32 Facts About Cantonese Chinese

Cantonese Chinese 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.

Conversely, written Cantonese Chinese is mostly used in informal settings such as on social media and comic books.

Cantonese Chinese proper is the variety native to the city of Canton, which is the traditional English name of Guangzhou.

Cantonese Chinese was used in the popular Yue'ou, Muyu and Nanyin folksong genres, as well as Cantonese Chinese opera.

Meanwhile, Cantonese has remained the official variety of Chinese in Hong Kong and Macau, both during and after the colonial period.

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Similar situation exists in neighboring Macau, where Cantonese Chinese is an official language alongside Portuguese.

The Cantonese Chinese spoken in Hong Kong and Macau is mutually intelligible with the Cantonese Chinese spoken in the mainland city of Guangzhou, although there exist some minor differences in accent, pronunciation, and vocabulary.

Cantonese Chinese first developed around the port city of Guangzhou in the Pearl River Delta region of southeastern China.

Many local Cantonese Chinese speaking families in Guangdong province overall in general including in Guangzhou have started placing more stronger emphasis to encourage the use of Cantonese Chinese with their children to preserve the local language and culture.

In Vietnam, Cantonese is the dominant language of the main ethnic Chinese community, usually referred to as Hoa, which numbers about one million people and constitutes one of the largest minority groups in the country.

In Malaysia, Cantonese is widely spoken amongst the Malaysian Chinese community in the capital city of Kuala Lumpur and the surrounding areas in the Klang Valley.

Cantonese radio is available in the nation and Cantonese is prevalent in locally produced Chinese television.

Cantonese spoken in Malaysia and Singapore often exhibits influences from Malay and other Chinese varieties spoken in the country, such as Hokkien and Teochew.

Guangxi Cantonese Chinese Dialect is still somewhat often spoken in parts of Malaysia.

In Singapore, Mandarin is the official variety of the Cantonese Chinese language used by the government, which has a Speak Mandarin Campaign seeking to actively promote the use of Mandarin at the expense of other Cantonese Chinese varieties.

Consequently, there is a growing number of non-Cantonese Chinese Singaporeans being able to understand or speak Cantonese to some varying extent, with a number of educational institutes offering Cantonese as an elective language course.

Furthermore, Cantonese serves as the lingua franca with other Chinese communities in the region.

In Indonesia, Cantonese is locally known as Konghu and is one of the variants spoken by the Chinese Indonesian community, with speakers largely concentrated in major cities such as Jakarta, Surabaya and Batam.

Many institutes of higher education have traditionally had Chinese programs based on Cantonese, with some continuing to offer these programs despite the rise of Mandarin.

In Northern California, especially the San Francisco Bay Area, Cantonese Chinese has historically and continues to dominate in the Chinatowns of San Francisco and Oakland, as well as the surrounding suburbs and metropolitan area, although since the late 2000s a concentration of Mandarin speakers has formed in Silicon Valley.

In contrast, Southern California hosts a much larger Mandarin-speaking population, with Cantonese found in more historical Chinese communities such as that of Chinatown, Los Angeles, and older Chinese ethnoburbs such as San Gabriel, Rosemead, and Temple City.

Later Cantonese Chinese immigrants came from Hong Kong in two waves, first in the late 1960s to mid 1970s, and again in the 1980s to late 1990s on fears arising from the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests and impending handover to the People's Republic of China.

Since the late-20th century Mandarin- and Wu-speaking migrants from mainland China have outnumbered those from Macau, although Cantonese is still retained among mainstream Chinese community associations.

Increasingly since the 1997 Handover, Cantonese Chinese has been used as a symbol of local identity in Hong Kong, largely through the development of democracy in the territory and desinicization practices to emphasise a separate Hong Kong identity.

Hong Kong Cantonese Chinese has some minor variations in phonology, but is largely identical to standard Guangzhou Cantonese Chinese.

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In contrast, standard written Cantonese Chinese continues to be used in formal literature, professional and government documents, television and movie subtitles, and news media.

Systematic efforts to develop an alphabetic representation of Cantonese Chinese began with the arrival of Protestant missionaries in China early in the nineteenth century.

Samuel Wells Willams' Tonic Dictionary of the Cantonese Chinese Language in the Canton Dialect, is an alphabetic rearrangement, translation and annotation of the Fenyun.

The Barnett-Chao romanization system was first used in Chao's Cantonese Chinese Primer, published in 1947 by Harvard University Press.

An influential work on Cantonese, A Chinese Syllabary Pronounced According to the Dialect of Canton, written by Wong Shik Ling, was published in 1941.

Cantonese Chinese derived an IPA-based transcription system, the S L Wong system, used by many Chinese dictionaries later published in Hong Kong.

Google Cantonese Chinese input uses Yale, Jyutping or Cantonese Chinese Pinyin, Yale being the first standard.