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Wikipedia

Cantonese

Cantonese (traditional Chinese: 廣東話; simplified Chinese: 广东话; Cantonese Yale: Gwóngdūng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding area in Southeastern China. It is the traditional prestige variety of the Yue Chinese dialect group, which has over 80 million native speakers.[1] While the term Cantonese specifically refers to the prestige variety, it is often used to refer to the entire Yue subgroup of Chinese, including related but largely mutually unintelligible languages and dialects such as Taishanese.

Cantonese is viewed as a vital and inseparable part of the cultural identity for its native speakers across large swaths of Southeastern China, Hong Kong and Macau, as well as in overseas communities. In mainland China, it is the lingua franca of the province of Guangdong (being the majority language of the Pearl River Delta) and neighbouring areas such as Guangxi. It is also the dominant and co-official language of Hong Kong and Macau. Cantonese is also widely spoken amongst Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia (most notably in Vietnam and Malaysia, as well as in Singapore and Cambodia to a lesser extent) and throughout the Western world.

Although Cantonese shares much vocabulary with Mandarin, the two Sinitic languages are mutually unintelligible, largely because of phonological differences, but also due to differences in grammar and vocabulary. Sentence structure, in particular the placement of verbs, 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 Mandarin written form or Standard Chinese.[2][3] However, it is only non-verbatim with respect to vernacular Cantonese as it is possible to read Standard Chinese text verbatim with formal Cantonese.[4] 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 such as on social media and comic books.[2][3]

Names

Cantonese
Traditional Chinese廣東話
Cantonese YaleGwóngdūng wá
Transcriptions
Standard Mandarin
Hanyu PinyinGuǎngdōnghuà
Yue: Cantonese
Yale RomanizationGwóngdūng wá
JyutpingGwong2dung1 waa2
'Canton speech' or 'Guangzhou speech'
Traditional Chinese廣州話
Cantonese YaleGwóngjāu wá
Transcriptions
Standard Mandarin
Hanyu PinyinGuǎngzhōuhuà
Yue: Cantonese
Yale RomanizationGwóngjāu wá
JyutpingGwong2zau1 waa2

In English, the term "Cantonese" can be ambiguous. Cantonese proper is the variety native to the city of Canton, which is the traditional English name of Guangzhou. This narrow sense may be specified as "Canton language"[5] or "Guangzhou language".[1]

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; Yuhtyúh). In this article, "Cantonese" is used for Cantonese proper.

Historically, speakers called this variety "Canton speech" (廣州話; 广州话; 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; Sáangsìng wá) or "plain speech" (白話; 白话; Baahkwá). Also, academically called "Canton prefecture speech" (廣府話; 广府话; Gwóngfú wá).[citation needed]

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; Gwóngdūng wá) or simply as "Chinese" (中文; Jūngmán).[6][7]

History

 
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] Cantonese was also used in the popular Yuè'ōu, Mùyú and Nányīn folksong genres, as well as Cantonese opera.[10][11] 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.[12]

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] Around this period 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.[13]

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.[14]

Geographic distribution

Hong Kong and Macau

The official languages of Hong Kong are Chinese and English, as defined in the Hong Kong Basic Law.[15] The Chinese language has many different varieties, of which Cantonese is one. Given the traditional predominance of Cantonese within Hong Kong, it is the de facto official spoken form of the Chinese language used in the Hong Kong Government and all courts and tribunals. It is also used as the medium of instruction in schools, alongside English.

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 Macau to Portugal in 1557 and Hong 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 the lingua franca of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces even after Mandarin was made the official language of the government by the Qing dynasty in the early 1900s.[16] 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.[17]

While the Chinese government encourages the use of Standard Mandarin rather than local varieties of Chinese in broadcasts,[18] 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.[19][20] 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.[14]

Nevertheless, the place of local Cantonese language and culture remains contentious, as with other non-Mandarin Chinese languages.[21] 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 recent 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.[22]

Despite some decline in Cantonese usage in Guangdong province, its survival is still doing better than other Chinese dialects due to the local cultural prestige, pride, popularity, and especially with the wide availability and popularity of Cantonese entertainment and media from both Guangzhou and especially from Hong Kong, which is maintaining the encouragements of the local Cantonese speakers to want to continue to preserve their culture and language versus other Chinese dialectal speaking regions are much more limited with their encouragements to maintain their local dialects as they have very limited to no media or entertainment outlets to cater to their local dialects. Back in the 1980s-90s, migrants from many parts of China settling in Guangzhou or anywhere in Guangdong showed more interest to learning Cantonese and wanting to integrate into the local cultural environment seeing it as trendy and rich due to the popularity of Hong Kong entertainment, but since the 2000s, the newer migrant settlers increasingly showed less interest in the local culture and very often strictly demanding the official obligations of the local residents to command speaking Mandarin as the official Chinese language to them. Though as of the 2020s, some additional renewed efforts to preserve the Cantonese language and culture have been introduced with some schools in Guangzhou now starting to teach some limited Cantonese language classes, activities related to Cantonese language and culture and as well as hosting Cantonese appreciation cultural events. Many local Cantonese speaking families in Guangdong province overall in general including in Guangzhou have started placing more stronger emphasis to encourage the use of Cantonese with their children to preserve the local language and culture. In a 2018 report study by Shan Yunming and Li Sheng, the report showed that 90% of people living in Guangzhou are bilingual in both Cantonese and Mandarin, though fluency will vary depending on if they are locally born to the city and the surrounding Guangdong province or migrants from other provinces, which shows how much importance the Cantonese language still has in the city despite the strict policy rules from the government to be using Mandarin as the country's official language.[23][24][25][26][27][28]

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.[29] Additionally, Cantonese media and popular culture from Hong Kong is popular throughout the region.

Vietnam

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.[30] 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.[31] Many speakers reflect their exposure to Vietnamese with a Vietnamese accent or a tendency to code-switch between Cantonese and Vietnamese.[citation needed]

Malaysia

In Malaysia, Cantonese is widely spoken amongst the Malaysian Chinese community in the capital city of Kuala Lumpur[32] and the surrounding areas in the Klang Valley (Petaling Jaya, Ampang, Cheras, Selayang, Sungai Buloh, Puchong, Shah Alam, Kajang, Bangi, and Subang Jaya). The language is also widely spoken as well in the town of Sekinchan in the district of Sabak Bernam located in the northern part of Selangor state and also in the state of Perak, especially in the state capital city of Ipoh and its surrounding towns of Gopeng, Batu Gajah, and Kampar of the Kinta Valley region plus the towns of Tapah and Bidor in the southern part of the Perak state, and also widely spoken in the eastern Sabahan town of Sandakan as well as the towns of Kuantan, Raub, Bentong, and Mentakab in Pahang state, and they are also found in other areas such as Sarikei, Sarawak, and Mersing, Johor.

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.[33]

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.[34][35]

Cantonese spoken in Malaysia and Singapore often exhibits influences from Malay and other Chinese varieties spoken in the country, such as Hokkien and Teochew.[36]

The Guangxi Cantonese dialect is still somewhat often spoken in parts of Malaysia.

Singapore

In Singapore, Mandarin is the official variety of the Chinese language used by the government, which has a Speak Mandarin Campaign (SMC) seeking to actively promote the use of Mandarin at the expense of other Chinese varieties. Cantonese is spoken by a little over 15% of Chinese households in Singapore. Despite the government's active promotion of SMC, the Cantonese-speaking Chinese community has been relatively successful in preserving its language from Mandarin compared to other dialect groups.[37]

Notably, all nationally produced non-Mandarin Chinese TV and radio programs were stopped after 1979.[38] The prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, then, also stopped giving speeches in Hokkien to prevent giving conflicting signals to the people.[38] 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 such as 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.[39]

Nevertheless, since the government restriction on media in non-Mandarin varieties was relaxed in the mid-1990s and 2000s, the presence of Cantonese in Singapore has grown substantially. Forms of popular culture from Hong Kong, such as television series, cinema and pop music have become popular in Singaporean society, and non-dubbed original versions of the media became widely available. Consequently, there is a growing number of non-Cantonese Chinese Singaporeans being able to understand or speak Cantonese to some varying extent, with a number of educational institutes offering Cantonese as an elective language course.[40]

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.[41] 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.[42]

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.[43] Among Chinese-speaking Thai households, Cantonese is the fourth most-spoken variety of Chinese after Teochew, Hakka and Hainanese.[44] 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.[45]

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 such as 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.[46]

North America

United States

 
Street in Chinatown, San Francisco. Cantonese has traditionally been the dominant Chinese variant among Chinese populations in the Western world.

458,840 Americans spoke Cantonese at home according to a 2005–2009 American Community Survey.[47]

Over a period of 150 years,[specify] Guangdong has been the place-of-origin for most Chinese emigrants to Western nations; one coastal county, Taishan (or Tóisàn, where the Sìyì or 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.[48] 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.

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.[49] 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,[50][51] 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.[52] 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.[53][54][55][56][57][58][59]

In Northern California, especially the San Francisco Bay Area, Cantonese has historically and continues to dominate in the Chinatowns of San Francisco and Oakland, as well as the surrounding suburbs and metropolitan area, although since the late 2000s a concentration of Mandarin speakers has formed in Silicon Valley. In contrast, Southern California hosts a much larger Mandarin-speaking population, with Cantonese found in more historical Chinese communities such as that of Chinatown, Los Angeles, and older Chinese ethnoburbs such as San Gabriel, Rosemead, and Temple City.[60] Mandarin predominates in much of the emergent Chinese American enclaves in eastern Los Angeles County and other areas of the metropolitan region.

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.[52][61]

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.[62] 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.[63] 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.[64]

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.[65]

Australia

Cantonese has traditionally been the dominant Chinese language of the Chinese Australian community since the first ethnic Chinese settlers arrived in the 1850s. It maintained this status 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.[66]

Cultural role

Letter to the Emperor by Su Xun, 1058, recited and explained in Cantonese by Jasper Tsang.

Spoken Chinese has numerous regional and local varieties, many of which are mutually unintelligible. Most of these are rare outside their native areas, though they may be spoken outside of China. Many varieties also have Literary and colloquial readings of Chinese characters for newer standard reading sounds. Since a 1909 Qing dynasty decree, China has promoted Mandarin for use in education, the media, and official communications.[67] The proclamation of Mandarin as the official national language, however, was not fully accepted by the Cantonese authorities in the early 20th century, who argued for the "regional uniqueness" of their own local language and commercial importance of the region.[68] Unlike other non-Mandarin Chinese varieties, Cantonese persists in a few state television and radio broadcasts today.

Nevertheless, there have been recent attempts to minimize the use of Cantonese in China. The most notable has been the 2010 proposal that Guangzhou Television increase its broadcast in Mandarin at the expense of Cantonese programs. This however led to protests in Guangzhou, which eventually dissuaded authorities from going forward with the proposal.[69] Additionally, there are reports of students being punished for speaking other Chinese languages at school, resulting in a reluctance of 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.

Increasingly since the 1997 Handover, Cantonese has been used as a symbol of local identity in Hong Kong, largely through the development of democracy in the territory and desinicization practices to emphasise a separate Hong Kong identity.[72]

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.[52][61]

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.[73] 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.[73]

Cantonese films date to the early days of Chinese cinema, and the first Cantonese talkie, White Gold Dragon (白金龍), was made in 1932 by the Tianyi Film Company.[74] 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.[68][75] From the mid-1970s to the 1990s, Cantonese films made in Hong Kong were very popular in the Chinese speaking world.

Phonology

Initials and finals

The de facto standard pronunciation of Cantonese is that of Canton (Guangzhou). Hong Kong Cantonese has some minor variations in phonology, but is largely identical to standard Guangzhou Cantonese.

In Hong Kong and Macau, certain phoneme pairs have merged. Although termed as "lazy sound" (懶音) and considered substandard to Guangzhou pronunciation, the phenomenon has been widespread in the territories since the early 20th century. The most notable difference between Hong Kong and Guangzhou pronunciation is the substitution of the liquid nasal (/l/) for the nasal initial (/n/) in many words.[76] An example of this is manifested in the word for you (), pronounced as néih in Guangzhou and as léih in Hong Kong.

Another key feature of Hong Kong Cantonese is the merging of the two syllabic nasals /ŋ̩/ and /m̩/. This can be exemplified in the elimination of the contrast of sounds between (Ng, a surname) (ng4/ǹgh in Guangzhou pronunciation) and (not) (m4/m̀h in Guangzhou pronunciation). In Hong Kong, both words are pronounced as the latter.[77]

Lastly, the initials /kʷ/ and /kʷʰ/ can be merged into /k/ and /kʰ/ when followed by /ɔː/. An example is in the word for country (), pronounced in standard Guangzhou as gwok but as gok with the merge. Unlike the above two differences, this merge is found 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 of /ŋ/ initial into null initial.
  • Merging of /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/.
  • Merging of the rising tones (陰上 2nd and 陽上 5th).[78]

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. 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 (such as syllables ending in -t, -p, or -k).

Tones

Generally speaking, Cantonese is a tonal language with six phonetic tones.

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]

Syllable type
Tone name dark flat
(陰平)
dark rising
(陰上)
dark departing
(陰去)
light flat
(陽平)
light rising
(陽上)
light departing
(陽去)
Description high level,
high falling
medium rising medium level low falling,
very low level
low rising low level
Yale or Jyutping
tone number
1 2 3 4 5 6
Example
Tone letter siː˥, siː˥˧ siː˧˥ siː˧ siː˨˩, siː˩ siː˩˧ siː˨
IPA diacritic síː, sîː sǐː sīː si̖ː, sı̏ː si̗ː sìː
Yale diacritic sī, sì si sìh síh sih

Written Cantonese

As Cantonese is used primarily in Hong Kong, Macau, and other overseas Chinese communities, it is usually written with traditional Chinese characters. However, it includes extra characters as well as characters with different meanings from written vernacular Chinese due to the presence of words that either do not exist in standard Chinese or correspond with spoken Cantonese. This system of written Cantonese is often found in colloquial contexts such as entertainment magazines and social media, as well as on advertisements.

In contrast, standard written Chinese continues to be used in formal literature, professional and government documents, television and movie subtitles, and news media. 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.

Romanization

Cantonese romanization systems are based on the accents of Canton and Hong Kong, and have helped define the concept of Standard Cantonese. The major systems are: Jyutping, Yale, the Chinese government's Guangdong Romanization, and Meyer–Wempe. While they do not differ greatly, Jyutping and Yale are the two most used and taught systems today in the West.[80] Additionally, Hong Kong linguist Sidney Lau modified the Yale system for his popular Cantonese-as-a-second-language course and is still in use today.

While the governments of Hong Kong and Macau utilize a romanization system for proper names and geographic locations, they are inconsistent in the transcription of some sounds and the systems are not taught in schools. Furthermore, the system of Macau differs slightly from Hong Kong's in that the spellings are influenced by the Portuguese language due to colonial history. For example, while some words under Macau's romanization system are the same as Hong Kong's (e.g., the surnames Lam 林, Chan 陳), instances of the letter ⟨u⟩ under Hong Kong's romanization system are often replaced by ⟨o⟩ under the Macau romanization system (e.g., Chau vs Chao 周, Leung vs Leong 梁). Both the spellings of Hong Kong and Macau Cantonese romanization systems do not look similar to the mainland China's pinyin system. Generally, plain stops are written with voiced consonants (/p/, /t/, /ts/, and /k/ as b, d, z/j, and g respectively), and aspirated stops with unvoiced ones, as in pinyin.

Early Western efforts

Systematic efforts to develop an alphabetic representation of Cantonese began with the arrival of Protestant missionaries 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 with minor variations 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 romanization system embodied the phonological system in a local dialect rhyme dictionary, the Fenyun cuoyao, which was widely used and easily available 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 the Fenyun. To adapt the system to the needs of users at a time when there were only local variants and no standard—although the speech of the western suburbs, Xiguan, of Guangzhou was the prestige variety at the time—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 an open circle (upper register tones) or an underlined open circle (lower register tones) 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 marking of tones using the acute accent to mark "rising" tones and the grave to mark "going" tones and no diacritic for "even" tones and marking upper register tones by italics (or underlining in handwritten work). "Entering" tones could be distinguished by their consonantal ending. Nicholas Belfeld Dennys used Chalmers romanization in his primer. This method of marking tones was adopted in the Yale romanization (with low register tones marked with an 'h'). A new romanization was developed in the first decade of the twentieth century which eliminated the diacritics on vowels by distinguishing vowel quality by spelling differences (e.g. a/aa, o/oh). Diacritics were used only for marking tones.

The name of Tipson is associated with this new romanization which still embodied the phonology of the Fenyun to some extent. It is the system used in Meyer-Wempe and Cowles' dictionaries and O'Melia's textbook and many other works in the first half of the twentieth century. It was the standard romanization until the Yale system supplanted it. The distinguished linguist Y. R. Chao developed a Cantonese adaptation of his Gwoyeu Romatzyh system. The Barnett-Chao romanization system was first used in Chao's Cantonese Primer, published in 1947 by Harvard University Press (The Cantonese Primer was adapted for Mandarin teaching and published by Harvard University Press in 1948 as Mandarin Primer). The BC system was also used in textbooks published by the Hong Kong government.

Cantonese romanization in Hong Kong

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 derived an IPA-based transcription system, the S. L. Wong system, used by many Chinese dictionaries later published in Hong Kong. Although Wong also derived a romanization scheme, also known as the S. L. Wong system, it is not widely used as his transcription scheme. This system was preceded by the Barnett–Chao system used by the Hong Government Language School.

The romanization advocated by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong (LSHK) is called Jyutping. The phonetic values of some consonants are closer to the approximate equivalents in IPA than in other systems. Some effort has been undertaken to promote Jyutping, but the success of its proliferation within the region has yet to be examined.

Another popular scheme is Cantonese Pinyin, which is the only romanization system accepted by Hong Kong Education and Manpower Bureau and Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority. Books and studies for teachers and students in primary and secondary schools usually use this scheme. But there are teachers and students who use the transcription system of S.L. Wong.

Despite the efforts to standardize Cantonese romanization, those learning the language may feel frustrated that most native Cantonese speakers, regardless of their level of education, are unfamiliar with any romanization system. Because Cantonese is primarily a spoken language and does not carry its own writing system (written Cantonese, despite having some Chinese characters unique to it, primarily follows modern standard Chinese, which is closely tied to Mandarin), it is not taught in schools.[citation needed] As a result, locals do not learn any of these systems. In contrast with Mandarin-speaking areas of China, Cantonese romanization systems are excluded in the education systems of both Hong Kong and the Guangdong province. In practice, Hong Kong follows a loose, unnamed romanization scheme used by the Government of Hong Kong.

Google Cantonese input uses Yale, Jyutping or Cantonese Pinyin, Yale being the first standard.[81][82]

Comparison

Differences between the three main standards are highlighted in bold. Note that Jyutping and Cantonese Pinyin recognize certain sounds used in a few colloquial words (such as /tɛːu˨/ 掉, /lɛːm˧˥/ 舐, and /kɛːp˨/ 夾) but have not been officially recognized in other systems such as Yale.[83][84]

Initials

Romanization system Initial consonant
Labial Dental/Alveolar Velar Glottal Sibilant Labial–velar Approximant
Yale b p m f d t n l g k ng h j ch s gw kw y w
Cantonese Pinyin b p m f d t n l g k ng h dz ts s gw kw j w
Jyutping b p m f d t n l g k ng h z c s gw kw j w
IPA p m f t n l k ŋ h ts tsʰ s kʷʰ j w

Finals

Romanization system Main vowel
// /ɐ/ /ɛː/, /e/ //, /ɪ/
Yale a aai aau aam aan aang aap aat aak a[note 1] ai au am an ang ap at ak e ei eng ek i iu im in ing ip it ik
Cantonese Pinyin aa aai aau aam aan aang aap aat aak aa[note 1] ai au am an ang ap at ak e ei eu em eng ep ek i iu im in ing ip it ik
Jyutping aa aai aau aam aan aang aap aat aak a[note 1] ai au am an ang ap at ak e ei eu em eng ep ek i iu im in ing ip it ik
IPA aːi aːu aːm aːn aːŋ aːp aːt aːk ɐ[note 1] ɐi ɐu ɐm ɐn ɐŋ ɐp ɐt ɐk ɛː ei ɛːu ɛːm ɛːŋ ɛːp ɛːk iːu iːm iːn ɪŋ iːp iːt ɪk
Romanization system Main vowel Syllabic consonant
/ɔː/, /o/ //, /ʊ/ /œː/ /ɵ/ //
Yale o oi ou on ong ot ok u ui un ung ut uk eu eung euk eui eun eut yu yun yut m ng
Cantonese Pinyin o oi ou on ong ot ok u ui un ung ut uk oe oeng oek oey oen oet y yn yt m ng
Jyutping o oi ou on ong ot ok u ui un ung ut uk oe oeng oet oek eoi eon eot yu yun yut m ng
IPA ɔː ɔːi ou ɔːn ɔːŋ ɔːt ɔːk uːi uːn ʊŋ uːt ʊk œː œːŋ œːt œːk ɵy ɵn ɵt yːn yːt ŋ̩
  1. ^ a b c d 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".[83]

Tones

Romanization system Tone
Dark (陰) Light (陽) Checked (入聲)
Yale ā,à á a àh áh ah āk ak ahk
Cantonese Pinyin 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Jyutping 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 3 6
Chao Tone Contour 55, 53 35 33 21, 11 24, 13 22 5 3 2
IPA Tone Letters[85] ˥, ˥˧ ˧˥ ˧ ˨˩, ˩ ˨˦, ˩˧ ˨ ˥ ˧ ˨

See also

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Further reading

  • Benoni, Lanctot (1867). Chinese and English Phrase Book: With the Chinese Pronunciation Indicated in English. San Francisco: A. Roman & Company. OCLC 41220764. OL 13999723M.
  • Bridgman, Elijah Coleman (1841). A Chinese Chrestomathy in the Canton Dialect. Macao: S. Wells Williams. OCLC 4614795. OL 6542029M.
  • Matthew, W. (1880). The Book of a Thousand Words: Translated, Annotated and Arranged So As to Indicate the Radical Number and Pronunciation (in Mandarin and Cantonese) of Each Character in the Text. Stawell: Thomas Stubbs. OL 13996959M.
  • Morrison, Robert (1828). Vocabulary of the Canton Dialect: Chinese Words and Phrases. Macao: Steyn. hdl:2027/uc1.b4496041. OCLC 17203540.
  • Williams, Samuel Wells (1856). Tonic Dictionary of the Chinese Language in The Canton Dialect. Canton: Chinese Repository. OCLC 6512080. OL 14002589M.
  • Zee, Eric (1991). "Chinese (Hong Kong Cantonese)". Illustrations of the IPA. Journal of the International Phonetic Association. 21 (1): 46–48. doi:10.1017/S0025100300006058.


External links

  • "Multi-function Chinese Character Database" 漢語多功能字庫 (in Chinese). The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
  • Cantonese Tools
  • 粵語/廣東話參考資料 Yue References by wordshk – GitHub Pages. GitHub.

cantonese, this, article, about, variety, chinese, widely, spoken, guangdong, hong, kong, macau, related, languages, dialects, chinese, people, group, that, speaks, this, language, people, other, uses, disambiguation, traditional, chinese, 廣東話, simplified, chi. This article is about the variety of Chinese widely spoken in Guangdong Hong Kong and Macau For related languages and dialects see Yue Chinese For the people group that speaks this language see Cantonese people For other uses see Cantonese disambiguation Cantonese traditional Chinese 廣東話 simplified Chinese 广东话 Cantonese Yale Gwongdung wa is a language within the Chinese Sinitic branch of the Sino Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou historically known as Canton and its surrounding area in Southeastern China It is the traditional prestige variety of the Yue Chinese dialect group which has over 80 million native speakers 1 While the term Cantonese specifically refers to the prestige variety it is often used to refer to the entire Yue subgroup of Chinese including related but largely mutually unintelligible languages and dialects such as Taishanese Cantonese廣東話 Gwongdung waGwongdung wa written in traditional Chinese left and simplified Chinese right charactersNative toChina Hong Kong Macau and overseas communitiesRegionChinaGuangdongGuangxi MacauHong KongSingaporeMalaysiaIndonesiaVietnamThailandAustraliaChristmas IslandNew ZealandUnited StatesCanadaUnited KingdomEthnicityCantonese peopleLanguage familySino Tibetan SiniticChineseYueYuehaiCantoneseDialectsXiguan Hong Kong MalaysianWriting systemWritten CantoneseCantonese BrailleWritten ChineseOfficial statusOfficial language in Hong Kong MacauRecognised minoritylanguage in Malaysia VietnamLanguage codesISO 639 3 a href https iso639 3 sil org code yue class extiw title iso639 3 yue yue a superset for all Yue dialects Glottologcant1236Linguasphere79 AAA maCantonese is viewed as a vital and inseparable part of the cultural identity for its native speakers across large swaths of Southeastern China Hong Kong and Macau as well as in overseas communities In mainland China it is the lingua franca of the province of Guangdong being the majority language of the Pearl River Delta and neighbouring areas such as Guangxi It is also the dominant and co official language of Hong Kong and Macau Cantonese is also widely spoken amongst Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia most notably in Vietnam and Malaysia as well as in Singapore and Cambodia to a lesser extent and throughout the Western world Although Cantonese shares much vocabulary with Mandarin the two Sinitic languages are mutually unintelligible largely because of phonological differences but also due to differences in grammar and vocabulary Sentence structure in particular the placement of verbs 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 Mandarin written form or Standard Chinese 2 3 However it is only non verbatim with respect to vernacular Cantonese as it is possible to read Standard Chinese text verbatim with formal Cantonese 4 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 such as on social media and comic books 2 3 Contents 1 Names 2 History 3 Geographic distribution 3 1 Hong Kong and Macau 3 2 Mainland China 3 3 Southeast Asia 3 3 1 Vietnam 3 3 2 Malaysia 3 3 3 Singapore 3 3 4 Cambodia 3 3 5 Thailand 3 3 6 Indonesia 3 4 North America 3 4 1 United States 3 4 2 Canada 3 5 Western Europe 3 5 1 United Kingdom 3 5 2 France 3 5 3 Portugal 3 6 Australia 4 Cultural role 5 Phonology 5 1 Initials and finals 5 2 Tones 6 Written Cantonese 7 Romanization 7 1 Early Western efforts 7 2 Cantonese romanization in Hong Kong 7 3 Comparison 7 3 1 Initials 7 3 2 Finals 7 3 3 Tones 8 See also 9 References 9 1 Citations 9 2 Works cited 10 Further reading 11 External linksNames EditCantoneseTraditional Chinese廣東話Cantonese YaleGwongdung waTranscriptionsStandard MandarinHanyu PinyinGuǎngdōnghuaYue CantoneseYale RomanizationGwongdung waJyutpingGwong2dung1 waa2 Canton speech or Guangzhou speech Traditional Chinese廣州話Cantonese YaleGwongjau waTranscriptionsStandard MandarinHanyu PinyinGuǎngzhōuhuaYue CantoneseYale RomanizationGwongjau waJyutpingGwong2zau1 waa2In English the term Cantonese can be ambiguous Cantonese proper is the variety native to the city of Canton which is the traditional English name of Guangzhou This narrow sense may be specified as Canton language 5 or Guangzhou language 1 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 Yuhtyuh In this article Cantonese is used for Cantonese proper Historically speakers called this variety Canton speech 廣州話 广州话 Gwongjau wa 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 Saangsing wa or plain speech 白話 白话 Baahkwa Also academically called Canton prefecture speech 廣府話 广府话 Gwongfu wa citation needed 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 Gwongdung wa or simply as Chinese 中文 Jungman 6 7 History EditSee also Yue Chinese 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 Cantonese was also used in the popular Yue ōu Muyu and Nanyin folksong genres as well as Cantonese opera 10 11 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 12 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 Around this period 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 13 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 14 Geographic distribution EditHong Kong and Macau Edit See also Hong Kong Cantonese The official languages of Hong Kong are Chinese and English as defined in the Hong Kong Basic Law 15 The Chinese language has many different varieties of which Cantonese is one Given the traditional predominance of Cantonese within Hong Kong it is the de facto official spoken form of the Chinese language used in the Hong Kong Government and all courts and tribunals It is also used as the medium of instruction in schools alongside English 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 Edit 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 Macau to Portugal in 1557 and Hong 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 the lingua franca of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces even after Mandarin was made the official language of the government by the Qing dynasty in the early 1900s 16 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 17 While the Chinese government encourages the use of Standard Mandarin rather than local varieties of Chinese in broadcasts 18 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 19 20 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 14 Nevertheless the place of local Cantonese language and culture remains contentious as with other non Mandarin Chinese languages 21 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 recent 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 22 Despite some decline in Cantonese usage in Guangdong province its survival is still doing better than other Chinese dialects due to the local cultural prestige pride popularity and especially with the wide availability and popularity of Cantonese entertainment and media from both Guangzhou and especially from Hong Kong which is maintaining the encouragements of the local Cantonese speakers to want to continue to preserve their culture and language versus other Chinese dialectal speaking regions are much more limited with their encouragements to maintain their local dialects as they have very limited to no media or entertainment outlets to cater to their local dialects Back in the 1980s 90s migrants from many parts of China settling in Guangzhou or anywhere in Guangdong showed more interest to learning Cantonese and wanting to integrate into the local cultural environment seeing it as trendy and rich due to the popularity of Hong Kong entertainment but since the 2000s the newer migrant settlers increasingly showed less interest in the local culture and very often strictly demanding the official obligations of the local residents to command speaking Mandarin as the official Chinese language to them Though as of the 2020s some additional renewed efforts to preserve the Cantonese language and culture have been introduced with some schools in Guangzhou now starting to teach some limited Cantonese language classes activities related to Cantonese language and culture and as well as hosting Cantonese appreciation cultural events Many local Cantonese speaking families in Guangdong province overall in general including in Guangzhou have started placing more stronger emphasis to encourage the use of Cantonese with their children to preserve the local language and culture In a 2018 report study by Shan Yunming and Li Sheng the report showed that 90 of people living in Guangzhou are bilingual in both Cantonese and Mandarin though fluency will vary depending on if they are locally born to the city and the surrounding Guangdong province or migrants from other provinces which shows how much importance the Cantonese language still has in the city despite the strict policy rules from the government to be using Mandarin as the country s official language 23 24 25 26 27 28 Southeast Asia Edit 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 29 Additionally Cantonese media and popular culture from Hong Kong is popular throughout the region Vietnam Edit See also Hoa people 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 30 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 31 Many speakers reflect their exposure to Vietnamese with a Vietnamese accent or a tendency to code switch between Cantonese and Vietnamese citation needed Malaysia Edit Main article Malaysian Cantonese See also Malaysian Chinese Cantonese In Malaysia Cantonese is widely spoken amongst the Malaysian Chinese community in the capital city of Kuala Lumpur 32 and the surrounding areas in the Klang Valley Petaling Jaya Ampang Cheras Selayang Sungai Buloh Puchong Shah Alam Kajang Bangi and Subang Jaya The language is also widely spoken as well in the town of Sekinchan in the district of Sabak Bernam located in the northern part of Selangor state and also in the state of Perak especially in the state capital city of Ipoh and its surrounding towns of Gopeng Batu Gajah and Kampar of the Kinta Valley region plus the towns of Tapah and Bidor in the southern part of the Perak state and also widely spoken in the eastern Sabahan town of Sandakan as well as the towns of Kuantan Raub Bentong and Mentakab in Pahang state and they are also found in other areas such as Sarikei Sarawak and Mersing Johor 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 33 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 34 35 Cantonese spoken in Malaysia and Singapore often exhibits influences from Malay and other Chinese varieties spoken in the country such as Hokkien and Teochew 36 The Guangxi Cantonese dialect is still somewhat often spoken in parts of Malaysia Singapore Edit See also Chinese Singaporeans and Languages of Singapore In Singapore Mandarin is the official variety of the Chinese language used by the government which has a Speak Mandarin Campaign SMC seeking to actively promote the use of Mandarin at the expense of other Chinese varieties Cantonese is spoken by a little over 15 of Chinese households in Singapore Despite the government s active promotion of SMC the Cantonese speaking Chinese community has been relatively successful in preserving its language from Mandarin compared to other dialect groups 37 Notably all nationally produced non Mandarin Chinese TV and radio programs were stopped after 1979 38 The prime minister Lee Kuan Yew then also stopped giving speeches in Hokkien to prevent giving conflicting signals to the people 38 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 such as 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 xin 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 39 Nevertheless since the government restriction on media in non Mandarin varieties was relaxed in the mid 1990s and 2000s the presence of Cantonese in Singapore has grown substantially Forms of popular culture from Hong Kong such as television series cinema and pop music have become popular in Singaporean society and non dubbed original versions of the media became widely available Consequently there is a growing number of non Cantonese Chinese Singaporeans being able to understand or speak Cantonese to some varying extent with a number of educational institutes offering Cantonese as an elective language course 40 Cambodia Edit 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 41 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 42 Thailand Edit 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 43 Among Chinese speaking Thai households Cantonese is the fourth most spoken variety of Chinese after Teochew Hakka and Hainanese 44 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 45 Indonesia Edit See also Indonesian Chinese Language 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 such as 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 46 North America Edit United States Edit Main article Chinese language and varieties in the United States Street in Chinatown San Francisco Cantonese has traditionally been the dominant Chinese variant among Chinese populations in the Western world 458 840 Americans spoke Cantonese at home according to a 2005 2009 American Community Survey 47 Over a period of 150 years specify Guangdong has been the place of origin for most Chinese emigrants to Western nations one coastal county Taishan or Toisan where the Siyi or 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 48 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 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 49 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 50 51 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 52 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 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 In Northern California especially the San Francisco Bay Area Cantonese has historically and continues to dominate in the Chinatowns of San Francisco and Oakland as well as the surrounding suburbs and metropolitan area although since the late 2000s a concentration of Mandarin speakers has formed in Silicon Valley In contrast Southern California hosts a much larger Mandarin speaking population with Cantonese found in more historical Chinese communities such as that of Chinatown Los Angeles and older Chinese ethnoburbs such as San Gabriel Rosemead and Temple City 60 Mandarin predominates in much of the emergent Chinese American enclaves in eastern Los Angeles County and other areas of the metropolitan region 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 52 61 Canada Edit 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 62 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 Edit United Kingdom Edit The overwhelming majority of Chinese speakers in the United Kingdom use Cantonese with about 300 000 British people claiming it as their first language 63 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 Edit 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 64 Portugal Edit 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 65 Australia Edit Cantonese has traditionally been the dominant Chinese language of the Chinese Australian community since the first ethnic Chinese settlers arrived in the 1850s It maintained this status 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 66 Cultural role EditSee also Cantonese culture and Culture of Hong Kong source source source source source source source source source source source source Letter to the Emperor by Su Xun 1058 recited and explained in Cantonese by Jasper Tsang Spoken Chinese has numerous regional and local varieties many of which are mutually unintelligible Most of these are rare outside their native areas though they may be spoken outside of China Many varieties also have Literary and colloquial readings of Chinese characters for newer standard reading sounds Since a 1909 Qing dynasty decree China has promoted Mandarin for use in education the media and official communications 67 The proclamation of Mandarin as the official national language however was not fully accepted by the Cantonese authorities in the early 20th century who argued for the regional uniqueness of their own local language and commercial importance of the region 68 Unlike other non Mandarin Chinese varieties Cantonese persists in a few state television and radio broadcasts today Nevertheless there have been recent attempts to minimize the use of Cantonese in China The most notable has been the 2010 proposal that Guangzhou Television increase its broadcast in Mandarin at the expense of Cantonese programs This however led to protests in Guangzhou which eventually dissuaded authorities from going forward with the proposal 69 Additionally there are reports of students being punished for speaking other Chinese languages at school resulting in a reluctance of 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 Increasingly since the 1997 Handover Cantonese has been used as a symbol of local identity in Hong Kong largely through the development of democracy in the territory and desinicization practices to emphasise a separate Hong Kong identity 72 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 52 61 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 73 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 73 Cantonese films date to the early days of Chinese cinema and the first Cantonese talkie White Gold Dragon 白金龍 was made in 1932 by the Tianyi Film Company 74 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 68 75 From the mid 1970s to the 1990s Cantonese films made in Hong Kong were very popular in the Chinese speaking world Phonology EditMain article Cantonese phonology See also Hong Kong Cantonese Initials and finals Edit The de facto standard pronunciation of Cantonese is that of Canton Guangzhou Hong Kong Cantonese has some minor variations in phonology but is largely identical to standard Guangzhou Cantonese In Hong Kong and Macau certain phoneme pairs have merged Although termed as lazy sound 懶音 and considered substandard to Guangzhou pronunciation the phenomenon has been widespread in the territories since the early 20th century The most notable difference between Hong Kong and Guangzhou pronunciation is the substitution of the liquid nasal l for the nasal initial n in many words 76 An example of this is manifested in the word for you 你 pronounced as neih in Guangzhou and as leih in Hong Kong Another key feature of Hong Kong Cantonese is the merging of the two syllabic nasals ŋ and m This can be exemplified in the elimination of the contrast of sounds between 吳 Ng a surname ng4 ǹgh in Guangzhou pronunciation and 唔 not m4 m h in Guangzhou pronunciation In Hong Kong both words are pronounced as the latter 77 Lastly the initials kʷ and kʷʰ can be merged into k and kʰ when followed by ɔː An example is in the word for country 國 pronounced in standard Guangzhou as gwok but as gok with the merge Unlike the above two differences this merge is found 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 of ŋ initial into null initial Merging of 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 Merging of the rising tones 陰上 2nd and 陽上 5th 78 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 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 such as syllables ending in t p or k Tones Edit Generally speaking Cantonese is a tonal language with six phonetic tones 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 Syllable typeTone name dark flat 陰平 dark rising 陰上 dark departing 陰去 light flat 陽平 light rising 陽上 light departing 陽去 Description high level high falling medium rising medium level low falling very low level low rising low levelYale or Jyutpingtone number 1 2 3 4 5 6Example 詩 史 試 時 市 是Tone letter siː siː siː siː siː siː siː siː IPA diacritic siː siː sǐː siː si ː si ː si ː siːYale diacritic si si si si sih sih sihWritten Cantonese EditMain articles Written Cantonese and Cantonese Braille As Cantonese is used primarily in Hong Kong Macau and other overseas Chinese communities it is usually written with traditional Chinese characters However it includes extra characters as well as characters with different meanings from written vernacular Chinese due to the presence of words that either do not exist in standard Chinese or correspond with spoken Cantonese This system of written Cantonese is often found in colloquial contexts such as entertainment magazines and social media as well as on advertisements In contrast standard written Chinese continues to be used in formal literature professional and government documents television and movie subtitles and news media 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 Romanization EditThis section needs additional citations for verification Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources Unsourced material may be challenged and removed Find sources Cantonese news newspapers books scholar JSTOR May 2021 Learn how and when to remove this template message It has been suggested that this section be split out into another article titled Romanisation of Cantonese Discuss June 2021 Cantonese romanization systems are based on the accents of Canton and Hong Kong and have helped define the concept of Standard Cantonese The major systems are Jyutping Yale the Chinese government s Guangdong Romanization and Meyer Wempe While they do not differ greatly Jyutping and Yale are the two most used and taught systems today in the West 80 Additionally Hong Kong linguist Sidney Lau modified the Yale system for his popular Cantonese as a second language course and is still in use today While the governments of Hong Kong and Macau utilize a romanization system for proper names and geographic locations they are inconsistent in the transcription of some sounds and the systems are not taught in schools Furthermore the system of Macau differs slightly from Hong Kong s in that the spellings are influenced by the Portuguese language due to colonial history For example while some words under Macau s romanization system are the same as Hong Kong s e g the surnames Lam 林 Chan 陳 instances of the letter u under Hong Kong s romanization system are often replaced by o under the Macau romanization system e g Chau vs Chao 周 Leung vs Leong 梁 Both the spellings of Hong Kong and Macau Cantonese romanization systems do not look similar to the mainland China s pinyin system Generally plain stops are written with voiced consonants p t ts and k as b d z j and g respectively and aspirated stops with unvoiced ones as in pinyin Early Western efforts Edit Systematic efforts to develop an alphabetic representation of Cantonese began with the arrival of Protestant missionaries 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 with minor variations embodied in the works of James Dyer Ball Ernst Johann Eitel and Immanuel Gottlieb Genahr 1910 Bridgman and Williams based their system on the phonetic alphabet and diacritics proposed by Sir William Jones for South Asian languages Their romanization system embodied the phonological system in a local dialect rhyme dictionary the Fenyun cuoyao which was widely used and easily available 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 the Fenyun To adapt the system to the needs of users at a time when there were only local variants and no standard although the speech of the western suburbs Xiguan of Guangzhou was the prestige variety at the time 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 an open circle upper register tones or an underlined open circle lower register tones 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 marking of tones using the acute accent to mark rising tones and the grave to mark going tones and no diacritic for even tones and marking upper register tones by italics or underlining in handwritten work Entering tones could be distinguished by their consonantal ending Nicholas Belfeld Dennys used Chalmers romanization in his primer This method of marking tones was adopted in the Yale romanization with low register tones marked with an h A new romanization was developed in the first decade of the twentieth century which eliminated the diacritics on vowels by distinguishing vowel quality by spelling differences e g a aa o oh Diacritics were used only for marking tones The name of Tipson is associated with this new romanization which still embodied the phonology of the Fenyun to some extent It is the system used in Meyer Wempe and Cowles dictionaries and O Melia s textbook and many other works in the first half of the twentieth century It was the standard romanization until the Yale system supplanted it The distinguished linguist Y R Chao developed a Cantonese adaptation of his Gwoyeu Romatzyh system The Barnett Chao romanization system was first used in Chao s Cantonese Primer published in 1947 by Harvard University Press The Cantonese Primer was adapted for Mandarin teaching and published by Harvard University Press in 1948 as Mandarin Primer The BC system was also used in textbooks published by the Hong Kong government Cantonese romanization in Hong Kong Edit Main article Hong Kong Government Cantonese Romanisation 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 derived an IPA based transcription system the S L Wong system used by many Chinese dictionaries later published in Hong Kong Although Wong also derived a romanization scheme also known as the S L Wong system it is not widely used as his transcription scheme This system was preceded by the Barnett Chao system used by the Hong Government Language School The romanization advocated by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong LSHK is called Jyutping The phonetic values of some consonants are closer to the approximate equivalents in IPA than in other systems Some effort has been undertaken to promote Jyutping but the success of its proliferation within the region has yet to be examined Another popular scheme is Cantonese Pinyin which is the only romanization system accepted by Hong Kong Education and Manpower Bureau and Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority Books and studies for teachers and students in primary and secondary schools usually use this scheme But there are teachers and students who use the transcription system of S L Wong Despite the efforts to standardize Cantonese romanization those learning the language may feel frustrated that most native Cantonese speakers regardless of their level of education are unfamiliar with any romanization system Because Cantonese is primarily a spoken language and does not carry its own writing system written Cantonese despite having some Chinese characters unique to it primarily follows modern standard Chinese which is closely tied to Mandarin it is not taught in schools citation needed As a result locals do not learn any of these systems In contrast with Mandarin speaking areas of China Cantonese romanization systems are excluded in the education systems of both Hong Kong and the Guangdong province In practice Hong Kong follows a loose unnamed romanization scheme used by the Government of Hong Kong Google Cantonese input uses Yale Jyutping or Cantonese Pinyin Yale being the first standard 81 82 Comparison Edit Differences between the three main standards are highlighted in bold Note that Jyutping and Cantonese Pinyin recognize certain sounds used in a few colloquial words such as tɛːu 掉 lɛːm 舐 and kɛːp 夾 but have not been officially recognized in other systems such as Yale 83 84 Initials Edit Romanization system Initial consonantLabial Dental Alveolar Velar Glottal Sibilant Labial velar ApproximantYale b p m f d t n l g k ng h j ch s gw kw y wCantonese Pinyin b p m f d t n l g k ng h dz ts s gw kw j wJyutping b p m f d t n l g k ng h z c s gw kw j wIPA p pʰ m f t tʰ n l k kʰ ŋ h ts tsʰ s kʷ kʷʰ j wFinals Edit Romanization system Main vowel aː ɐ ɛː e iː ɪ Yale a aai aau aam aan aang aap aat aak a note 1 ai au am an ang ap at ak e ei eng ek i iu im in ing ip it ikCantonese Pinyin aa aai aau aam aan aang aap aat aak aa note 1 ai au am an ang ap at ak e ei eu em eng ep ek i iu im in ing ip it ikJyutping aa aai aau aam aan aang aap aat aak a note 1 ai au am an ang ap at ak e ei eu em eng ep ek i iu im in ing ip it ikIPA aː aːi aːu aːm aːn aːŋ aːp aːt aːk ɐ note 1 ɐi ɐu ɐm ɐn ɐŋ ɐp ɐt ɐk ɛː ei ɛːu ɛːm ɛːŋ ɛːp ɛːk iː iːu iːm iːn ɪŋ iːp iːt ɪkRomanization system Main vowel Syllabic consonant ɔː o uː ʊ œː ɵ yː Yale o oi ou on ong ot ok u ui un ung ut uk eu eung euk eui eun eut yu yun yut m ngCantonese Pinyin o oi ou on ong ot ok u ui un ung ut uk oe oeng oek oey oen oet y yn yt m ngJyutping o oi ou on ong ot ok u ui un ung ut uk oe oeng oet oek eoi eon eot yu yun yut m ngIPA ɔː ɔːi ou ɔːn ɔːŋ ɔːt ɔːk uː uːi uːn ʊŋ uːt ʊk œː œːŋ œːt œːk ɵy ɵn ɵt yː yːn yːt m ŋ a b c d 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 83 Tones Edit Romanization system ToneDark 陰 Light 陽 Checked 入聲 Yale a a a a ah ah ah ak ak ahkCantonese Pinyin 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9Jyutping 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 3 6Chao Tone Contour 55 53 35 33 21 11 24 13 22 5 3 2IPA Tone Letters 85 See also Edit China portal Hong Kong portal Language portalCantonese grammar Cantonese profanity Cantonese slang Languages of China List of English words of Cantonese origin List of varieties of Chinese Protection of the Varieties of ChineseReferences EditCitations Edit a b Cantonese at Ethnologue 23rd ed 2020 a b Matthews amp Yip 1994 p 5 a b Snow Donald B 2004 Cantonese as Written Language The Growth of a Written Chinese Vernacular Hong Kong University Press p 48 ISBN 9789622097094 Archived from the original on 2016 04 24 Retrieved 2015 11 09 Lee Kwai Leung Wai 2012 The status of Cantonese in the education policy of Hong Kong Multilingual Education 2 2 doi 10 1186 2191 5059 2 2 Ramsey 1987 p page needed 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 a b Yue Hashimoto 1972 p 4 a b Li 2006 p 126 Yue Hashimoto 1972 pp 5 6 Ramsey 1987 p 99 Yue Hashimoto 1972 p 5 Yue Hashimoto 1972 p 70 a b Zhang amp Yang 2004 p 154 Basic Law Chapter I General Principles archived from the original on 29 January 2018 retrieved 29 January 2018 via basiclaw gov hk Coblin 2000 pp 549 550 Ramsey 1987 pp 3 15 Zhōngguo guǎngbo dianshi boyin yuan zhǔchi ren zhiye daode zhǔnze 中国广播电视播音员主持人职业道德准则 Code of Professional Ethics of Radio and Television Hosts of China in Chinese Guojia guangbo dianying dianshi zongju 2005 02 07 Archived from the original on 2011 07 18 Retrieved 2010 07 26 Chinese Language Programes South China University of Technology Archived from the original on 2016 02 29 Chinese Language South China Normal University Archived from the original on 2016 03 04 The Slow Death of China s Dialects The McGill International Review Retrieved 2021 09 11 Wong Edward 2010 07 26 Move to Limit Cantonese on Chinese TV Is Assailed The New York Times Archived from the original on 2018 09 24 Retrieved 2018 09 24 Why Cantonese lost to Mandarin on its own turf 12 March 2018 Canton s Unease As Mandarin Spreads Locals Face Identity Crisis 10 November 2021 The Slow Death of China s Dialects Under threat Cantonese speakers worry about their language s future DW News YouTube Canton s Unease As Mandarin Spreads Locals Face Identity Crisis 10 November 2021 广州人语言态度与粤语认同传承 语言战略研究 3 3 34 41 doi 10 19689 j cnki cn10 1361 h 20180304 West Barbara A 2009 Encyclopedia of the Peoples of Asia and Oceania Facts on File pp 289 290 ISBN 978 0816071098 eBook ISBN 978 1438119137 Report on Results of the 2019 Census General Statistics Office of Vietnam Retrieved 1 May 2020 Khanh 1993 p 31 Sin Ka Lin 2009 Mǎlaixiya de san ge hanyǔ fangyan zhōng zhi jilongpō Guǎngdōnghua yue tan 马来西亚的三个汉语方言 中之 吉隆坡广东话阅谭 A Review on Kuala Lumpur s Cantonese in Part of The Three Chinese Dialects in Malaysia PDF Xinjiyuan xueyuan xuebao New Era College Academic Journal in Simplified Chinese 6 83 131 Archived PDF from the original on 2013 05 11 Retrieved 29 January 2018 Sim Tze Wei 2012 Why are the Native Languages of the Chinese Malaysians in Decline Journal of Taiwanese Vernacular 4 1 75 Malaysian Cantonese IPS Community 2014 05 27 Archived from the original on 2014 05 27 Retrieved 2019 08 01 Sim Tze Wei 2012 Why are the Native Languages of the Chinese Malaysians in 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Other than English Spoken in 1980 and Changes in Relative Rank 1990 2010 United States Census Bureau US Census Mandarin Use Up in Chinese American Communities HSK Tests Online Associated Press December 29 2003 Archived from the original on 16 March 2018 Retrieved 29 January 2018 As Mandarin Language Becomes Standard Chinatown Explores New Identity Medill Reports Chicago Archived from the original on 2012 01 20 Retrieved 2012 01 20 a b c Tan Chee Beng ed 2007 Chinese Transnational Networks Taylor amp Francis p 115 Semple Kirk October 21 2009 In Chinatown Sound of the Future Is Mandarin The New York Times p 2 Archived from the original on 2017 10 19 Retrieved March 22 2014 Nelson Katie September 15 2011 Asian Boom in Brooklyn Along N Lline Neighborhoods in Brooklyn Census Data Shows New York Daily News Archived from the original on 2012 07 31 Retrieved 2021 05 08 Robbins Liz April 15 2015 With an Influx of Newcomers Little Chinatowns Dot a Changing Brooklyn The New York Times Chinese 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Kong Cinema Scarecrow Press p 427 ISBN 978 0810855205 Matthews amp Yip 2011 p 4 a b Matthews amp Yip 2011 p 37 Bauer Robert S Cheung Kwan hin Cheung Pak man 2003 Variation and Merger of the Rising Tones in Hong Kong Cantonese PDF Language Variation and Change 15 2 211 225 doi 10 1017 S0954394503152039 hdl 10397 7632 S2CID 145563867 Bauer amp Benedict 1997 119 120 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 Google Cantonese Input 28 August 2017 Archived from the original on 16 March 2018 Retrieved 29 January 2018 via Google Play Guǎngdōnghua pinyin Google sōuxun jianyi 廣東話拼音 Google 搜尋建議 Google Hong Kong in Chinese Archived from the original on 18 January 2018 Retrieved 29 January 2018 a b Linguistic Society of Hong Kong Jyutping 粵拼 Archived from the original on 2021 01 06 Retrieved 2020 10 07 粵音節表 Table of Cantonese Syllables Retrieved 2021 07 20 Matthews amp Yip 1994 p page needed Works cited Edit Bauer Robert S Benedict Paul K 1997 Modern Cantonese Phonology Walter de Gruyter ISBN 978 3 11 014893 0 Coblin W South 2000 A Brief History of Mandarin Journal of the American Oriental Society 120 4 537 552 doi 10 2307 606615 JSTOR 606615 Khanh Tran 1993 The Ethnic Chinese and Economic Development in Vietnam Institute of Southeast Asian Studies ISBN 978 981 3016 66 8 Lewis M Paul ed 2005 Indonesia Ethnologue Languages of the World 15th ed Dallas T X SIL International ISBN 978 1 55671 159 6 retrieved 26 January 2010 Li Qingxin 2006 Maritime Silk Road trans William W Wang China Intercontinental Press ISBN 978 7 5085 0932 7 Matthews Stephen Yip Virginia 1994 Cantonese A Comprehensive Grammar London Routledge ISBN 9780203420843 Matthews Stephen Yip Virginia 2011 Cantonese A Comprehensive Grammar 2nd ed Ramsey S Robert 1987 The Languages of China Princeton New Jersey Princeton University Press ISBN 978 0 691 01468 5 Yue Hashimoto Anne Oi Kan 1972 Studies in Yue Dialects 1 Phonology of Cantonese Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 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 ISBN 978 1 4020 8038 8 Further reading EditBenoni Lanctot 1867 Chinese and English Phrase Book With the Chinese Pronunciation Indicated in English San Francisco A Roman amp Company OCLC 41220764 OL 13999723M Bridgman Elijah Coleman 1841 A Chinese Chrestomathy in the Canton Dialect Macao S Wells Williams OCLC 4614795 OL 6542029M Matthew W 1880 The Book of a Thousand Words Translated Annotated and Arranged So As to Indicate the Radical Number and Pronunciation in Mandarin and Cantonese of Each Character in the Text Stawell Thomas Stubbs OL 13996959M Morrison Robert 1828 Vocabulary of the Canton Dialect Chinese Words and Phrases Macao Steyn hdl 2027 uc1 b4496041 OCLC 17203540 Williams Samuel Wells 1856 Tonic Dictionary of the Chinese Language in The Canton Dialect Canton Chinese Repository OCLC 6512080 OL 14002589M Zee Eric 1991 Chinese Hong Kong Cantonese Illustrations of the IPA Journal of the International Phonetic Association 21 1 46 48 doi 10 1017 S0025100300006058 External links Edit Multi function Chinese Character Database 漢語多功能字庫 in Chinese The Chinese University of Hong Kong Hong Kong Government site on the HK Supplementary Character Set HKSCS Cantonese Tools 粵語 廣東話參考資料 Yue References by wordshk GitHub Pages GitHub Cantonese at Wikipedia s sister projects Media from Commons Textbooks from Wikibooks Phrasebook from Wikivoyage Cantonese Edition from Wikipedia Data from Wikidata Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Cantonese amp oldid 1131499131, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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