese. This has led to a linguistic discrimination that has also contributed to social conflicts between the two sides,with a growing number of Chinese Americans (including American-born Chinese) of Cantonese background defending the historic Chinese-American culture against the impacts of increasing Mandarin-speaking new arrivals.[55][64]
Canada
Cantonese is the most common Chinese variety spoken among Chinese Canadians. According to the Canada 2016 census,there were 565,275 Canadian residents who reported Cantonese as their native language. Among the self-reported Cantonese speakers,44% were born in Hong Kong,27% were born in Guangdong Province in China,and 18% were Canadian-born. Cantonese-speakers can be found in every city with a Chinese community. The majority of Cantonese-speakers in Canada live in the Greater Toronto Area and Metro Vancouver. There are sufficient Cantonese-speakers in Canada that there exist locally produced Cantonese TV and radio programming,such as Fairchild TV.
As in the United States,the Chinese Canadian community traces its roots to early immigrants from Guangdong during the latter half of the 19th century.[65] Later Chinese immigrants came from Hong Kong in two waves,first in the late 1960s to mid 1970s,and again in the 1980s to late 1990s on fears arising from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and impending handover to the People's Republic of China. Chinese-speaking immigrants from conflict zones in Southeast Asia,especially Vietnam,arrived as well,beginning in the mid-1970s and were also largely Cantonese-speaking.
Western Europe
United Kingdom
The overwhelming majority of Chinese speakers in the United Kingdom use Cantonese,with about 300,000 British people claiming it as their first language.[66] This is largely due to the presence of British Hong Kongers and the fact that many British Chinese also have origins in the former British colonies in Southeast Asia of Singapore and Malaysia.
France
Among the Chinese community in France,Cantonese is spoken by immigrants who fled the former French Indochina (Vietnam,Cambodia and Laos) following the conflicts and communist takeovers in the region during the 1970s. While a slight majority of ethnic Chinese from Indochina speak Teochew at home,knowledge of Cantonese is prevalent due to its historic prestige status in the region and is used for commercial and community purposes between the different Chinese variety groups. As in the United States,there is a divide between Cantonese-speakers and those speaking other mainland Chinese varieties.[67]
Portugal
Cantonese is spoken by ethnic Chinese in Portugal who originate from Macau,the most established Chinese community in the nation with a presence dating back to the 16th century and Portuguese colonialism. Since the late-20th century,however,Mandarin- and Wu-speaking migrants from mainland China have outnumbered those from Macau,although Cantonese is still retained among mainstream Chinese community associations.[68]
Australia
Cantonese was the dominant Chinese language of the Chinese Australian community from the time the first ethnic Chinese settlers arrived in the 1850s until the mid-2000s,when a heavy increase in immigration from Mandarin-speakers largely from mainland China led to Mandarin surpassing Cantonese as the dominant Chinese dialect spoken. Cantonese is the third most-spoken language in Australia. In the 2011 census,the Australian Bureau of Statistics listed 336,410 and 263,673 speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese,respectively. By 2016,those numbers became 596,711 and 280,943.[69]
Spoken Chinese exhibits a multitude of regional and local varieties,many of which are mutually unintelligible. The majority of these varieties are not widely spoken outside of their native regions,although they may be encountered in other parts of the world. Additionally,numerous varieties possess both literary and colloquial readings of Chinese characters for newer standard reading sounds. Since a 1909 decree of the Qing dynasty,the government of China has promoted Mandarin for use in education,the media,and official communications.[70] However,the proclamation of Mandarin as the official national language was not fully accepted by the Cantonese authorities in the early In the 20th century,proponents of the regional uniqueness of their local language and the commercial importance of the region argued that Cantonese should be preserved. In contrast to other non-Mandarin Chinese varieties,Cantonese persists in a few state television and radio broadcasts today.
Nevertheless,there have been recent efforts to reduce the use of Cantonese in China. The most notable of these has been the 2010 proposal put forth by Guangzhou Television,which called for an increase in Mandarin broadcasts at the expense of Cantonese programmes. This,however,resulted in protests in Guangzhou,which ultimately dissuaded the authorities from pursuing the proposal. Furthermore,there are reports of students being punished for speaking other Chinese languages at school,which has led to a reluctance among younger children to communicate in their native languages,including Cantonese.[70] Such actions have further provoked Cantonese speakers to cherish their linguistic identity in contrast to migrants who have generally arrived from poorer areas of China and largely speak Mandarin or other Chinese languages.[71]
Due to the linguistic history of Hong Kong and Macau,and the use of Cantonese in many established overseas Chinese communities,the use of Cantonese is quite widespread compared to the presence of its speakers residing in China. Cantonese is the predominant Chinese variety spoken in Hong Kong and Macau. In these areas,public discourse takes place almost exclusively in Cantonese,making it the only variety of Chinese other than Mandarin to be used as an official language in the world. Because of their dominance in Chinese diaspora overseas,standard Cantonese and its dialect Taishanese are among the most common Chinese languages that one may encounter in the West.
A similar identity issue exists in the United States,where conflicts have arisen among Chinese-speakers due to a large recent influx of Mandarin-speakers. While older Taiwanese immigrants have learned Cantonese to foster integration within the traditional Chinese American populations,more recent arrivals from the mainland continue to use Mandarin exclusively. This has contributed to a segregation of communities based on linguistic cleavage. In particular,some Chinese Americans (including American-born Chinese) of Cantonese background emphasise their non-mainland origins (e.g. Hong Kong,Macau,Vietnam,etc.) to assert their identity in the face of new waves of immigration.[55][64]
Along with Mandarin and Hokkien,Cantonese has its own popular music,Cantopop,which is the predominant genre in Hong Kong. Many artists from the mainland and Taiwan have learned Cantonese to break into the market.[72] Popular native Mandarin-speaking singers,including Faye Wong,Eric Moo,and singers from Taiwan,have been trained in Cantonese to add "Hong Kong-ness" to their performances.[72]
Cantonese films date to the early days of Chinese cinema,and the first Cantonese talkie,White Gold Dragon[zh],was made in 1932 by the Tianyi Film Company.[73] Despite a ban on Cantonese films by the Nanjing authority in the 1930s,Cantonese film production continued in Hong Kong which was then under British colonial rule.[74][75] From the mid-1970s to the 1990s,Cantonese films made in Hong Kong were very popular in the Chinese speaking world.
The de facto standard for Cantonese pronunciation is that of Canton (Guangzhou). While there are some minor phonological variations between Hong Kong Cantonese and standard Guangzhou Cantonese,the two forms are almost identical.
The phonemic systems of Hong Kong and Macau exhibit a tendency to merge certain phoneme pairs. Despite the fact that this phenomenon has been described as a lazy sound/pronunciation (懶音) furthermore,this pronunciation is regarded as inferior to that of Guangzhou,and has been prevalent in the territories since the early 20th century. The most notable difference between Hong Kong and Guangzhou pronunciation is substituting liquid nasal /l/ for nasal initial /n/ in many words.[76] An example is manifested in the word for you (你),pronounced as [nei˩˧] in Guangzhou and as [lei˩˧] in Hong Kong.
Another key feature of Hong Kong Cantonese is the two syllabic nasals /ŋ̩˨˩/ and /m̩˨˩/ merging. This can be exemplified in the elimination of the contrast of sounds between 吳(Ng,a surname) ([ŋ̩˨˩] in Guangzhou pronunciation) and 唔 (not) ([m̩˨˩] in Guangzhou pronunciation). Hong Kong Cantonese pronounce both words as the latter.[77]
Lastly,the initials /kʷ/ and /kʷʰ/ are merging into /k/ and /kʰ/ when followed by /ɔː/. An example is in the word for country (國),pronounced in standard Guangzhou as [kʷɔk] but as [kɔk] with the merge. Unlike the above two differences,this merge is alongside the standard pronunciation in Hong Kong rather than being replaced. Educated speakers often stick to the standard pronunciation but can exemplify the merged pronunciation in casual speech. In contrast,less educated speakers pronounce the merge more frequently.[77]
Less prevalent,but still notable differences found among a number of Hong Kong speakers include:
Merging /ŋ/ initial into null initial
Merging /ŋ/ and /k/ codas into /n/ and /t/ codas respectively,eliminating contrast between these pairs of finals (except after /e/ and /o/[clarification needed]):/aːn/-/aːŋ/,/aːt/-/aːk/,/ɐn/-/ɐŋ/,/ɐt/-/ɐk/,/ɔːn/-/ɔːŋ/ and /ɔːt/-/ɔːk/.
Cantonese vowels tend to be traced further back to Middle Chinese than their Mandarin analogues,such as M. /aɪ/ vs. C. /ɔːi/;M. /i/ vs. C. /ɐi/;M. /ɤ/ vs. C. /ɔː/;M. /ɑʊ/ vs. C. /ou/ etc.[clarification needed] For consonants,some differences include M. /ɕ,tɕ,tɕʰ/ vs. C. /h,k,kʰ/;M. /ʐ/ vs. C. /j/;and a greater syllable coda diversity in Cantonese (like syllables ending in -p,-t or -k).
Tones
Generally speaking,Cantonese is a tonal language with six phonetic tones,two more than the four in Standard Chinese Mandarin. This makes Cantonese in general harder to master due to required ability of users to readily be able to process two additional phonetic tones. People who grew up using Cantonese tones can usually hear the tonal differences with no problem,but adults who were brought up speaking non-tonal languages like English and most Western European languages may not be able to distinguish the tonal differences quick enough to optimally use the language. This difficulty also applies to tonal language speakers with fewer tones attempting to master languages with more tones such as Mandarin natives trying to learn spoken Cantonese as adults.
Historically,finals that end in a stop consonant were considered as "checked tones" and treated separately by diachronic convention,identifying Cantonese with nine tones (九声六调). However,these are seldom counted as phonemic tones in modern linguistics,which prefer to analyse them as conditioned by the following consonant.[79]
As Cantonese is predominantly utilised in Hong Kong,Macau,and other overseas Chinese communities,it is typically inscribed with traditional Chinese characters. Nevertheless,it incorporates supplementary characters and characters with disparate meanings from written vernacular Chinese,due to the presence of lexical items that are either absent from standard Chinese or correspond with spoken Cantonese. This written Cantonese system frequently manifests in colloquial contexts,such as entertainment magazines,social media,and advertisements.
In contrast,formal literature,professional and government documents,television and movie subtitles,and news media continue to use standard written Chinese. Nevertheless,colloquial characters may be present in formal written communications such as legal testimonies and newspapers when an individual is being quoted,rather than paraphrasing spoken Cantonese into standard written Chinese.
Systems of Cantonese romanization are based on the accents of Canton and Hong Kong and have helped define the concept of Standard Cantonese. The major systems are (in order of their invention from newest to oldest): Jyutping, the Chinese government's Guangdong Romanization, Yale, Meyer–Wempe, and Standard Romanization. Jyutping and Yale are the two most used and taught systems today in the West,[70] and they do not differ greatly from one another except in how they mark tones. Additionally, Hong Kong linguist Sidney Laumodified the Yale system for his popular Cantonese-as-a-second-language course, and his variant is another system in use today.
Hong Kong's and Macau's governments use systems of romanization for proper names and geographic locations, but they transcribe some sounds inconsistently. These systems are not taught in schools. Macau's system differs slightly from Hong Kong's in that the spellings are influenced by Portuguese language due to colonial history. For example, while many words in Macau's system are the same as Hong Kong's (e.g. surnames Lam 林, Chan 陳), instances of the letter ⟨u⟩ under Hong Kong's system are often replaced by ⟨o⟩ in Macau's (e.g. Chau vs. Chao 周, Leung vs Leong 梁). Neither the spellings of Hong Kong's system nor of Macau's look very similar to mainland China's system called pinyin, chiefly because it distinguishes between Mandarin's two series of stops while they, although the pronunciation of Standard Cantonese's two series is similar to the Mandarin, do not generally distinguish them, they thus rendering not only /pʰ/, /tʰ/, and so forth, but also /p/, /t/, and the remaining non-aspirates, by the simple spellings ⟨p⟩, ⟨t⟩, etc. vs. it rendering the latter series by ⟨b⟩, ⟨d⟩, and the like.
Early Western efforts
Systematic efforts to develop an alphabetic representation of Cantonese began with Protestant missionaries arriving in China early in the nineteenth century. Romanization was considered both a tool to help new missionaries learn the variety more easily and a quick route for the unlettered to achieve gospel-literacy. Earlier Catholic missionaries, mostly Portuguese, had developed romanization-schemes for the pronunciation current in the court and capital city of China but made few efforts to romanize other varieties.
Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary in China, published a Vocabulary of the Canton Dialect (1828) with a rather unsystematic romanized pronunciation. Elijah Coleman Bridgman and Samuel Wells Williams in their Chinese Chrestomathy in the Canton Dialect (1841) were the progenitors of a long-lived lineage of related romanizations that with minor variations are embodied in the works of James Dyer Ball, Ernst Johann Eitel, and Immanuel Gottlieb Genähr (1910). Bridgman and Williams based their system on the phonetic alphabet and diacritics proposed by Sir William Jones for South Asian languages.
Their system of romanization embodied the phonological system of a local-dialect rhyme-dictionary, the Fenyun cuoyao, which was widely used and easily obtainable at the time and is still available today. Samuel Wells Willams' Tonic Dictionary of the Chinese Language in the Canton Dialect (Yinghua fenyun cuoyao, 1856) is an alphabetic rearrangement, translation, and annotation of this Fenyun. To adapt the system to the needs of users in an era when there was no standard, but rather only a range of local variants—although the speech of the western suburbs (Xiguan 西關) of Guangzhou was the prestige variety—Williams suggested that users learn and follow their teacher's pronunciation of his chart of Cantonese syllables. It was apparently Bridgman's innovation to mark the tones with (for the upper-register ones) open circles vs. (for the lower-register tones) underlined open circles, in either case at the four corners of the romanized word in analogy with the traditional Chinese system of marking the tone of a character with a circle (lower left for "even", upper left for "rising", upper right for "going", and lower right for "entering" tones).
John Chalmers in his English and Cantonese Pocket-Dictionary (1859) simplified the tone-markings by using: a syllable-final acute accent to mark "rising" tones, a syllable-final grave one to mark the "going" tones, no diacritic for the "even" tones, and italics (or in hand-written work underlining) to mark tones as belonging to the upper register. "Entering" tones could be distinguished by the consonants with which they end (p/t/k). Nicholas Belfeld Dennys used Chalmers' romanization in his primer. This method of marking tones was in most of its details used later also by the Yale romanization, where however, importantly, instead of the upper-register tones being marked by italics, the lower-register ones are marked by an 'h' (which comes after whatever letter spells the last vocalic element in the syllable). Another innovation of Chalmers in this dictionary was to eliminate acute/grave accents on top of vowels by adding more distinctions of vowel-spelling (e.g. a/aa, o/oh), so that the presence vs. absence of an accent over the vowel was no longer needed to distinguish different pronunciations of it.
This new style of romanization still embodied the phonology of the Fenyun, and the name of Tipson is associated with its particular variety that then was fixed upon by his missionary peers to become Standard Romanization. This was the system used importantly: (with virtually no deviation) by Meyer-Wempe's dictionary, (even more faithfully) by Cowles' dictionaries (of 1917 & 1965), by O'Melia's textbook, and by many other works in the first two thirds of the twentieth century. It reigned without serious challenge as the standard spelling until Yale's system was devised and became an important rival to it.
The major linguist Y. R. Chao developed a Cantonese adaptation of his Gwoyeu Romatzyh system. It was first used in Chao's Cantonese Primer, published in 1947 by Harvard University Press (which then in 1948, changed by him very little beyond swapping in of Pekingese for the Cantonese, became his Mandarin Primer, published by the same Press). The system was then modified by K. M. A. Barnett in 1950 into the Barnett-Chao romanization system.[81] The B–C system was used in a handful of texts, including textbooks published by the Hong Kong government, such as Cantonese Conversation Grammar, published in 1963.
An influential work on Cantonese, A Chinese Syllabary Pronounced According to the Dialect of Canton, written by Wong Shik Ling, was published in 1941. He devised an IPA-based system of transcription, the S. L. Wong system, used by many Chinese dictionaries later published in Hong Kong. Although Wong also devised a romanization-scheme, likewise known as the S. L. Wong system, the latter is not as widely used as his transcription. This system succeeded the Barnett–Chao system as being the one used by the Hong Kong Government Language School.
The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong (LSHK) has advocated the romanization it devised (and named Jyutping). An arguable advantage of it is that its particular use of J for instance (as at the beginning of its name) matches IPA in contrast to most other systems' using Y, resembling English. Some effort has been made to promote Jyutping, but it has yet to be examined how successfully this has caused use of it to proliferate in the region.
Those learning Cantonese may feel frustrated that, despite efforts to standardize Cantonese romanizations, most native Cantonese speakers, regardless of their level of education, are unfamiliar with any romanization beyond the conventional, Latin-letter spellings of Cantonese names. Because Cantonese is primarily a spoken language, meaning that its speakers do not in most genres of writing use its own writing-system (instead, in most of their writing, despite having some Chinese characters unique to Cantonese, primarily following modern standard Chinese, which is closely tied to Mandarin), therefore, it is not taught in schools.[citation needed] As a result, locals do not learn any of these systems. In contrast to the general use of romanization in Mandarin-speaking areas of China, systems of romanization for Cantonese are excluded from the educational systems of both Hong Kong and the province of Guangdong. In practice, Hong Kong follows a loose, unnamed romanization-scheme used by the Government of Hong Kong.
Google's Cantonese input uses Yale, Jyutping, or Cantonese Pinyin, the Yale being the first standard.[82][83]
Comparison
Differences between the three main standards are highlighted in bold. Jyutping and Cantonese Pinyin recognize certain sounds used in a few colloquial words (like /tɛːu˨/ 掉, /lɛːm˧˥/ 舔, and /kɛːp˨/ 夾) but have not been officially recognized in other systems like Yale. Letters Q, R, V and X are not used in any of the systems.[84][85]
1 2 3 4 Jyutping recognizes the distinction between final "short a" /ɐ/ and "long a" /aː/. The "short a" can occur in elided syllables such as the 十 in 四十四 (sei3-a6-sei3), which the other systems would transcribe with same spelling as the "long a".[84]
"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."
↑ De facto spoken language—while no specific variety of Chinese is official in Hong Kong, Cantonese is the predominant spoken form and the de facto regional spoken standard. The Hong Kong government promotes trilingualism between Cantonese, Mandarin, and English, especially in public education.
↑ De facto spoken language—while no specific variety of Chinese is official in Macau, Cantonese is the predominant spoken form and the de facto regional spoken standard. The Macau government promotes each of Cantonese, Mandarin, Portuguese, and English, especially in public education.
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Chinese is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China. Approximately 1.35 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language.
Mandarin is a group of Chinese language dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China and Taiwan. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language of China and Taiwan. Because Mandarin originated in North China and most Mandarin dialects are found in the north, the group is sometimes referred to as Northern Chinese. Many varieties of Mandarin, such as those of the Southwest and the Lower Yangtze, are not mutually intelligible with the standard language. Nevertheless, Mandarin as a group is often placed first in lists of languages by number of native speakers.
Standard Chinese is a modern standard form of Mandarin Chinese that was first codified during the republican era (1912–1949). It is designated as the official language of mainland China and a major language in the United Nations, Singapore, and Taiwan. It is largely based on the Beijing dialect. Standard Chinese is a pluricentric language with local standards in mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore that mainly differ in their lexicon. Hong Kong written Chinese, used for formal written communication in Hong Kong and Macau, is a form of Standard Chinese that is read aloud with the Cantonese reading of characters.
Hakka forms a language group of varieties of Chinese, spoken natively by the Hakka people in parts of Southern China, Taiwan, some diaspora areas of Southeast Asia and in overseas Chinese communities around the world.
Yue is a branch of the Sinitic languages primarily spoken in Southern China, particularly in the provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi.
There are hundreds of local Chinese language varieties forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast part of mainland China. The varieties are typically classified into several groups: Mandarin, Wu, Min, Xiang, Gan, Jin, Hakka and Yue, though some varieties remain unclassified. These groups are neither clades nor individual languages defined by mutual intelligibility, but reflect common phonological developments from Middle Chinese.
Taishanese, alternatively romanized in Cantonese as Toishanese or Toisanese, in local dialect as Hoisanese or Hoisan-wa, is a Yue Chinese dialect native to Taishan, Guangdong.
Beihai is a prefecture-level city in the south of Guangxi, People's Republic of China. Its status as a seaport on the north shore of the Gulf of Tonkin has granted it historical importance as a port of international trade for Guangxi, Hunan, Hubei, Sichuan, Guizhou, and Yunnan. Between the years 2006 and 2020, Beihai is predicted to be the world's fastest growing city. Beihai has a large shipyard, but most of the money generated in the city is derived from trade.
Yue or Yueh may refer to:
Written Cantonese is the most complete written form of a Chinese language after that for Mandarin Chinese and Classical Chinese. Written Chinese was the main literary language of China until the 19th century. Written vernacular Chinese first appeared in the 17th century, and a written form of Mandarin became standard throughout China in the early 20th century. Cantonese is a common language in places like Hong Kong and Macau. While the Mandarin form can to some extent be read and spoken word for word in other Chinese varieties, its intelligibility to non-Mandarin speakers is poor to incomprehensible because of differences in idioms, grammar and usage. Modern Cantonese speakers have therefore developed new characters for words that do not exist and have retained others that have been lost in standard Chinese.
The Han Chinese people can be defined into subgroups based on linguistic, cultural, ethnic, genetic, and regional features. The terminology used in Mandarin to describe the groups is: "minxi", used in mainland China or "zuqun", used in Taiwan. No Han subgroup is recognized as one of People's Republic of China's 56 official ethnic groups, in Taiwan only three subgroups, Hoklo, Hakka and Waishengren are recognized.
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The Cantonese people or Yue people, are a Han Chinese subgroup originating from Guangzhou and its satellite cities and towns. In a more general sense "Cantonese people" can refer to any Han Chinese people originating from or residing in the provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi, or it may refer to the inhabitants of Guangdong province alone.
The Sinitic languages, often synonymous with the Chinese languages, are a group of East Asian analytic languages that constitute a major branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. It is frequently proposed that there is a primary split between the Sinitic languages and the rest of the family. This view is rejected by some researchers but has found phylogenetic support among others. The Macro-Bai languages, whose classification is difficult, may be an offshoot of Old Chinese and thus Sinitic; otherwise, Sinitic is defined only by the many varieties of Chinese unified by a shared historical background, and usage of the term "Sinitic" may reflect the linguistic view that Chinese constitutes a family of distinct languages, rather than variants of a single language.
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Hong Kong Cantonese is a dialect of the Cantonese language (廣東話，粵語), which is in the Sino-Tibetan language family. Cantonese is lingua franca of populations living in the Guangdong Province of mainland China, in the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau, as well as in many overseas Chinese communities. Hong Kong Cantonese shares a recent and direct lineage with the Guangzhou (Canton) dialect of Cantonese (廣州話); decades of separation have led to some deviations between Hong Kong Cantonese and Guangzhou Cantonese in terms of vocabulary and other noticeable speech habits, although Hong Kong officially maintains the Guangzhou dialect and pronunciations as the official language standard. Hongkongers refer to the language as "Cantonese" (廣東話).
The Cantonese Wikipedia is the Cantonese-language edition of Wikipedia, run by the Wikimedia Foundation. It was started on 25 March 2006.
Standard Cantonese pronunciation originates from Guangzhou, also known as Canton, the capital of Guangdong Province. Hong Kong Cantonese is closely related to the Guangzhou dialect, with only minor differences. Yue dialects spoken in other parts of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces, such as Taishanese, exhibit more significant divergences.
In July 2010, the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) Guangzhou Committee, in a written proposal to mayor of Guangzhou Wan Qingliang, suggested increasing Mandarin programming on Guangzhou Television's main and news channels. The proposal sparked widespread controversy, met with fierce criticism in native Cantonese-speaking cities including Guangzhou and Hong Kong, which eventually triggered a mass protest in the former city. In a formal response, Guangzhou TV rejected the proposal, citing "historic causes and present demands" as reasons for Cantonese-Mandarin bilingualism.
1 2 3 4 Kataoka, Shin; Lee, Yin-Ping Cream (2022). 晚清民初歐美傳教士書寫的廣東話文獻精選[Selected Cantonese Publications by Western Missionaries in China (1828–1927)](PDF). Chinese University of Hong Kong. p.25.
↑ "Han-fung's Record". The Sacred Edict: Containing Sixteen Maxims of the Emperor Kang-Hi. Translated by Milne, William. 1817. pp.xxvii–xxviii. Archived from the original on 2007-04-30. bought with him the Paraphrase on the Sacred Edict [廣訓衍], which the minister Wang-yew-poh [王又樸], formerly over the salt revenue in Shen-See, had printed. This interpretation was written in the northern dialect, [...] on the first and fifteenth of the each moon, they might proclaim the original text in the Canton dialect.
↑ Bonney, Samuel William (1854). A Vocabulary with Colloquial Phrases of the Canton Dialect. pp.20, 47. OL18035405W.
↑ The Hong Kong Observatory is one of the examples of the Hong Kong Government officially adopting the name "廣東話", see "Audio Web Page". Hong Kong Observatory. Archived from the original on 2018-01-01. Retrieved 2021-05-08.
↑ Cantonese program at Chinese University of Hong Kong, designating standard Cantonese as 廣東話, see Chinese as a FSL (Cantonese) Curriculum(PDF), Yale-China Chinese Language Centre, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, retrieved 29 January 2018
↑ Zhang, Jingwei (13 June 2019). "Tone mergers in Cantonese: Evidence from Hong Kong, Macao, and Zhuhai". Asia-Pacific Language Variation. 5 (1): 28–49. doi:10.1075/aplv.18007.zha. S2CID197998897.
1 2 Bordwell, David (2000). Planet Hong Kong: popular cinema and the art of entertainment. Cambridge (Mass.) London: Harvard university press. ISBN0-674-00214-8.
↑ Knodel, John; Ofstedal, Mary Beth; Hermalin, Albert I (2002). "The Demographic, Socioeconomic, and Cultural Context of the Four Study Countries". The Well-Being of the Elderly in Asia: A Four-Country Comparative Study. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. pp.38–39. hdl:2027/mdp.39015060636282. ISBN0-472-11280-5.
↑ New York City Department of City Planning (2013). "Immigrant Settlement Patterns in New York City"(PDF). The Newest New Yorkers: Characteristics of the City's Foreign-Born Population (Report) (2013ed.). pp.23–94.
↑ Laurent, Annabelle (28 June 2010). ""Chinois de France" ne veut rien dire"["Chinese from France" means nothing]. Slate.fr (in French). Archived from the original on 15 February 2018. Retrieved 29 January 2018.
1 2 3 Kataoka, Shin; Lee, Cream (2008). "A System without a System: Cantonese Romanization Used in Hong Kong Place and Personal Names". Hong Kong Journal of Applied Linguistics. 11: 83–84.
1 2 3 Kwaan, Choi Wah; etal. (2004). English-Cantonese Dictionary 英粵字典: Cantonese in Yale Romanization. Sha Tin: New Asia-Yale-in-China Chinese Language Center; The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1991; "first copublished edition", The Chinese University Press, The Chinese University of Hong; New Asia-Yale-in-China Language Center, 2000; second printing. Note that, in Yale-Romanization, tone 1 is marked by the (down-sloping =) grave accent even in the situation that it gets realised as its high flat variant, which occurs (automatically) in Canton-standard pronunciation wherever the tone 1 immediately precedes any syllable whose tone is or begins high, as within for example the 應當 that occurs in the sample text near the end of this article.
Kwaan, Choi Wah; etal. (2004). English-Cantonese Dictionary 英粵字典: Cantonese in Yale Romanization. New Asia-Yale-in-China Chinese Language Center; The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1991; "first copublished edition", The Chinese University Press, The Chinese University of Hong; New Asia-Yale-in-China Language Center, 2000; second printing. ISBN962-201-970-6.
Yue-Hashimoto, Anne Oi-Kan (1972). Studies in Yue Dialects 1: Phonology of Cantonese. Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-0-521-08442-0.
Zhang, Bennan; Yang, Robin R. (2004). "Putonghua Education and Language Policy in Postcolonial Hong Kong". In Zhou, Minglang (ed.). Language Policy in the People's Republic of China: Theory and Practice Since 1949. Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp.143–161. ISBN978-1-4020-8038-8.
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