18 Facts About Written Cantonese

Written Cantonese is the written form of Cantonese, the most complete written form of Chinese after that for Mandarin Chinese and Classical Chinese.

Written Cantonese vocabulary was used much more in the lungzau songs performed mainly by beggars on the streets.

An important landmark in the history of written Cantonese was the publication of Jyut-au by Zhao Ziyong in 1828.

However, Cantonese is unique amongst the non-Mandarin varieties in having a widely used written form.

Written Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong used to be a British colony isolated from mainland China before 1997, so most HK citizens do not speak Mandarin.

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Written Cantonese has developed as a means of informal communication.

Historically, written Cantonese has been used in Hong Kong for legal proceedings in order to write down the exact spoken testimony of a witness, instead of paraphrasing spoken Cantonese into standard written Chinese.

Written Cantonese has become quite popular in certain tabloids, online chat rooms, instant messaging, and even social networking websites; this would be even more evident since the rise of localism in Hong Kong from the 2010s, where the articles written by those localist media are written in Cantonese.

However, colloquial Cantonese advertisements are sometimes seen in Guangdong, suggesting that written Cantonese is widely understood and is regarded favourably, at least in some contexts.

The special Written Cantonese characters used in all of these were not standardized and show wide variation.

Written Cantonese contains many characters not used in standard written Chinese in order to transcribe words not present in the standard lexicon, and for some words from Old Chinese when their original forms have been forgotten.

Ouyang Shan made a corpus-based estimate concluding that one third of the lexical items used in regular Written Cantonese speech do not exist in Mandarin, but that between the formal registers the differences were smaller.

Written Cantonese analyzed a radio news broadcast and concluded that of its lexical items, 10.

Written Cantonese writers have from time to time reinvented or borrowed a new character if they are not aware of the original one.

For example, some suggest that the common word leng, meaning pretty in Written Cantonese but looking into the mirror in Mandarin, is in fact the character ling.

Written Cantonese continues this practice via putting the 'mouth' radical next to a character pronounced similarly that indicates its pronunciation.

However, their colloquial Written Cantonese pronunciations have diverged from formal Written Cantonese pronunciations.

In spoken Written Cantonese, mou has the same usage, meaning, and pronunciation as, except for tone.