Cantonese
Cantonese is the traditional prestige variety of Yue Chinese, a Sinitic language belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family. It originated in the city of Guangzhou and its surrounding Pearl River Delta. Although Cantonese specifically refers to the prestige variety in linguistics, the term is often used more broadly to describe the entire Yue subgroup of Chinese, including varieties such as Taishanese, which have limited mutual intelligibility with Cantonese.
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 and neighbouring areas such as Guangxi. It is also the dominant and co-official language of Hong Kong and Macau. Further, Cantonese is widely spoken among overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and the Western world. With about 80 million total speakers as of 2023, standard Cantonese is by far the most spoken variant of Yue Chinese and non-Mandarin Chinese language.
Although Cantonese shares much vocabulary with Mandarin and other varieties of Chinese, these Sinitic languages have very limited to no mutual intelligibility, largely because of phonological differences, but also 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. 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. This results in a situation in which a Cantonese and a Mandarin text may look similar but are pronounced differently. Conversely, written Cantonese is mostly used in informal settings like social media and comic books.
Names of Cantonese
In English, the term "Cantonese" can be ambiguous. "Cantonese" as used to refer to the language native to the city of Canton, which is the traditional English name of Guangzhou, was popularized by An English and Cantonese Pocket Dictionary, a bestseller by the missionary John Chalmers. Before 1859, this variant was often referred to in English as "the Canton dialect".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". In this article, "Cantonese" is used for Cantonese proper.
Historically, speakers called this variety "Guangzhou speech", although this term is now seldom used outside mainland China. In Guangdong and Guangxi, people also call it "provincial capital speech" or "plain speech". In academic linguistic circles, it is also referred to as "Guangzhou prefecture speech".
In Hong Kong and Macau, as well as among overseas Chinese communities, the language is referred to as "Guangdong speech" or "Canton Province Speech" or simply as "Chinese".
History
During the Southern Song period, Guangzhou became the cultural center of the region. 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. Specifically, the mutually intelligible speech of the Sam Yap, the Three Counties of Guangzhou, namely the historical counties of Panyu, Nanhai, and Shunde, came to be heralded as the standard. Cantonese was also used in the popular Yuè'ōu, Mùyú and Nányīn folksong genres, as well as Cantonese opera. 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.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. Much of the sources for this period of early Cantonese, such as the 18th century rime dictionary Fenyun Cuoyao and the 1828 Vocabulary of the Canton Dialect by the missionary Robert Morrison, were written in Guangzhou during this period.
After the First Opium War, centuries of maritime prohibitions ended. Large numbers of Cantonese people from the Pearl River Delta, especially merchants, subsequently migrated by boat to other parts of Guangdong and Guangxi. These migrants established enclaves of Cantonese in areas that primarily spoke other forms of Yue or even non-Sinitic languages such as Zhuang, as with the case of the Yong–Xun Yue dialect of Nanning. Many Cantonese migrants sailed also overseas, bringing the Cantonese language with them to Southeast Asia, North and South America, and Western Europe. Such enclaves of Cantonese are still found in Chinatowns across many of these major cities outside China. During the late 19th century, the pedagogical work Cantonese made easy, written by James Dyer Ball in 1883, articulated the provenance of the prestige accent of Cantonese: that of the district of Xiguan in the west of Guangzhou. It is known for its distinctive use of an apical vowel in some cases where modern Cantonese would use a final.
Throughout the 19th century and continuing into the 20th century, 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. The influx of such migrants into Hong Kong established Cantonese as the main language of the colony, supplanting local Yue Chinese varieties, which were closer to the dialects of neighboring Shenzhen and Dongguan, as well as the Hakka and Southern Min varieties of the region. With subsequent waves of migration into Hong Kong, even as late as the 1950s, the proportion of native Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong had not yet surpassed 50%; nonetheless, this figure has risen to above 90% since the 1970s. On the other hand, the indigenous variety of Yue Chinese in Macau had been close to that of Zhongshan, and this has had an effect on the tonal phonology of the Cantonese spoken in Macau.
As a significant proportion of the entertainment industry in China migrated to Hong Kong in the early decades of the 20th century, the Hong Kong-based entertainment industry underwent a transformation to suit overseas as well as domestic audiences. With the bifurcation of the film industry into Cantonese and Mandarin, the use of the Xiguan accent of Guangzhou as a conservative prestige accent of standard Cantonese was maintained in mass media, with films from the 1930s making prominent use of it. However, during this time many phonological changes can be detected, indicating the change from Early Cantonese to Modern Cantonese.
In mainland China, Standard Mandarin has been heavily promoted as the medium of instruction in schools and as the official language, especially after the communist takeover in 1949. Meanwhile, Cantonese has remained the official variety of Chinese in Hong Kong and Macau, both during and after the colonial period, under the policy of 'biliteracy and trilingualism'. Government and law still function predominantly in Cantonese in these jurisdictions, and officials speak Cantonese even at the most formal occasions.
Geographic distribution
Hong Kong and Macau
The official languages of Hong Kong are Chinese and English, as defined in the Hong Kong Basic Law. 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 neighbouring 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.
China
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 centre, 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.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 even after Mandarin was made the official language of the government by the Qing dynasty in the early 1900s. 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.
While the Chinese government encourages the use of Standard Mandarin rather than local varieties of Chinese in broadcasts, 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. The permitted usage of Cantonese in mainland China is largely a countermeasure against the influence from Hong Kong, which has historically enjoyed more media freedom than its former counterpart, as its Cantonese-language media has a substantial exposure and following in Guangdong.
Nevertheless, the place of local Cantonese language and culture remains contentious, as with other non-Mandarin Chinese languages. 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 centre of China, there have been concerns that the use of Cantonese in Guangzhou is diminishing in favour of Mandarin, both through the continual influx of Mandarin-speaking migrants from impoverished areas and strict government policies. As a result, Cantonese is being given a more important status by the natives than ever before as a common identity of the local people. This has led to initiatives to revive the language such as its introduction into school curricula and locally produced programs on broadcast media.