Cantonese (linguistics) Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Cantonese or Yuè colloquially known as (廣東話/广东话, lit. "Guangdong speech" or more formally, 粤語 yuèyǔ, lit. "Yue dialect", just as 漢語 hànyǔ, the formal term for Mandarin, is the Han dialect; Yue is a formal term for the region now known as Guangdong and Guangxi) is one of the major dialectss of the Chinese language. It is mainly spoken in the south-eastern part of Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, by the Chinese minorities in Southeast Asia and by many overseas Chinese worldwide. Its name is derived from Canton, the former name of Guangzhou, the capital city of Guangdong Province. It is a tonal language.It is the lingua franca of the overseas Chinese diaspora, spoken by about 70 million people worldwide. While fewer than the nearly one billion of Mandarin speakers, it is rivalled overseas only by the 40 million speakers of Hokkien, or Southern Fujianese dialects, many of whom are located throughout Southeast Asia. Cantonese is most commonly spoken in Hong Kong, the financial and cultural capitol of the Cantonese diaspora, and in one form or another in many if not most Chinatowns around the world. For instance, sei yap or siyi (四邑) dialect, from the Guangdong counties where a majority of Exclusion-era Chinese immigrants emigrated, continues to be spoken both by recent immigrants from the mainland and even by third-generation Chinese Americans alike.
Like all other varieties of Chinese, there is plenty of dispute as to whether Cantonese is a language or a dialect. Please see here for the issues surrounding this dispute.
| Cantonese (粤語) | |
|---|---|
| Spoken in: | China, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other countries where Cantonese migrants have settled. |
| Region: | in China: central Guangdong province(the Pearl River Delta， including Hong Kong and Macau); eastern Guangxi Autonomous Region |
| Total speakers: | 66 million |
| Ranking: | 16 [1] |
| Genetic classification: | Sino-Tibetan Chinese Yue |
| Official status | |
| Official language of: | Hong Kong, Macau |
| Regulated by: | - |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-1 | zh |
| RFC 3066 | zh-yue |
| ISO 639-2(B) | chi |
| ISO 639-2(T) | zho |
| SIL | YUH |
| Table of contents |
|
2 Sounds and tones 3 Cantonese versus Mandarin 4 Romanization 5 Written Cantonese 6 External links |
There are at least four major dialect groups of Cantonese: Yuehai (including Zhongshan or Chungshan, and Tungkuan or Dongguan), the dialect spoken in Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macau; Siyi (sei yap), exemplified by Taishan (台山 Toisaan, Hoisaan) dialect, which used to be ubiquitous in American Chinatowns before 1970; Gaoyang, as spoken in Yangjiang; and Guinan (Nanning dialect) spoken widely in Guangxi. However, Cantonese generally refers to the Yuehai dialect.
For the last 150 years, Guangdong Province has been the home of most Chinese emigrants; one county near its center, Taishan (where the siyi 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 we understand to be mainstream Cantonese (with a heavy Hong Kong influence) have been the major spoken dialects abroad. As more and different kinds of Chinese emigrate, however, the situation is now changing, so that Min (Hokkien, or Fujianese dialect speakers) and Wu dialect speakers are also now heard, as well as Mandarin in increasing numbers from Taiwanese and mainland immigrants.
In addition, there are at least three other major Chinese languages spoken in Guangdong Province—Putonghua, which is official standard Mandarin, spoken in official occasions, used in education, and among the many internal migrants from the north seeking work in the relatively prosperous south; 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 minority, with whom the Cantonese- and Min-speaking majority (or bendi, natives) fought bloody wars during the Qing Dynasty. Hanyu is mandatory through the state education system, but in the household, the popularization of Cantonese-language media (Hong Kong films, television serials, and Cantopop, most notably), isolation from the north, and the economic strength of the Cantonese diaspora ensure that the language has a life of its own. Most wuxia films are filmed originally in Cantonese and then dubbed in both Mandarin or English.
There are six toness:
In Hong Kong, the high level tone is often used interchangeably with the high falling tone without affecting the meaning of the words being spoken. Most Hong Kong speakers are in general not consciously aware of when they use and when to use high level and high falling.
It is interesting to note that there are not actually more tone levels in Cantonese than in Mandarin (three if one excludes the Cantonese low falling tone, which begins on the third level and needs somewhere to fall), only Cantonese has a more complete set of tone courses.
Linguistically, Cantonese is a more conservative dialect than Mandarin. This can be seen, for example, by comparing the words for "I/me" (我) and "hunger" (餓). They are written using very similar characters, but in Mandarin their pronunciation is quite different ("wǒ" vs. "è"), whereas in Cantonese they are pronounced identically except for the respective tones (ngo5 vs ngo6 respectively). Since the characters hint at a similar pronunciation, it can be concluded that their ancient pronunciation was indeed similar (as preserved in Cantonese), but in Mandarin the two syllables acquired different pronunciations in the course of time.
Cantonese sounds quite different from Mandarin, mainly because it has a different set of syllables. The rules for syllable formation are a lot laxer than in Mandarin, for example there are syllables ending in non-nasal consonants (e.g. "lak"). It also provides a different set of tones.
Cantonese tends to preserve more variations of sound while Mandarin merged many of them. For example, the characters, (藝,憶,懿,邑,譯,佚) all pronounced as yi4 in Mandarin, but all different in Cantonese, they are pronounced as ngai6, yik1, yi3, yap1, yik6, yat6 respectively. However, Mandarin's vowel system is somewhat more conservative than Cantonese's, in that many diphthongs preserved in Mandarin are merged in Cantonese.
There is another very obvious difference between Cantonese and Mandarin. Mandarin lacks the ending sound of "m" such as "taam6" (譚) becomes tán, "yim4" (鹽) becomes yán, "tim1" (添) becomes tiān, "ham4" (含) becomes hán, etc., in Mandarin. The examples are too numerous to list.
However, there are clear sound correspondences in, for instance, the tones. For example, a fourth-tone word in Cantonese is usually spoken as second tone in Mandarin.
Despite the popularity of Cantonese, most universities in the US do not and have not historically taught Cantonese, but Mandarin, which is used officially by both the People's Republic of China and Republic of China, and formerly in Imperial China as the court dialect.
There are several major romanization schemes for Cantonese in circulation: Barnett-Chao, Gwohngdongwaa Pengyam, Meyer-Wempe, Penkyamp, and Yale. While they do not differ greatly, Yale is the one most commonly seen in the west today. The Hong Kong linguist Sidney Lau modified Yale for his popular Cantonese-as-a-second-language course, so that is also another system used today by contemporary Cantonese learners. The current one advocated by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong (LSHK) is called jyutping, which solves many of the inconsistencies and problems of the older, favored, and more familiar system of Yale romanization, but departs considerably from it in a number of ways unfamiliar to Yale users. Some effort has been undertaken to promote jyutping but it is too early to tell how successful it has been.
Colloquial Cantonese is rarely used in formal forms of writing; almost always formal written communication is conducted in standardized hanyu, albeit still pronounced in Cantonese. Written colloquial Cantonese does exist, however, mostly for transcription of speech in informal forms of communications. Thus it is not uncommon to see the front page of a daily written in hanyu, while the entertainment sections are, at least partly, in Cantonese. The vernacular writing system is derived from a process, over time, of modifying hanyu characters to express lexical and syntactic elements deemed unique to Cantonese. In spite of their vernacular origin and informal use, these characters have become so important for communication that the Hong Kong Government has incorporated them into a special Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS).
A main problem for the student of Cantonese is the lack of a widely accepted, standardized transcription system. The second problem is with the Chinese characters: Cantonese uses the same system of characters as Mandarin, but it often uses different words, which have to be written with different characters. At least this is the case in Hong Kong, but in mainland China, Cantonese is written with the exact same characters as Mandarin, though the characters stand for words not actually used in Cantonese. An example may help to clarify this:
The written word for "to be" is 是 in spoken Mandarin (pronounced shì) but is 係 in spoken Cantonese (pronounced hai6). In formal written Chinese, only 是 is used. However, in Hong Kong, 係 is sometimes used in colloquial written Cantonese.
See also:
This is an Article on Cantonese (linguistics). Page Contains Information, Facts Details or Explanation Guide About Cantonese (linguistics) Dialects of Cantonese
Sounds and tones
For purposes of rhyming, the first and fourth tones are traditionally grouped in the "flat category" (平聲), while the rest are "oblique" (仄聲).Cantonese versus Mandarin
Romanization
Written Cantonese
External links