Although Cantonese shares much vocabulary withMandarin and othervarieties of Chinese, theseSinitic languages are notmutually intelligible, largely because of phonological differences, but also due to the differences in grammar and vocabulary. Sentence structure, in particular the verb placement, sometimes differs between the two varieties. A notable difference between Cantonese and Mandarin is how the spoken word is written; both can be recorded verbatim, but very few Cantonese speakers are knowledgeable in the full Cantonese written vocabulary, so a non-verbatim formalized written form is adopted, which is more akin to the writtenStandard Mandarin.[4][2] However, it is only non-verbatim with respect to vernacular Cantonese as 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.[5] This results in the situation in which a Cantonese and a Mandarin text may look similar but are pronounced differently. Conversely, written (vernacular) Cantonese is mostly used in informal settings like social media and comic books.[4][2]
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 ofGuangzhou, was popularized byAn English and Cantonese Pocket Dictionary (1859), a bestseller by the missionaryJohn Chalmers.[6] Before 1859, this variant was often referred to in English as "the Canton dialect".[7][6]
However, "Cantonese" may also refer to the primary branch of Chinese that contains Cantonese proper as well asTaishanese andGaoyang; 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;Gwóngjāu 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;Gwóngfú wá).[8]
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;Gwóngdūng wá) or simply as "Chinese" (中文;Zung1 man2;Jūngmán).[9][10]
Chinese dictionary from theTang dynasty. Modern Cantonese pronunciation preserves almost all terminal consonants (-m, -n, -ng, -p, -t, -k) from Middle Chinese.
During theSouthern Song period, Guangzhou became the cultural center of the region.[11] Cantonese emerged as theprestige variety ofYue Chinese when the port city ofGuangzhou on thePearl River Delta became the largest port in China, with a trade network stretching as far as Arabia.[12] Specifically, the mutually intelligible speech of theSam Yap (三邑), the Three Counties of Guangzhou, namely the historical counties of Panyu (番禺),Nanhai (南海), andShunde (顺德), came to be heralded as the standard.[13] Cantonese was also used in the popularYuè'ōu,Mùyú andNányīn folksong genres, as well asCantonese opera.[14][15] Additionally, a distinct classical literature was developed in Cantonese, withMiddle Chinese texts sounding more similar to modern Cantonese than other present-day Chinese varieties, including Mandarin.[16]
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.[12] Much of the sources for this period of early Cantonese, such as the 18th centuryrime dictionaryFenyun Cuoyao (Chinese:分韻撮要;pinyin:Fēnyùn Cuòyào;Cantonese Yale:Fān Wáhn Chyutyiu) and the 1828Vocabulary of the Canton Dialect by the missionaryRobert Morrison, were written in Guangzhou during this period.[17]
After theFirst Opium War, centuries of maritime prohibitions 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 asZhuang, as with the case of theYong–Xun Yue dialect ofNanning.[13] Many Cantonese migrants sailed also overseas, bringing the Cantonese language with them to Southeast Asia, North and South America, and Western Europe. Such enclaves of Cantonese are still found inChinatowns across many of these major cities outside China.[13] During the late 19th century, the pedagogical workCantonese made easy, written byJames Dyer Ball in 1883, articulated the provenance of the prestige accent of Cantonese: that of the district ofXiguan (simplified Chinese:西关;traditional Chinese:西關;Jyutping:Sai1 Gwaan1;Cantonese Yale:Sāigwāan) in the west of Guangzhou.[18] It is known for its distinctive use of anapical vowel (/ɿ/, or in more conventionalIPA:/ź̩~ɯ~ɨ/) in some cases where modern Cantonese would use a/i/ final.[17]
Throughout the 19th century and continuing into the 20th century, the ancestors of most of the population ofHong Kong andMacau arrived from Guangzhou and surrounding areas after they were ceded toBritain andPortugal, respectively.[19] The influx of such migrants into Hong Kong established Cantonese as the main language of the colony, supplanting local Yue Chinese varieties, which were closer to the dialects of neighboringShenzhen andDongguan, as well as theHakka andSouthern Min varieties of the region.[13] With subsequent waves of migration into Hong Kong, even as late as the 1950s, the proportion of native Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong had not yet surpassed 50%; nonetheless, this figure has risen to above 90% since the 1970s.[13] On the other hand, the indigenous variety of Yue Chinese in Macau had been close to that ofZhongshan, and this has had an effect on the tonal phonology of the Cantonese spoken in Macau.[20][13]
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.[21] With the bifurcation ofthe film industry into Cantonese and Mandarin,[21] 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.[17]
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).[22] Government and law still function predominantly in Cantonese in these jurisdictions, and officials speak Cantonese even at the most formal occasions.[13]
A similar situation also exists in neighboringMacau, where Chinese is an official language alongsidePortuguese. As in Hong Kong, Cantonese is the predominant spokenvariety 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 ismutually intelligible with the Cantonese spoken in the mainland city ofGuangzhou, although there exist some minor differences in accent, pronunciation, and vocabulary.
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 ofGuangzhou in thePearl 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 theYue varieties of Chinese in theSouthern Song dynasty and its usage spread around most of what is now the provinces ofGuangdong andGuangxi.[11]
Despite the cession of Macau to Portugal in 1557 andHong Kong to Britain in 1842, 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 thelingua franca ofGuangdong andGuangxi even after Mandarin was made the official language of the government by theQing dynasty in the early 1900s.[24] 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 ofStandard 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.[25]
While the Chinese government encourages the use of Standard Mandarin rather than local varieties of Chinese in broadcasts,[26] 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 andChinese as a foreign language programs.[27][28] The permitted usage of Cantonese in mainland China is largely a countermeasure against Hong Kong's influence, as its Cantonese-language media has a substantial exposure and following in Guangdong.[29][22]
Nevertheless, the place of local Cantonese language andculture remains contentious, as with other non-Mandarin Chinese languages.[30] A 2010proposal to switch some programming on Guangzhou television from Cantonese to Mandarin was abandoned following massive public protests, the largest since theTiananmen 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.[31] This has led to initiatives to revive the language such as its introduction into school curricula and locally produced programs on broadcast media.[32][33]
Cantonese has historically served as alingua franca among overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, who speak a variety of other forms of Chinese includingHokkien,Teochew, andHakka.[34] Additionally, Cantonese media and popular culture such asHong Kong cinema is popular throughout the region.
InVietnam, Cantonese is the dominant language of the main ethnic Chinese community, usually referred to asHoa, which numbers about one million people and constitutes one of the largest minority groups in the country.[35] 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.[36] Many speakers reflect their exposure toVietnamese with a Vietnamese accent or a tendency tocode-switch between Cantonese and Vietnamese.
AlthoughHokkien is the most natively spoken variety of Chinese and Mandarin is the medium of education atChinese-language schools, Cantonese is largely influential in the local Chinese media and is used in commerce by Chinese Malaysians.[38]
Due to the popularity ofHong 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.[39][40]
Cantonese spoken in Malaysia and Singapore often exhibits influences fromMalay and other Chinese varieties spoken in the country, like Hokkien and Teochew.[41]
The Singapore government uses Mandarin as the official Chinese variety and has aSpeak 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.[42]
Notably, all nationally produced non-Mandarin Chinese TV and radio programs were stopped after 1979.[43] The prime minister,Lee Kuan Yew, then, also stopped giving speeches inHokkien to prevent giving conflicting signals to the people.[43] Hong Kong (Cantonese) andTaiwanese 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 toHanyu Pinyin of certain terms which originated from southern Chinese varieties. For instance,dim sum is often known asdiǎn xīn in Singapore's English-language media, though this is largely a matter of style, and most Singaporeans will still refer to it asdim sum when speaking English.[44]
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, liketelevision series,cinema andpop 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.[45]
Cantonese is widely used as the inter-communal language amongChinese Cambodians, especially inPhnom Penh and other urban areas. While Teochew speakers form the majority of the Chinese population inCambodia, Cantonese is often used as a vernacular in commerce and with other Chinese variant groups in the nation.[46] 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.[47]
WhileThailand is home to thelargest overseas Chinese community in the world, the vast majority of ethnic Chinese in the country speak Thai exclusively.[48] Among Chinese-speaking Thai households, Cantonese is the fourth most-spoken Chinese variety afterTeochew,Hakka andHainanese.[49] 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.[50]
InIndonesia, Cantonese is locally known asKonghu and is one of the variants spoken by theChinese Indonesian community, with speakers largely concentrated in certain major cities likeJakarta,Medan,Surabaya,Makassar,Semarang,Manado andBatam. 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.[51]
Street inChinatown, 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 Sìyì orsei yap variety of Yue is spoken), alone may be the origin of the vast majority of Chinese immigrants to the U.S. before 1965.[52] As a result, Yue languages such as Cantonese and the closely related variety ofTaishanese 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.[53]
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 theSacramento River Delta (seeLocke, 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.[54] 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 isYale 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 thehandover) 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 speakStandard Mandarin (Putonghua) as their native language,[55][56] although some may also speak their native local variety, such asShanghainese,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.[57] For example, in New York City, Cantonese still predominates in the city'solder, traditional western portion ofChinatown inManhattan and in Brooklyn's small new Chinatowns inBensonhurst andHomecrest. The newly emergedLittle Fuzhou eastern portion of Manhattan's Chinatown andBrooklyn's main large Chinatown in and aroundSunset Park are mostly populated byFuzhounese 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 theOuter Boroughs of NYC, such asBrooklyn andQueens, but mainly in Brooklyn's newer Chinatowns, the Cantonese speaking population in NYC is now increasingly concentrated inBensonhurst's Little Hong Kong/Guangdong andHomecrest's Little Hong Kong/Guangdong. The Fuzhou population of NYC is becoming increasingly concentrated in Brooklyn's Sunset Park, also known asLittle 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, andElmhurst'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.[58][59][60][61][62][63][64]
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 alinguistic discrimination that has also contributed to social conflicts between the two sides, with a growing number of Chinese Americans (includingAmerican-born Chinese) of Cantonese background defending the historic Chinese-American culture against the impacts of increasing Mandarin-speaking new arrivals.[57][66]
Cantonese is the most common Chinese variety spoken amongChinese Canadians. According to theCanada 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 theGreater Toronto Area andMetro Vancouver. There are sufficient Cantonese-speakers in Canada that there exist locally produced Cantonese TV and radio programming, such asFairchild 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.[67] 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 the1989 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.
The overwhelming majority of Chinese speakers in the United Kingdom use Cantonese, with about 300,000 British people claiming it as their first language.[68] This is largely due to the presence ofBritish Hong Kongers and the fact that manyBritish Chinese also have origins in the former British colonies in Southeast Asia of Singapore and Malaysia.
Among theChinese community in France, Cantonese is spoken by immigrants who fled the formerFrench 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.[69]
Cantonese is spoken by ethnicChinese in Portugal whooriginate from Macau, the most established Chinese community in the nation with a presence dating back to the 16th century andPortuguese 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.[70]
Cantonese was the dominant Chinese language of theChinese 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.[71]
Spoken Chinese exhibits a multitude of regional and local varieties, many of which aremutually 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 theQing dynasty, the government of China has promotedMandarin for use in education, the media, and official communications.[72] However, the proclamation ofMandarin as the official national language was not fully accepted by the Cantonese authorities in the early 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 statetelevision andradio broadcasts today.
Nevertheless, there have been recent efforts to reduce the use of Cantonese inChina. The most notable of these has been the 2010 proposal put forth byGuangzhou 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 otherChinese languages at school, which has led to a reluctance among younger children to communicate in their native languages, including Cantonese.[72] 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.[73]
Due to the linguistic history ofHong Kong andMacau, and the use of Cantonese in many establishedoverseas 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 dialectTaishanese 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 (includingAmerican-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.[57][66]
Along with Mandarin andHokkien, 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.[74] Popular native Mandarin-speaking singers, includingFaye Wong,Eric Moo, and singers from Taiwan, have been trained in Cantonese to add "Hong Kong-ness" to their performances.[74]
Cantonese films date to the early days of Chinese cinema, and the first Cantonese talkie,White Gold Dragon [zh], was made in 1932 by theTianyi Film Company.[75] Despite a ban on Cantonese films by theNanjing authority in the 1930s, Cantonese film production continued in Hong Kong which was then under British colonial rule.[76][77] 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 ofCanton (Guangzhou). While there are some minor phonological variations betweenHong Kong Cantonese and standard Guangzhou Cantonese, the two forms are almost identical.
The phonemic systems ofHong 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.[78] 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.[79]
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.[79]
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 toMiddle 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).
Generally speaking, Cantonese is atonal 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 astop consonant were considered as "checked tones" and treated separately bydiachronic convention, identifying Cantonese with nine tones (九声六调). However, these are seldom counted asphonemic tones in modern linguistics, which prefer to analyse them asconditioned by the following consonant.[81]
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'sGuangdong Romanization,Yale,Meyer–Wempe, andStandard Romanization. Jyutping and Yale are the two most used and taught systems today in the West,[72] and they do not differ greatly from one another except in how they mark tones. Additionally, Hong Kong linguistSidney 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 andMacau'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 byPortuguese language due to colonial history. For example, while many words in Macau's system are the same as Hong Kong's (e.g. surnamesLam 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 vsLeong 梁). Neither the spellings of Hong Kong's system nor of Macau's look very similar to mainland China's system calledpinyin, 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.
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 firstProtestant missionary in China, published aVocabulary of the Canton Dialect (1828) with a rather unsystematic romanized pronunciation.Elijah Coleman Bridgman andSamuel Wells Williams in theirChinese 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 ofJames Dyer Ball,Ernst Johann Eitel, andImmanuel Gottlieb Genähr (1910). Bridgman and Williams based their system on the phonetic alphabet and diacritics proposed bySir William Jones for South Asian languages.
Their system of romanization embodied the phonological system of a local-dialect rhyme-dictionary, theFenyun 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 thisFenyun. 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 hisEnglish 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 theYale 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 theFenyun, and the name ofTipson is associated with its particular variety that then was fixed upon by his missionary peers to becomeStandard Romanization. This was the system used importantly: (with virtually no deviation) byMeyer-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 linguistY. R. Chao developed a Cantonese adaptation of hisGwoyeu Romatzyh system. It was first used in Chao'sCantonese 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 hisMandarin Primer, published by the same Press). The system was then modified by K. M. A. Barnett in 1950 into theBarnett-Chao romanization system.[83] The B–C system was used in a handful of texts, including textbooks published by the Hong Kong government, such asCantonese Conversation Grammar, published in 1963.
An influential work on Cantonese,A Chinese Syllabary Pronounced According to the Dialect of Canton, written byWong Shik Ling, was published in 1941. He devised anIPA-based system of transcription, theS. L. Wong system, used by many Chinese dictionaries later published in Hong Kong. Although Wong also devised a romanization-scheme, likewise known as theS. L. Wong system, the latter is not as widely used as his transcription. This system succeeded theBarnett–Chao system as being the one used by the Hong Kong Government Language School.
TheLinguistic Society of Hong Kong (LSHK) has advocated the romanization it devised (and namedJyutping). 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 theGovernment of Hong Kong.
Google's Cantonese input uses Yale, Jyutping, or Cantonese Pinyin (ILE romanisation), the Yale being the first standard.[84][85]
Differences between the three main standards arehighlighted in bold. Jyutping and ILE 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. LettersQ,R,V andX are not used in any of the systems.[86][87]
^abcdJyutping 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".[86]
"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.
^abKataoka, 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 byMilne, William. 1817. pp. xxvii–xxviii. Archived fromthe original on 2007-04-30.bought with him theParaphrase 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. Retrieved2021-05-08.
^Cantonese program at Chinese University of Hong Kong, designating standard Cantonese as 廣東話, seeChinese as a FSL (Cantonese) Curriculum(PDF), Yale-China Chinese Language Centre, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, retrieved29 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.
^abBordwell, 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) (2013 ed.). 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. Retrieved29 January 2018.
^abcKataoka, 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.
^abcKwaan, Choi Wah; et al. (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; et al. (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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