StandardCantonese pronunciation originates fromGuangzhou (also known as Canton) the capital ofGuangdong Province.Hong Kong Cantonese is closely related to theGuangzhou dialect, with only minor differences.Yue dialects spoken in other parts of Guangdong andGuangxi provinces, such asTaishanese, exhibit more significant differences in pronunciation.

Cantonese uses about 1,760 syllables to cover pronunciation of more than 10,000 Chinese characters. Most syllables are represented by standard Chinese characters, however a few are written with colloquial Cantonese characters. Cantonese has a relatively simple syllable structure when compared to other languages. A Cantonese syllable contains one tone-carryingvowel with up to oneconsonant on either side.^{[1][failed verification]} The average Cantonese syllable represents 6 unique Chinese characters.

A Cantonese syllable usually includes an initial (onset) and a final (rime/rhyme). The Cantonese syllabary numbers about 630.

Some syllables—such as/kʷeŋ˥/ (扃),/ɛː˨/ and/ei˨/ (欸)—are no longer common. Some—such as/kʷek˥/ and/kʷʰek˥/ (隙), or/kʷaːŋ˧˥/ and/kɐŋ˧˥/ (梗)—have traditionally had two equally correct pronunciations, but speakers are starting to pronounce them in only one particular way. This usually occurs because the 'unused' pronunciation is almost unique to that word alone, which leads to the unused sounds practically disappearing from the language.

Some syllables—such as/kʷʰɔːk˧/ (擴),/pʰuːi˥/ (胚),/tsɵi˥/ (錐),/kaː˥/ (痂)—have alternative nonstandard pronunciations that have become mainstream (as/kʷʰɔːŋ˧/,/puːi˥/,/jɵi˥/ and/kʰɛː˥/, respectively). However, others—such as/faːk˧/ (謋),/fɐŋ˩/ (揈),/tɐp˥/ (耷)—have become popularly (but erroneously) believed to be made-up or borrowed from modern vernacular Cantonese when they have in fact been present since before these vernacular usages became popular.

In Hong Kong, there arenew words (neologisms) that use combinations borrowed from other languages. For example,/kɛt˥/, a syllable which was borrowed from the English wordget, means "to understand". This/ɛt/ final sound does not fit into general Cantonese phonology, though the final sound with the longer vowel-et/ɛːt/ has appeared in vernacular Cantonese before: e.g.pet6/pʰɛːt˨/坺, themeasure word for gooey or sticky substances such as mud or glue.

Initials (oronsets) refer to the 19 initialconsonants which may occur at the beginning of asyllable. Some syllables have no initials and are said to have anull initial. The following is the inventory for Cantonese as represented by theIPA:

Note theaspiration contrast and the lack ofvoicing contrast instops.

Acoronal consonant's position varies fromdental toalveolar, with/t/ and/tʰ/ more likely to be dental. The position of the coronalaffricates andsibilants/t͡s/,/t͡sʰ/,/s/'s is alveolar, and articulatory findings indicate they are palatalized before close front vowels/iː/ and/yː/.^[3] The affricates/t͡s/ and/t͡sʰ/ also have a tendency to be palatalized before central round vowels/œː/ and/ɵ/.^[4] Historically, another alveolo-palatal sibilant series existed as discussedbelow.

Chart of monophthongs used in Cantonese, fromZee (1999:59)

Chart of diphthongs used in Cantonese, fromZee (1999:59)

Finals (orrimes/rhymes) are the part of the sound after the initial. A final is typically composed of a main vowel (nucleus) and a terminal (coda).

As the traditionally transcribed near-close finals ([ɪŋ],[ɪk],[ʊŋ],[ʊk]) have been found to be pronounced in the mid region, according to acoustic research,^[5] sources such asBauer & Benedict (1997:46–47) prefer to analyze them as close-mid ([eŋ],[ek],[oŋ],[ok]) which results in eleven vowel phonemes. In this analysis, vowel length is a key contrastive feature of the vowels.

The following chart lists all the finals in Cantonese as represented inIPA.^[6]

Some sources prefer to keep the near-close finals ([ɪŋ],[ɪk],[ʊŋ],[ʊk]) as traditionally transcribed and to analyze the long-short pairs[ɛː,e],[ɔː,o],[œː,ɵ],[iː,ɪ] and[uː,ʊ] asallophones of the same phonemes, resulting in an eight-vowel system, instead.^[7] In this analysis, vowel length is mainly allophonic and is contrastive only in the open vowels.

The following chart lists all the finals in Cantonese as represented inIPA.^[7]

Note:^abcde Finals/ɛːu/,^[8]/ɛːm/,/ɛːn/,/ɛːp/ and/ɛːt/ only appear in colloquial pronunciations of characters.^[9] They are absent from some analyses and romanization systems.

Diphthongal ending/i/ is rounded after rounded vowels.^[8] Nasal consonants can occur as base syllables in their own right and are known as syllabic nasals. The stop consonants (/p,t,k/) areunreleased ([p̚,t̚,k̚]).

When the threechecked tones are separated, the stop codas/p,t,k/ are incomplementary distribution with the nasal codas/m,n,ŋ/.

Cantonese usestone contours to distinguish words, with the number of possible tones depending on the type of final. While Guangzhou Cantonese generally distinguishes between high-falling and high-level tones, the two have merged in Hong Kong Cantonese and Macau Cantonese, yielding a system of six different tones in syllables ending in a semi-vowel ornasal consonant (some of these have more than one realization, but such differences are not used to distinguish words). In finals that end in astop consonant, the number of tones is reduced to three; in Chinese descriptions, these "checked tones" are treated separately bydiachronic convention, so that Cantonese is traditionally said to have nine tones. However, phonetically these are a conflation of tone and final consonant; the number of phonemic tones is six in Hong Kong and seven in Guangzhou.^[10]

The first tone can be either high-level or high-falling, usually without affecting the meaning of the words being spoken. Most speakers are in general not consciously aware of when they use, and when to use, high-level and high-falling. Most Hong Kong speakers have merged the high-level and high-falling tones. In Guangzhou, the high-falling tone is disappearing as well, but is still prevalent in certain words, e.g. intraditional Yale Romanization with diacritics,sàam (high-falling) means the number three三, whereassāam (high-level) means shirt衫.^[11]

The relative pitch of the tones varies with the speaker; consequently, descriptions vary from one source to another. The difference between high- and mid-level tones (1 and 3) is about twice that between mid- and low-level (3 and 6): 60 Hz to 30 Hz. Low-falling (4) starts at the same pitch as low-level (6), but then drops; as is common with falling tones, it is shorter than the three level tones. The two rising tones, (2) and (5), both start at the level of (6), but rise to the level of (1) and (3), respectively.^[12]

Tones 3, 4, 5 and 6 are dipping in the last syllable when in an interrogative sentence or an exclamatory sentence.眞係? "really?" is pronounced[tsɐn˥hɐi˨˥].

The numbers "394052786" when pronounced in Cantonese, will give the nine tones in order (Romanization (Yale) saam1, gau2, sei3, ling4, ng5, yi6, chat7, baat8, luk9), thus giving amnemonic for remembering the nine tones.

For purposes ofmeters inChinese poetry, the first and fourth tones are "flat/level tones" (平聲), while the rest are "oblique tones" (仄聲). Thefour tones of Middle Chinese continue to stay distinguished in Cantonese. And like other Yue dialects, the four tones split into yin tones (陰) with a relatively higher pitch and yang tones (陽) with a relatively lower pitch, thereby preserving an analog to thevoicing distinction ofMiddle Chinese in the manner shown in the chart below.

The distinction of voiced and voiceless consonants found in Middle Chinese was preserved by thedistinction of tones in Cantonese. The difference in vowel length further caused the splitting of the dark-entering tone, making Cantonese (as well as otherYue Chinese branches) one of the fewChinese varieties to have further split a tone after the voicing-related splitting of the four tones of Middle Chinese.^[13][14]

Cantonese is special in the way that the vowel length can affect both the rhyme and the tone. Some linguists^[who?] believe that the vowel length feature may have roots inOld Chinese.

Cantonese also has twochanged tones, which add thediminutive-like meaning "that familiar example" to a standard word. For example, the word for "silver" (銀,/ŋɐn˩/) with a modified tone (/ŋɐn˩꜔꜒/, riɡht-facinɡ tone bars denote chanɡed tones) means "coin". They are comparable to the diminutive suffixes兒 and子 of Mandarin. In addition, modified tones are used in compounds, reduplications (擒擒青/kɐm˩ kɐm˩ tʃʰɛːŋ˥/→/kɐm˩ kɐm˩꜔꜒ tʃʰɛːŋ˥/ "in a hurry") anddirect address to family members (妹妹/muːy˨ muːy˨/→/muːy˨꜖ muːy˨꜔꜒/ "sister").^[15] The two modified tones are high-level, like tone 1, and mid-rising, like tone 2, though for some people not as high as tone 2. The high-level changed tone is more common for speakers with a high-falling tone; for others, mid-rising (or its variant realization) is the main changed tone, in which case it only operates on those syllables with a non-high-level and non-mid rising tone (i.e. only tones 3, 4, 5 and 6 in Yale and Jyutping romanizations may have changed tones).^[16] However, in certain specificvocatives, the changed tone does indeed result in a high-level tone (tone 1), including speakers without a phonemically distinct high-falling tone.^[17]

Like other languages, Cantonese sounds are constantlychanging, in a process where more and more native speakers of a language change the pronunciations of certain sounds.

One shift that affected Cantonese in the past was themerger of alveolar and alveolo-palatal (sometimes termed as postalveolar) sibilants, which occurred during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Multiple Cantonese dictionaries and pronunciation guides published prior to the 1950s documented this distinction, which is no longer documented in any modern Cantonese dictionary.

Publications that documented this distinction include:

• Williams, S.,A Tonic Dictionary of the Chinese Language in the Canton Dialect, 1856.
• Cowles, R.,A Pocket Dictionary of Cantonese, 1914.
• Meyer, B. and Wempe, T.,The Student's Cantonese-English Dictionary, 3rd edition, 1947.
• Chao, Y.Cantonese Primer, 1947.

This distinction was lost, causing a number of words that were once distinct to sound the same. For comparison, modern Standard Mandarin still has this distinction, with most Cantonese alveolo-palatal sibilants corresponding to Mandarinretroflex sibilants. For instance:

The merged phoneme shows might be pronounced with palatalisation, depending on the following vowel, as discussedabove.

Even though the aforementioned references observed the phonemic distinction, most of them also noted that the merger was already occurring at the time. Williams (1856) writes:

The initialsch andts are constantly confounded, and some persons are absolutely unable to detect the difference, more frequently identifying the words underts asch, than contrariwise.

Cowles (1914) adds:

"s" initial may be heard for "sh" initial and vice versa.

A vestige of this palatalization difference is sometimes reflected in theromanization scheme used for Cantonese names in Hong Kong. For instance, a number of names are spelled withsh even though the "sh sound" (/ɕ/) is no longer used to pronounce the word. Examples include the surname石 (/sɛːk˨/), which is often romanized asShek, and the names of places such asSha Tin (沙田;/saː˥tʰiːn˩/).

In Mandarin, alveolo-palatal sibilants occur in complementary distribution with retroflex sibilants, with alveolo-palatal sibilants only occurring before/i/ or/y/. However, Mandarin also retains the medials, where/i/ and/y/ can occur, as can be seen in the examples above. Cantonese had lost its medials some time ago, reducing the ability for speakers to distinguish its sibilant initials.

A number of modern-day younger Hong Kong speakers do not distinguish between phoneme pairs such as/n/ vs./l/ and/ŋ/ vs. null initial^[2] and merge one sound into another. Examples of this include你/nei˨˧/ being pronounced as/lei˨˧/ and我/ŋɔː˨˧/ being pronounced as/ɔː˨˧/. Another incipient sound change is the lost distinctions in/kʷ/ vs./k/ and/kʷʰ/ vs./kʰ/, for example國/kʷɔːk˧/ being pronounced as[kɔːk̚˧].^[18] Although that is often considered substandard and denounced as "lazy sounds/pronunciation" (懶音), it is becoming more common and is influencing other Cantonese-speaking regions (seeHong Kong Cantonese).^{[citation needed]}

• Proper Cantonese pronunciation
• Cantonese nasal-stop alternation

• Cantonese phonology
• Cantonese language

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