Yue Chinese (Cantonese)

Where it’s spoken

Yue Chinese — popularly known as Cantonese — is the dominant Chinese variety in Guangdong, Guangxi, Hong Kong, and Macao. It is also the heritage variety in many overseas Chinese communities, particularly in Canada, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Southeast Asia, owing to historical emigration patterns from the Pearl River Delta.

What it sounds like

Cantonese typically distinguishes six tones (some analyses count nine including checked tones), compared with Mandarin’s four. It preserves final consonants -p, -t, -k that Mandarin lost, giving its syllables a clipped feel. The phonology is closer to Middle Chinese in many respects than Mandarin’s is.

How it’s written

Standard written Chinese — essentially written Mandarin — is the formal writing system across the Cantonese-speaking world. However, “written Cantonese” with characters like 喺, 嘅, 嘢 is widely used in Hong Kong tabloids, social media, and comics. Hong Kong uses traditional characters; mainland Guangdong uses simplified.

History

Yue diverged from Old Chinese during the southward expansions of the Han. Hong Kong’s 20th-century film and Cantopop industries gave the language outsized global cultural reach.