Cantonese
Variety of Yue Chinese / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Cantonese is the traditional prestige variety of Yue Chinese, a Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding Pearl River Delta, with over 82.4 million native speakers.[1]
Cantonese | |
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Native to | Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and overseas communities |
Region | Pearl River Delta |
Early forms | |
Dialects | |
Official status | |
Official language in | |
Regulated by | |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | yue (superset for all Yue dialects) |
Glottolog | cant1236 |
Linguasphere | 79-AAA-ma |
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 Chinese province of Guangdong (being the majority language of the Pearl River Delta) and neighbouring areas such as Guangxi.[verification needed] 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) and the Western world.
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]