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The Cantonese Language
The Cantonese language is spoken by approximately 65 million people in the southern China provinces, Hong Kong and Macao as well as other South East Asian countries like Singapore, and in the other large Chinese communities around the world.
Also called Yue, Cantonese is one of the five major languages in China. The Cantonese language is from the Sino-Tibetan family of languages.
The word "Cantonese" originates from the former English name of Guangzhou, which is considered as the area where the language was born in its purest form. The city of Hong Kong, now an autonomous province of China, is the contemporary hub of the Cantonese language and culture.
The Cantonese language is the principal language in Chinese communities abroad because most Chinese immigrants came from Hong Kong. Cantonese is the language predominantly used for business around southeast Asia.
Colloquial Cantonese language is a constantly evolving language, with a large amount of fashionable expressions and slang words. Cantonese grammar is simple, with no verbs conjugations, and no prefixes or suffixes.
Cantonese in today's world
Overview and background of Cantonese
Cantonese is a language spoken by approximately 66 million people, mainly in south eastern China, but also amongst significant overseas Chinese communities around the world. In Asia, the countries of Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines have large Cantonese communities, and there are also a large number of speakers in Australia, Canada, the USA and the United Kingdom. As a result of the historical emigration of people from Cantonese areas in China, Cantonese was traditionally the most common form of Chinese spoken by overseas Chinese communities, although the rising importance of Mandarin is now beginning to change the situation. Within China, Cantonese is the daily language of Hong Kong and Macau, and is also widely spoken in neighbouring provinces such as Guangdong and Guangxi.
Historically Cantonese was seen more as a spoken language, rather than a written one (written Chinese has generally been formal standard Mandarin). However as Cantonese has increasingly diverged from Mandarin over time, written Chinese became somewhat distant from spoken Cantonese. A new, informal style of written Cantonese gradually emerged which was far closer to the spoken language and which had over a thousand additional Chinese characters, largely unintelligible to Mandarin speakers. This however is rarely used for formal writing situations, when standard written Mandarin is used instead.
Differences from spoken Mandarin
Spoken Cantonese sounds very different from Mandarin, as a result of a combination of differences in both pronunciation and grammar. One of the greatest differences is how `tones` are employed. Both languages are tonal, by which the meaning of a word frequently depends upon which one of a number of available tones it is assigned. In Mandarin there are five possible tones that a syllable may have, whereas in Cantonese there are nine. In addition, Mandarin syllables generally only ever end in a vowel, or a nasal consonant such as `n`, or `ng`. In contrast Cantonese syllables may end in other non-nasal consonants, for instance `k` or `p`.
Romanisation and encoding of Cantonese
There have been several different systems devised to attempt to write Cantonese with the latin alphabet, including the Meyer-Wempe system developed in the 1920`s, or the Yale system that was developed to assistant American students learning Cantonese. More recently, with the growth in computer communications, efforts have been made to encode Cantonese for computer input; this has proved difficult though, especially with the question of how to record the individual tone of a syllable. The Jyutping scheme was developed in the 1990`s by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong. This final scheme addresses the issue of Cantonese being a tonal language, and uses numbers to mark the different tones employed, thereby allowing tones to be digitally encoded.
Mandarin has also influenced efforts to encode Cantonese, in particular with the development of the Standard Cantonese Pinyin Scheme, based on the Pinyin romanisation scheme already employed in Mandarin; this has now become the only romanisation scheme accepted by several government agencies, for instance the Hong Kong Education and Manpower Bureau. With all the information at your fingertips, why not get started and try out your own Cantonese Language Course today?
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