Cantonese in the narrow sense, also known as Canton dialect or Guangzhou dialect, is the prestige dialect of the Yue branch of Chinese.^{[neutrality disputed]} It is spoken natively in and around the city of Guangzhou (Canton) in Southern China, by the majority population of Hong Kong and Macau, and as a lingua franca of Guangdong province and some neighbouring areas. It is used in Hong Kong and Macau as the spoken language of government and instruction in the schools. It is spoken by overseas Chinese communities in Canada, the United States and Australia, as well as throughout Europe and Southeast Asia, being the most widely spoken dialect and a lingua franca in many of these communities.

[edit] Names

In English, the term "Cantonese" is ambiguous. Cantonese proper is the dialect native to the city of Canton and its environs, including the areas of Zhongshan, Wuzhou, and Foshan^{[citation needed]}, and later brought to Hong Kong and Macau^{[citation needed]}; this narrow sense may be specified as "Guangzhou dialect" or "Canton dialect" in English.^[1]

However, "Cantonese" may also refer to the primary branch of Chinese which contains Cantonese proper as well as Taishanese and Gaoyang; this broader usage may be specified as "Yue" (粤). In this article, "Cantonese" will be used for Cantonese proper.

Native speakers of Cantonese customarily call their language "Guangzhou Prefecture Speech".^[2] In Guangdong province people also call it "Provincial Capital speech".^[3] In Hong Kong and Macau, people usually call it "Guangdong (Province) speech".^[4]. Outside of Guangzhou, people also call it "Baak Waa".^[5]

[edit] Cultural role

Chinese has numerous regional and local varieties, many of which are mutually unintelligible. Most of these are rarely used or heard outside their native areas by native speakers, although they may be spoken in homes outside of the country. For most of its history China has promoted Standard Mandarin for use in education, the media and for official communication,^[6] though a few state television and radio broadcasts are in Cantonese. However, due to the linguistic history of Hong Kong and Macau, as well as the use of Cantonese in many overseas Chinese communities, international usage of Cantonese has spread far out of proportion to its relatively small number of speakers in China, even though the majority of Cantonese speakers still live in mainland China.^{[citation needed]}

As the majority of Hong Kong and Macau people and/or their ancestors emigrated from Guangdong before the widespread use of Standard Mandarin, Cantonese is the variety of Chinese spoken in Hong Kong and Macau. Cantonese is also the only variety of Chinese other than Standard Mandarin to be used in official contexts. Because of their use by non-Mandarin-speaking Yue speakers overseas, the Cantonese and Taishanese dialects are some of the primary forms of Chinese that Westerners come into contact with.

Along with Mandarin and Hokkien, Cantonese is one of the few varieties of Chinese which has its own popular music, Cantopop. The prevalence of Hong Kong's popular culture has spurred some Chinese in other regions to learn Cantonese.^{[citation needed]} In Hong Kong, Cantonese is dominant in the domain of popular music, and many artists from Beijing and Taiwan have had to learn Cantonese so that they can make Cantonese versions of their recordings especially for distribution in Hong Kong.^[7] Some singers, including Faye Wong, Eric Moo, and singers from Taiwan, have been trained in Cantonese to add "Hong Kong-ness" to their performances.^[7]

[edit] Phonology

The standard pronunciation of the Cantonese language is that of Guangzhou, which is described at the Cantonese phonology article.

[edit] Written Cantonese

Cantonese has the most developed literature of any form of Chinese after Classical Chinese and Mandarin. It is used primarily in Hong Kong and in overseas Chinese communities. It uses characters not found in the Standard Mandarin, and is not easily intelligible to Mandarin speakers.

[edit] Romanization

Cantonese has a more standard romanized form than any variety of Chinese other than Mandarin and Classical Chinese. Cantonese romanization systems are based on the accent of Canton and Hong Kong, and have helped define the concept of Standard Cantonese. The major systems are Barnett–Chao, Meyer–Wempe, the Chinese government's Guangdong Romanization, Yale and Jyutping. While they do not differ greatly, Yale is the one most commonly seen in the west today^{[citation needed]}. The Hong Kong linguist Sidney Lau modified the Yale system for his popular Cantonese-as-a-second-language course, so that is another system used today by contemporary Cantonese learners.

[edit] Early Western effort

Systematic efforts to develop an alphabetic representation of Cantonese began with the arrival of Protestant missionaries in China early in the nineteenth century. Romanization was considered both a tool to help new missionaries learn the dialect more easily and a quick route for the unlettered to achieve gospel literacy. Earlier Catholic missionaries, mostly Portuguese, had developed romanization schemes for the pronunciation current in the court and capitol city of China but made few efforts at romanizing other dialects.

Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary in China published a "Vocabulary of the Canton Dialect" (1828) with a rather unsystematic romanized pronunciation. Elijah Coleman Bridgman and Samuel Wells Williams in their "Chinese Chrestomathy in the Canton Dialect" (1841) were the progenitors of a long-lived lineage of related romanizations with minor variations embodied in the works of James Dyer Ball, Ernst Johann Eitel, and Immanuel Gottlieb Genăhr (1910). Bridgman and Williams based their system on the phonetic alphabet and diacritics proposed by Sir William Jones for South Asian languages. Their romanization system embodied the phonological system in a local dialect rhyme dictionary, the Fenyun cuoyao, which was widely used and easily available at the time and is still available today. Samuel Wells Willams' Tonic Dictionary of the Chinese Language in the Canton Dialect (Yinghua fenyun cuoyao 1856), is an alphabetic rearrangement, translation and annotation of the Fenyun. In order to adapt the system to the needs of users at a time when there were only local variants and no standard—although the speech of the western suburbs, xiguan, of Guangzhou was the prestige variety at the time—Williams suggested that users learn and follow their teacher's pronunciation of his chart of Cantonese syllables. It was apparently Bridgman's innovation to mark the tones with an open circles (upper register tones) or an underlined open circle (lower register tones) at the four corners of the romanized word in analogy with the traditional Chinese system of marking the tone of a character with a circle (lower left for "even," upper left for "rising," upper right for "going," and lower right for "entering" tones). John Chalmers, in his "English and Cantonese pocket-dictionary" (1859) simplified the marking of tones using the acute accent to mark "rising" tones and the grave to mark "going" tones and no diacritic for "even" tones and marking upper register tones by italics (or underlining in handwritten work). "Entering" tones could be distinguished by their consonantal ending. Nicholas Belfeld Dennys used Chalmers romanization in his primer. This method of marking tones was adopted in the Yale romanization (with low register tones marked with an 'h'). A new romanization was developed in the first decade of the twentieth century which eliminated the diacritics on vowels by distinguishing vowel quality by spelling differences (e.g. a/aa, o/oh). Diacritics were used only for marking tones. The name of Tipson is associated with this new romanization which still embodied the phonology of the Fenyun to some extent. It is the system used in Meyer-Wempe and Cowles' dictionaries and O'Melia's textbook and many other works in the first half of the twentieth century. It was the standard romanization until the Yale system supplanted it. The distinguished linguist, Y. R. Chao developed a Cantonese adaptation of his Gwoyeu romanization system which he used in his "Cantonese Primer." The front matter to this book contains a review and comparison of a number of the systems mentioned in this paragraph. The GR system was not widely used.

[edit] Cantonese romanisation in Hong Kong

An influential work on Cantonese, A Chinese Syllabary Pronounced According to the Dialect of Canton, written by Wong Shik Ling, was published in 1941. He derived an IPA-based transcription system, the S. L. Wong system, used by many Chinese dictionaries later published in Hong Kong. Although Wong also derived a romanisation scheme, also known as S. L. Wong system, it is not widely used as his transcription scheme.

The romanization 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. The phonetic values of letters are not quite familiar to those who have studied English. Some effort has been undertaken to promote jyutping with some official support, but it is too early to tell how successful it is.

Another popular scheme is Standard Cantonese Pinyin Schemes, which is the only romanization system accepted by Hong Kong Education and Manpower Bureau and Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority. Books and studies for teachers and students in primary and secondary schools usually use this scheme. But there are quite a lot teachers and students using the transcription system of S. L. Wong.

However, learners may feel frustrated that most native Cantonese speakers, no matter how educated they are, really are not familiar with any romanization system. Apparently, there is no motive for local people to learn any of these systems. The romanization systems are not included in the education system either in Hong Kong or in Guangdong province. In practice, Hong Kong people follow a loose unnamed romanisation scheme used by the Government of Hong Kong.

[edit] Loanwords

Life in Hong Kong is characterised by the blending of Asian (mainly south Chinese) and Western influences, as well as the status of the city as a major international business centre. Influences from this territory are widespread in foreign cultures. As a results, many loanwords are created and exported to China, Taiwan and Singapore. Some of the loanwords are even more popular than their Chinese counterparts. At the same time, some new words created are vividly borrowed by other languages as well.

[edit] See also

• Chinese language
• Cantonese (Yue)

[edit] Footnotes

[edit] External links

Canton dialect edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• Cantonese, an external wiki

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of Cantonese

[edit] Dictionaries

[edit] Cantonese dictionaries or databases with spoken Cantonese entries

• 香港中文大學－現代標準漢語與粵語對照資料庫 (Chinese University of Hong Kong - Standard Mandarin and Cantonese control database): A comparative database and dictionary of Modern Chinese and Cantonese: This is one of the few online sites with an extensive database of spoken Cantonese terms and phrases on the Internet. A rare and precious resource (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.

[edit] 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

[edit] Other links

• CantoInput Free tool that converts Cantonese Yale Romanization into characters. Note that tone markings/numbers are not used, but rather there is a menu of characters.
• OmniglotCharacter comparisons between colloquial Cantonese characters and Standard Chinese characters.
• Dictionary with Yale Romanization Cantonese dictionary using Yale Romanization with numbers.
• Dictionary with Jyutping Cantonese dictionary using Jyutping romanization
• Cantonese-Learner A site that can help cantonese learners improve.
• 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
• 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 (Sixth International Cantonese Language Research Conference)
• 八十年代以後的粵方言研究 (Post-1980s Cantonese Language Research)
• Cantonese, an external wiki
• Profile and Linguistic Map of Cantonese
• Learn Cantonese with Chinese Lyrics
• Cantonese - a Category III language Languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers
• Cantonese Classroom
• The Chinese University of Hong Kong Research Centre for Humanities Computing: Chinese Character Database: With Word-formations Phonologically Disambiguated According to the Cantonese Dialect
• Research on Cantonese, HKU
• Cantonese Tone Tool Add tone marks to romanized Cantonese
• Reviews of Cantonese Course Books and Dictionaries
• Explanation of the Sidney Lau Cantonese Romanization System
• http://www.cantonese.ca
• http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/
• Basic Cantonese Glossary from Learn Cantonese Online
• Moodle Cantonese Course with mp3 and videos