Yue Chinese

This article is about all of the Cantonese (Yue) dialects. For the dialect of Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macau, see Standard Cantonese.

Cantonese or Yue (粵語) is a major dialect group or language of the Chinese language, a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Cantonese is spoken by 71 million people. The area with the highest concentration are in Guangdong and some parts of Guangxi in southern mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau. Other major groups include Chinese minorities in Southeast Asia and by many overseas Chinese of Guangdong and Hong Kong origin worldwide. The name is derived from Canton, a former romanized Western name for Guangdong.

Different dialects of Cantonese exist, the most widely spoken is the Guangzhou dialect, also referred to simply as "Cantonese". The Guangzhou dialect is a lingua franca of not just Guangdong province, but also the overseas Cantonese speaking diaspora. The Guangzhou dialect is also spoken in Hong Kong, one of the financial and cultural centres of China. In addition to the Guangzhou dialect, the Taishan dialect, one of the sei yap or siyi ([四邑] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hani (help)) dialects that come from Guangdong counties from whence a majority of Exclusion-era Cantonese-Chinese immigrants emigrated, continues to be spoken both by recent immigrants from Taishan and even by third-generation Chinese Americans of Cantonese ancestry alike.

Like other major varieties of Chinese, Cantonese is often considered a dialect of a single Chinese language for cultural or nationalistic reasons, though in practice Cantonese, like many other Chinese language varieties, is mutually unintelligible with many other Chinese "dialects". See Identification of the varieties of Chinese.

Dialects

There are at least four major dialect groups of Cantonese: Yuehai, which includes the dialect spoken in Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macau as well as the dialects of Zhongshan, and Dongguan; Sìyì ([四邑] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hani (help), sei yap), exemplified by Taishan dialect, which used to be ubiquitous in American Chinatowns before 1970; Gaoyang, as spoken in Yangjiang; and Guinan [桂南] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hani (help) (Nanning dialect) spoken widely in Guangxi. However, Cantonese generally refers to the Yuehai dialect.

For the last 150 years, Guangdong Province has been the place of origin of most of the Chinese emigrants in western countries; one county near its center, Taishan (or Tóisàn, where the Sìyì or sei yap dialect of Cantonese is spoken), alone may have been the home to more than 60% of Chinese immigrants to the US before 1965, and as a result, Guangdong dialects such as sei yap (the dialects of Taishan, Enping, Kaiping, Xinhui; Counties) and what is now called mainstream Cantonese (with a heavy Hong Kong influence) have been the major spoken dialects abroad, particularly in western countries. The dialect of Zhongsan in Pearl River Delta is spoken by many Chinese immigrants in Hawaii, and some in San Francisco and in the Sacramento River Delta (see Locke, California); it is much closer to Cantonese than the Taishan dialect, but has "flatter" tones in pronunciation than Cantonese.

The dialectical situation is now changing in the United States; recent Chinese emigrants originate from many different areas including mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South-east Asia. Those from mainland China and Taiwan all speak Standard Mandarin (putonghua/guoyu) and their native local dialects, which will include dialects of Min (Hokkien and other Fujianese dialects), dialects of Wu, dialects of Mandarin, and dialects of Cantonese. As a result Standard Mandarin is increasingly becoming more common as the Chinese lingua franca amongst the overseas Chinese.

In addition, there are at least three other major Chinese languages spoken in Guangdong Province— Standard Mandarin, which is used for formal occasions, education, the media, and as a national lingua franca; Min-nan (Southern Min) spoken in the eastern regions bordering Fujian, such as those from Chaozhou and Shantou; and Hakka, the language of the Hakka people. Standard Mandarin is mandatory through the state education system, but in Cantonese speaking households, the popularization of Cantonese-language media (Hong Kong films, television serials, and Cantopop, most notably), isolation from the other regions of China, local identity, and the existence of the non-Mandarin speaking Cantonese diaspora (including Hong Kong) ensure that the language has a life of its own. Most wuxia films from Canton are filmed originally in Cantonese and then dubbed or subtitled in Standard Mandarin or English or both.

Phonology

File:Map-Sinitic Languages.gif

The area coloured in red shows the Cantonese-speaking region in the PRC.

See Standard Cantonese for a discussion of the sounds of Standard Cantonese and pages on individual dialects for their phonologies

Cantonese and Mandarin

Although Standard Mandarin (Putonghua/guoyu) is the standard and official language in mainland China and Taiwan and is spoken by nearly everyone with different variations in addition to their native local dialects (which includes Cantonese in Guangdong), Cantonese is one of the main languages in many overseas Chinese communities including Hong Kong, South-east Asia, North America, and Europe. This is because many of the emigrants and/or their ancestors originated from Guangdong before the widespread use of Mandarin, or from Hong Kong where Mandarin is not commonly used.

In some ways, Cantonese is a more conservative language than Mandarin, and in other ways it is not. For example many southern dialects including Cantonese have retained consonant endings from older varieties of Chinese that have been lost in Mandarin. On the other hand, Cantonese have split tones and merged other sounds.

The Taishan dialect, which in the U.S. nowadays is heard mostly spoken by Chinese actors in old American TV shows and movies (e.g. Hop Sing on Bonanza), is even more conservative than the Guangzhou/Hong Kong variants of Cantonese. It has preserved the initial /n/ sound of words, whereas post-World War II-born Hong Kong Cantonese speakers have changed it to an /l/ sound in many cases ("ngàuh lām" instead of "ngàuh nām" for "stewed beef" [牛腩] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hani (help)) and more recently drop the "ng-" initial (so that it changes further to "àuh lām"); this seems to have arisen from some kind of street affectation as opposed to systematic phonological change. The common word for "who" in Taishan is "sŭe" ([誰] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hant (help)), which is almost the same as in Mandarin, whereas Cantonese has changed it to "bīn go" ([邊個] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hant (help)).

Cantonese sounds quite different from Mandarin, mainly because it has a different set of syllables. The rules for syllable formation are different; for example, there are syllables ending in non-nasal consonants (e.g. "lak"). It also has different tones and more than Mandarin. Cantonese is generally considered to have 6 or 7 tones, the choice depending on whether a traditional distinction between a high-level and a high-falling tone is observed; the two tones in question have largely merged into a single, high-level tone, especially in Hong Kong Cantonese, which has tended to simplify traditional Chinese tones . Many (especially older) descriptions of the Cantonese sound system record a higher number of tones, e.g. 9 or 10. However, the extra tones differ only in that they end in p, t, or k; otherwise they can be modeled identically .

Cantonese preserves many syllable-final sounds that Mandarin has lost or merged. For example, the characters 裔, 屹, 藝, 艾, 憶, 譯, 懿, 誼, 肄, 翳, 邑, and 佚 are all pronounced "yì" in Mandarin, but they are all different in Cantonese (jeoi6, ngat6, ngai6, ngaai6, yik1, yik6, yi3, yi4, si3, ai3, yap1, and yat6, respectively). Like Hakka and Min Nan, Cantonese has preserved the final consonants [-m, -n, -ŋ -p, -t, -k] from Middle Chinese, while the Mandarin has been reduced to [-n, -ŋ]. For example, lacking the syllable-final sound "m"; the final "m" and final "n" from older varieties of Chinese have merged into "n" in Mandarin, e.g. Cantonese "taam6" (譚) and "taan4" (壇) versus Mandarin tán, "yim4" (鹽) and "yin4" (言) versus Mandarin yán, "tim1" (添) and "tin1" (天) versus Mandarin tiān, "hum4" (含) and "hon4" (寒) versus Mandarin hán. The examples are too numerous to list. Furthermore, nasals can be independent syllables in Cantonese words, e.g. "ng5" (五) "five," and "m4" (唔) "not".

A more drastic example is the character (學), pronounced *ɣæwk in Middle Chinese. Its modern pronunciations in Cantonese, Hakka, Taiwanese and Japanese are "hok6", "hok8" (pinjim), "ha̍k" (Pe̍h-ōe-jī) and "gaku" (Sino-Japanese), respectively, while the pronunciation in Mandarin is xué.

Differences also arise from Mandarin's relatively recent sound changes. One change, for example, merged [kʲ] with [tsɕ], and is reflected in historical Mandarin romanizations, such as Peking (Beijing), Kiangsi (Jiangxi), and Fukien (Fujian). This distinction is still preserved in Cantonese. For example, 晶, 精, 經 and 京 are all pronounced as "jīng" (jing1) in Mandarin, but in Cantonese, the first pair is pronounced "jing1", and the second pair "ging1".

However, Mandarin's vowel system is somewhat more conservative than Cantonese's, in that many diphthongs preserved in Mandarin have merged or been lost in Cantonese. Also, Mandarin makes a three-way distinction among alveolar, alveopalatal, and retroflex fricatives, distinctions that are not made by Cantonese. For example, jiang (將) and zhang (張) are two distinct syllables in Mandarin, but in Cantonese they have the same sound, "jeung1". (Both words have two pronunciations in : zoeng1 and zoeng3.)

There are clear sound correspondences in, for instance, the tones. For example, a fourth-tone (low falling tone) word in Cantonese is usually second tone (rising tone) in Mandarin.

This can be partly explained by their common descent from Middle Chinese (spoken), still with its different dialects. One way of counting tones gives Cantonese 9 tones, Mandarin 4 and Middle Chinese 4 (later split into 8). Within this system, Mandarin merged the so-called "yin" and "yang" tones except for the Ping (平, flat) category, while Cantonese not only preserved these, but split one of them into 2 over time. Also, within this system, Cantonese is the only Chinese dialect known to have split its tones rather than merge them since the time of Late Middle Chinese.

Most universities in the US do not teach and have not historically taught Cantonese. Most only offer Chinese classes in Standard Mandarin because it is the official language of both the People's Republic of China and Taiwan. In addition, Mandarin serves as the lingua franca used between people who do not speak the same dialect, and is spoken and understood by virtually everyone in mainland China and Taiwan. In addition, Mandarin was the court dialect formerly used in Qing Dynasty Imperial China. However, Cantonese courses can be found at some U.S. universities. Harvard University, Yale University, Stanford University, the University of Hawaii, Brigham Young University, San Jose State University, New York University and Cornell University are some examples. In Canada, where Cantonese is one of the most commonly spoken languages among immigrants, Cantonese courses can be taken in connection with various universities such as the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia. The language is also commonly taught in 'heritage language' programs in the public schools in areas where many children have parents who speak the language. It is easier for a Cantonese-speaker to understand Mandarin than for a Mandarin-speaker to understand Cantonese. This is because Cantonese speakers who do not speak Mandarin are educated to read and write in standard modern Chinese, but with Cantonese pronunciation when read aloud.

Written Cantonese

Main article: Written Cantonese

Standard written Chinese is, in essence, written Standard Mandarin. When reading aloud, Chinese people who do not speak Standard Mandarin usually use their local language's sound values for the characters. However, this written language sounds stilted and unnatural in some cases. Written Cantonese is the Cantonese language written as it is actually spoken. Unusual for a regional (i.e., non-Mandarin) Chinese language, Cantonese has a written form, developed over the last few decades in Hong Kong, and includes many unique characters that are not found in standard written Chinese. Readers who understand standard written Chinese but do not know Cantonese often find written Cantonese odd, and even unintelligible in parts, as it is different from standard written Chinese in grammar and vocabulary. However, written Cantonese is commonly used informally among Cantonese speakers. Circumstances where written Cantonese is used include conversations through instant messaging services, entertainment magazines and entertainment sections of newspapers, and sometimes subtitles in Hong Kong movies, and advertisements. It rarely finds its way into the subtitles of Western movies or TV shows, though The Simpsons is a notable exception.

Forms of written Chinese in Hong Kong:

1. Standard Written Chinese (traditional characters) used in Hong Kong SAR post-WWII Vernacular Reformation.
2. pakwa 日常白话 Colloquial Written Cantonese - currently used in journals, advertisements, etc. in Hong Kong SAR, overseas Cantonese Chinese communities.
3. Classical Cantonese Chinese - a reconstructed Neo-Classical written Chinese forms widely used in 1900s-90s Hong Kong in Cantonese opera lyrics, Cantonese Chinese poetic forms and especially in 80s cantopop.
4. Classical Chinese known as wenyanwen - a written Chinese form in poems and writings from the dynastic periods.

For colloquial vernacular usage, written Cantonese incorporates an entire range of characters and particles specific to the Cantonese spoken form. This is commonly used in publicity and journalistic writing in Hong Kong and Hong Kong-influenced regions. It reads exactly as Modern Standard Spoken Cantonese.

For literary and artistic reasons (such as calligraphy), standard literary Chinese, the classical wenyanwan is used.

Records of legal documents in Hong Kong also use written Cantonese sometimes, in order to record exactly what a witness has said.

Colloquial Cantonese is rarely used in formal forms of writing; formal written communication is almost always in standardized Mandarin or hanyu, albeit still pronounced in Cantonese by Cantonese speakers who do not speak Mandarin. However, written colloquial Cantonese does exist; it is used mostly for transcription of speech in tabloids, in some broadsheets, for some subtitles, for personal diaries, and in other informal forms of communication such as Internet bulletin boards (BBS) or e-mails. It is not uncommon to see the front page of a Cantonese paper written in hanyu, while the entertainment sections are, at least partly, in Cantonese. The vernacular writing system has evolved over time from a process of modifying characters to express lexical and syntactic elements found in Cantonese but not the standard written language. In spite of their vernacular origin and informal use, these characters have become so common in Hong Kong that the Hong Kong Government has incorporated them into a special Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS), as the same as special characters used for proper nouns.

A problem for the student of Cantonese is the lack of a widely accepted, standardized transcription system. Another problem is with Chinese characters: Cantonese uses the same system of characters as Mandarin, but it often uses different words, which have to be written with different or new characters. At least this is the case in Hong Kong, but in the Cantonese speaking area of mainland China, most people also speak Mandarin and generally use standard written Chinese. An example of Cantonese using a different word and a different character to write it: the Mandarin word for "to be" is shì and is written as 是, but in Cantonese the word for "to be" is hai6 and 係 is used in written Cantonese (係 is xì in Mandarin). In standard written Chinese 是 is normally used, though 係 can be found in classical literature and modern legal writing. In Hong Kong, 係 is often used in colloquial written Cantonese and therefore actively avoided and discouraged in formal writing; on the other hand, the use of 係 is relatively widespread in both mainland China and in Taiwan, in government publications and product descriptions, for example.

Many characters used in colloquial Cantonese writings are made up by putting a mouth radical (口) on the left hand side of another more well known character to indicate that the character is read like the right hand side, but it is only used phonetically in the Cantonese context. The characters , 叻, 吓, 吔, 呃, 咁, 咗, 咩, 哂, 哋, 唔, 唥, 唧, 啱, 啲, 喐, 喥, 喺, 嗰, 嘅, 嘜, 嘞, 嘢, 嘥, 嚟, 嚡, 嚿, 囖 etc. are commonly used in Cantonese writing.

As not all Cantonese words can be found in current encoding system, or the users simply do not know how to enter such characters on the computer, in very informal speech, Cantonese tends to use extremely simple romanization (e.g. use D as 啲), symbols (add an English letter "o" in front of another Chinese character; e.g. 㗎 is defined in Unicode, but will not display in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0, hence the proxy o架 is often used), homophones (e.g. use 果 as 嗰), and Chinese characters of different Mandarin meaning (e.g. 乜, 係, 俾 etc.) to compose a message.

For example, "你喺嗰喥好喇, 千祈咪搞佢啲嘢。" is often written in easier form as "你o係果度好喇, 千祈咪搞佢D野。" (character-by-character, approximately "you, be, there (two characters), good, (final particle), thousand, pray, don't, mess, he/she, genitive particle, thing"; translation: "Its okay that you're staying here, but please don't mess with his/her stuff").

Other common characters are unique to Cantonese or deviated from their Mandarin usage; these include: 乜, 冇, 仔, 佢, 佬, 係, 俾, 靚 etc.

The words represented by these characters are sometimes cognates with pre-existing Chinese words. However, their colloquial Cantonese pronunciations have diverged from formal Cantonese pronunciations. For example, in formal written Chinese, 無 (mou4) is the character used for "without". In spoken Cantonese, [冇] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hani (help) (mou5) has the same usage, meaning, and pronunciation as [無] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hani (help), differing only by tone. [冇] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hani (help) is actually a hollowed out writing of its antonym ([有] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hani (help)). [冇] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hani (help) represents the spoken Cantonese form of the word "without", while 無 represents the word used in Mandarin (pinyin: wú) and formal Chinese writing. However, 無 is still used in some instances in spoken Chinese in both dialects, like 無論 ("no matter what"). A Cantonese-specific example is the doublet [來/嚟] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hani (help), which means "to come". [來] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hani (help) (loi4) is used in formal writing; [嚟] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hani (help) (lei4) is the spoken Cantonese form.

History

Qin and Han

In ancient China, Guangdong was called Nanyue, and very few Han people lived there. Therefore, the Chinese language was not widely spoken there at that time. However, in the Qin Dynasty Chinese troops moved south and conquered the Baiyue territories, and thousands of Han people began settling in the Lingnan area. This migration led to the Chinese language being spoken in the Lingnan area. After Zhào Tuó was made the Duke of Nanyue by the Han Dynasty and given authority over the Nanyue region, many Han people entered the area and lived together with the Nanyue population, consequently affecting the livelihood of the Nanyue people as well as stimulating the spread of the Chinese language. Although thousands of Han people settled in the south they were a minority compared with the indigenous Nanyue population. Therefore, early Cantonese was a mixture of local Nanyue language and Chinese language.

Sui

In the Sui Dynasty, Central China was in a period of war and discontent, and many people moved southwards to avoid war, forming the first mass migration of Han people into the South. As the population in the Lingnan area dramatically rose, the Chinese language in the south developed significantly. Thus, the Cantonese language began to develop more significant differences with central Chinese.

Tang

As the Han population in the Guangdong area continued to rise during the Tang Dynasty, some indigenous people living in the south had been culturally assimilated by the Han population, while others moved to other regions (such as Guangxi), developing their own dialects. At the time, Cantonese had been affected by central Chinese and became more standardized, but it further developed a more independent language structure, vocabulary, and grammar.

Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing

In the Song Dynasty, the differences between central Chinese and Cantonese became more significant, and the languages became more independent of one another. During the Yuan and Ming dynasties, Cantonese developed still further, developing its own characteristics.

Mid to Late Qing

In the late Qing, the dynasty had gone through a period of maritime ban under the Hai jin. Guangzhou remained one of the only cities that allowed trading with foreign countries, since the trade chamber of commerce was established there. Therefore, some foreigners learned Cantonese and some Imperial government officials spoke Cantonese, making the language very popular in Cantonese speaking Guangzhou.

20th century

Since 1949, the majority of Cantonese speakers also speak Putonghua (Mandarin) as well as Cantonese. In the Cantonese speaking region of mainland China Putonghua is used for formal purposes while Cantonese is used more in the home and informal situations.

In Hong Kong Putonghua has been used for dealings with non Cantonese-speaking mainland Chinese while Cantonese is used increasingly in Entertainment (rise of Hong Kong cinema), in business dealings with overseas Chinese communities, in addition to being used in the home and informal situations.

With the opening up of Hong Kong SAR to Mainland Chinese quality immigrants, many Northern Chinese, especially the merchant capitalist class, as well as the younger population has gained fluency in Cantonese through migration to the Guangdong-Greater Hong Kong region, as well as through exposure to overseas Chinese communities, and the most important factor-through Hong Kong cinema and media. Increasingly, the younger Chinese population has grown up to gain natural bilingualism and multilingualism, speaking and understanding Mandarin, Cantonese and their native dialect.

Nowadays, due to Putonghua being the medium of education on the mainland, many youngsters in the Cantonese speaking region in mainland China do not know specific historical vocabularies in Cantonese but Entertainment, Commercial and Trading vocabularies. The language is still widely spoken and learned by overseas Chinese of Guangdong and Hong Kong origin. As Hong Kong entrepreneurs move into developing real estate and cinemas on the Mainland, more Mandarin variant speakers have gained knowledge in Cantonese in addition to Mandarin, especially in Sichuan, Guangdong, Guangxi, Chaozhou and Zhejiang. Even the proud Shanghainese have increasingly used Cantonese loanwords in their vocabularies due to an expansion of their media and cinema industries through Hong Kong joint ventures.

See also

• Standard Cantonese
• Hong Kong Government Cantonese Romanisation
• Standard Cantonese Pinyin
• Jyutping
• Yale Romanization#Cantonese
• Written Cantonese
• Cantonese grammar
• Chinese written language
• Chinese input methods for computers

External links

Dictionaries

Cantonese dictionaries or databases with spoken Cantonese entries

• A Comparative Database of Modern Chinese and Cantonese: A Cantonese↔Standard Chinese Dictionary at the Chinese University of Hong Kong: This is one of the few online sites with an extensive database of spoken Cantonese terms and phrases on the Internet. Exclusively in Chinese.
• The CantoDict Project is a free, online Cantonese (characters, jyutping, and some pinyin; definition in English) dictionary updated frequently by volunteers from around the world. As well as tens of thousands of words, many of its example sentences may be listened to in MP3 format.
• Cantonese-Japanese Dictionary: This is an online Cantonese-Japanese dictionary aimed mainly at Japanese speakers. The corresponding Japanese-Cantonese dictionary is also on this site.

Character-only Cantonese pronunciation dictionaries

• The Chinese University of Hong Kong Research Centre for Humanities Computing: Chinese Character Database: With Word-formations Phonologically Disambiguated According to the Cantonese Dialect: A vast Chinese character database of over 13,000 characters with audio pronunciations in Cantonese. This site is viewable in Chinese and English. You can choose from seven transcription schemes to view character pronunciations. By default, the site is displayed in Chinese and uses the LSHK jyutping transcription scheme. To view the site in English and/or use a different transcription scheme, a cookies enabled browser is required. For each character you can find Cantonese pronunciations, Mandarin pronunciations, character ranking/frequency, Big5 encoding number, Unicode number, cangjie (chongkit) input code, and which radical the character can be found under using a traditional Chinese dictionary.
• Cantonese Talking Syllabary: in Chinese; require Big5 font
• Chinese Character Dictionary
• MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary: An online Chinese English dictionary supporting both Cantonese and Mandarin. (You need to click the compound word to get the individual Cantonese readings of each character; no direct Cantonese phrase pronunciation guide at the moment.) Standard Chinese words only. Vernacular Cantonese not supported

Other links

• Learn Cantonese: an English site dedicated to publishing Cantonese learning resources and reference materials.
• Classification of Yue Dialects
• Cantonese Tone Tool Add tone marks to romanized Cantonese
• Ethnologue report on Cantonese
• Hong Kong Government site on the HK Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS)
• Official Website for Free Cantonese Classes in New York City
• [第六屆國際粵方言研討會論文集] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hant (help) (Sixth International Cantonese Language Research Conference)
• [八十年代以後的粵方言研究] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hant (help) (Post-1980s Cantonese Language Research)
• Cantonese, an external wiki
• Profile and Linguistic Map of Cantonese
• Cantonese is losing its voice (Article preview available free; full access available for fee)