Cantonese

Cantonese
白话/白話 Baak6waa2
广府话/廣府話 gwong2fu2 waa6*2
广州话/廣州話 gwong2zau1 waa6*2/Guong2 zeo1 wa6
Spoken in
Region in China: the Pearl River Delta (central and western Guangdong, eastern Guangxi; Hong Kong, Macau)
Total speakers 26 million
Language family Sino-Tibetan
Language codes
ISO 639-1 None
ISO 639-2 –
ISO 639-3 –
Linguasphere
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Cantonese or Standard Cantonese is a language spoken in and around the city of Canton (now Guangzhou) in Southern China, by the majority population of Hong Kong and Macau, and as a lingua franca of Guangdong province, eastern Guangxi province, and some neighbouring areas. It is used in Hong Kong and Macau as the de facto official spoken language of government and instruction in schools. It is spoken by overseas Chinese communities in Canada, Perú, Panamá, 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. While the same "Cantonese" generally refers narrowly to the Hong Kong-Guangzhou dialect, it is also used in a broader sense for the Yue branch of Chinese, which includes related dialects such as Taishanese.

Contents

Names

In English, the term "Cantonese" is ambiguous. Cantonese proper is the dialect native to the city of Canton, which is the traditional English name of Guangzhou, and later brought to Hong Kong and Macau; this narrow sense may be specified as "Canton dialect" or "Guangzhou 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.

Chinese speakers use names which do not correspond exactly with the English terms. Customarily speakers 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" (plain speech) (白話).[5]

Due to its status as a prestige dialect, it often called "Standard Cantonese" (simplified Chinese: 标准粤语; traditional Chinese: 標準粵語; Jyutping: biu1zeon2 jyut6jyu5)Guangdong Romanization：Biu1 zên2 yud6 yu5 .

Cultural role

Spoken Chinese has numerous regional and local varieties (dialects), 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. Since the early 1900s (1909 Qing Dynasty decree), 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.

Cantonese is the predominant dialect 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. In Hong Kong, Cantonese lyrics predominate within popular music, and many artists from Beijing and Taiwan have learned Cantonese in order to make Cantonese versions of their recordings.[7] Popular native Mandarin speaking singers, including Faye Wong, Eric Moo, and singers from Taiwan, have been trained in Cantonese to add "Hong Kong-ness" to their performances.[7]

Phonology

The de facto standard pronunciation of the Cantonese language is that of Canton (Guangzhou), which is described at the Cantonese phonology article. Hong Kong Cantonese has some minor variations in phonology.

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, so is usually written with traditional Chinese characters. Cantonese includes extra characters and characters with different meanings from Standard Written Chinese.

Romanization

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. The Hong Kong linguist Sidney Lau modified the Yale system for his popular Cantonese-as-a-second-language course and is still widely in use today.

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.

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.

Cantonese outside mainland China

Historically, the majority of the overseas Chinese have originated from just two provinces, Fujian and Guangdong. This has resulted in the overseas Chinese having a far higher proportion of Fujian and Guangdong languages/dialect speakers than Chinese speakers in China as a whole.

The largest number of Cantonese speakers outside mainland China and Hong Kong are in south east Asia; however, speakers of Min dialects predominate among the overseas Chinese in south east Asia. The Cantonese spoken in Singapore and Malaysia are known to have borrowed substantially from Malay and other languages.

Canada

For many decades and today, Cantonese continues to be the most common Chinese language spoken among Chinese Canadians. According to Canada 2006 Census, there are 361,450 Canadian residents who reported Cantonese as their mother tongue including 166,655 in Greater Toronto Area and 125,940 in Greater Vancouver to lead the way. The total number of Cantonese speakers in Canada however are expected to be greater than those numbers provided by Statistics Canada considering the fact that 456,705 people who reported a Chinese mother tongue either did not specify their dialects or specified a dialect outside of Cantonese, Mandarin, Chaochow, Fukien, Hakka, Shanghainese, or Taiwanese. Hence among the 456,705 residents, many of them are Cantonese speakers as well.

The majority of Cantonese speakers came from Hong Kong who came in bunches in the late 60s to mid 70s during and after the Hong Kong 1967 Leftist Riots, and came in masses during the 80s to late 90s in response to the Transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong back to Mainland China in 1997. Immigrants from Guangdong, Vietnam and Southeast Asia also form a integral part of the Cantonese speaker demographics in Canada.

Hong Kong

The so-called "Battle between Cantonese and Mandarin" started in Hong Kong in the mid-1980s when a large number of non-Cantonese speaking mainland Chinese people started crossing the border into Hong Kong during Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms. At that time, Hong Kong and Macau were still British and Portuguese protectorates respectively, and Mandarin was not often heard in those territories. Today Mandarin is often taught as a second language, but was not used in daily life (circa 1980-1990's) except by immigrants from Taiwan and non-Cantonese speaking parts of the mainland. Persons from the mainland and the colonies who did not speak the same dialect, often viewed the other with suspicion or even a mutual animosity. It was not uncommon for Chinese magazines in the mid-1980s to publish polemics against the other's language - thus Cantonese became known on the mainland as "British Chinese" - and Mandarin became known as "流氓話 Lau Man Waa" - literally "outlaw speech" - in the colonies.

Singapore

In Singapore the government has had a Speak Mandarin Campaign (SMC) which seeks to actively promote the use of Standard Mandarin Chinese over other forms of Chinese such as Min-nan (colloquially known as Hokkien) (45% of the Chinese population), Teochew (22.5%), Cantonese (16%), Hakka (7%) and Hainanese. This was seen as a way of creating greater cohesion among the ethnic Chinese. In addition to positive promotion of Mandarin, the campaign also includes active attempts to dissuade people from using Chinese dialects. Most notably, the use of dialects in local broadcast media is banned, and access to foreign media in dialect is limited. Some Chinese Singaporeans believe that the Singaporean Government has gone too far in its endeavour. While even Japanese and Korean drama series are available in their original languages on TV to the viewers, Taiwanese and Hong Kong drama series are not available in their original languages on TV. Some Taiwanese (Min-nan) songs in some Taiwanese entertainment programmes have been singled out and censored and Hong Kong (Cantonese) drama series on non-cable TV channels are dubbed in Mandarin and broadcast in Singapore without their original Cantonese soundtrack. Some Min-nan (Hokkien) and Cantonese speakers in Singapore feel that the dubbing causes the series to sound very unnatural and lose much of its flavour. In response to this, supporters of non-Mandarin Chinese languages often buy original DVDs and VCDs from Taiwan and Hong Kong to keep in touch with their true mother tongues.

An offshoot of SMC is the Pinyinisation of certain terms which originated from southern Chinese languages. For instance, dim sum is often known as dianxin in Singapore's English language media, though this is largely a matter of style, and most Singaporeans will refer to dim sum when speaking English. Another result of SMC is that most young Singaporeans from Cantonese speaking families are unable to understand or speak Cantonese. The situation is very different in nearby Malaysia (especially in Kuala Lumpur and Ipoh), where even most non-Cantonese speaking Chinese can understand the dialect to a certain extent through exposure to the language.

United Kingdom

The majority of Cantonese speakers in the UK have origins from the former British colony of Hong Kong and speak the Canton/Hong Kong dialect, although many are in fact from Hakka-speaking families and are bilingual in Hakka. There are also Cantonese speakers from south east Asian countries such as Malaysia and Singapore, as well as from Guangdong in China itself. Today an estimated 300,000 British people have Cantonese as a mother tongue, this represents 0.5% of the total UK population and 1% of the total overseas Cantonese speakers.[8]

United States

For the last 150 years, Guangdong Province has been the place of origin of most Chinese emigrants to Western countries; one coastal county, Taishan (or Tóisàn, where the Sìyì or sei yap dialect of Yue is spoken), alone may have been the home to more than 60% of Chinese immigrants to the US before 1965. As a result, Yue dialects such as Siyi (the dialects of Taishan, Enping, Kaiping and Xinhui Districts) and Cantonese (with a heavy Hong Kong influence) have been the major Yue dialects spoken abroad, particularly in the United States.

The Zhongshan dialect of Cantonese, with origins in the Pearl River Delta, is spoken by many Chinese immigrants in Hawaii, and some in San Francisco and in the Sacramento River Delta (see Locke, California); it is a Yuehai dialect much like Guangzhou Cantonese, but has "flatter" tones. Yue is the third most widely spoken non-English language in the United States.[9] Many institutes of higher education, such as Stanford, Duke, and Yale, have Cantonese programs. The currently most popular romanization for learning Cantonese in the United States is Yale Romanization.

The dialectal situation is now changing in the United States; recent Chinese emigrants originate from many different areas including mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. Recent immigrants from mainland China and Taiwan in the U.S. all speak Standard Mandarin (putonghua/guoyu),[10][11] with varying degrees of fluency, and their native local language/dialect, such as Min (Hokkien and other Fujian dialects), Wu, Mandarin, Cantonese etc. As a result, Standard Mandarin is increasingly becoming more common as the Chinese lingua franca among overseas Chinese.

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.

See also


Footnotes

  1. ↑ Ramsey and Ethnologue, respectively
  2. ↑ simplified Chinese: 广州话 or 广府话; traditional Chinese: 廣州話 or 廣府話; Jyutping: Gwong2zau1 waa2 or Gwong2fu2 waa2
  3. ↑ simplified Chinese: 省城话; traditional Chinese: 省城話; Jyutping: Saang2seng4 waa2
  4. ↑ simplified Chinese: 广东话; traditional Chinese: 廣東話; Jyutping: Gwong2dung1 waa2
  5. ↑ simplified Chinese: 白话; traditional Chinese: 白話; Jyutping: baak6waa2
  6. ↑ Minglang Zhou, Hongkai Sun (2004). Language Policy in the People's Republic of China: Theory and Practice Since 1949. Springer. ISBN 1402080387, 9781402080388. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=Z4O3bcRUwKQC. 
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Donald, Stephanie; Keane, Michael; Hong, Yin (2002). Media in China: Consumption, Content and Crisis. RoutledgeCurzon. p. 113. ISBN 0700716149. 
  8. ↑ Cantonese speakers in the UK
  9. ↑ Lai, H. Mark (2004). Becoming Chinese American: A History of Communities and Institutions. AltaMira Press. ISBN 0759104581.  need page number(s)
  10. ↑ Mandarin Use Up in Chinese American Communities
  11. ↑ As Mandarin language becomes standard, Chinatown explores new identity

External links