Back कैंटोनीज ANP صينية يؤ Arabic ܠܫܢܐ ܩܢܛܘܢܝܐ ARC Kanton dili Azerbaijani Kantones BCL Кантонскі дыялект Byelorussian Кантонски език Bulgarian ক্যান্টনীয় উপভাষা Bengali/Bangla Kantoneg Breton Cantonès Catalan
| Cantonese | |
|---|---|
| |
 | |
| Native to | China, Hong Kong, Macau, and overseas communities |
| Region | Guangdong, eastern Guangxi |
Early forms | |
| Dialects | |
| Official status | |
Official language in | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | yue (superset for all Yue dialects) |
| Glottolog | cant1236 |
| Linguasphere | 79-AAA-ma |
 Parts of China where Cantonese is spoken. | |
| This article is part of the series on the |
| Cantonese language |
|---|
| Yue Chinese |
| Grammar |
|
| Phonology |
Cantonese (traditional Chinese: 廣東話; simplified Chinese: 广东话; Jyutping: gwong2 dung1 waa2; Cantonese Yale: Gwóngdùng 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 Pearl River Delta. It is the traditional prestige variety of the Yue Chinese group, which has over 82.4 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 partially mutually intelligible varieties like 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 among Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia (most notably in Vietnam and Malaysia, as well as in Singapore and Cambodia to a lesser extent), the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.
Although Cantonese shares much vocabulary with Mandarin and other varieties of Chinese, these Sinitic languages are not mutually intelligible, largely because of phonological differences, but also due to the differences in grammar and vocabulary. Sentence structure, in particular the verb placement, sometimes differs between the two varieties. A notable difference between Cantonese and Mandarin is how the spoken word is written; both can be recorded verbatim, but very few Cantonese speakers are knowledgeable in the full Cantonese written vocabulary, so a non-verbatim formalized written form is adopted, which is more akin to the written Standard Mandarin.[2][3] However, it is only non-verbatim with respect to vernacular Cantonese as it is possible to read Standard Chinese text verbatim in formal Cantonese, often with only slight changes in lexicon that are optional depending on the reader's choice of register.[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 like social media and comic books.[2][3]
- ^ Cantonese at Ethnologue (23rd ed., 2020)
- ^ a b Matthews & 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. hdl:10397/98877.
