THE LANGUAGE

The word Cantonese comes from Canton, the former English name of Guangzhou where the dialect originates. However, through years of mass media and pop culture influence, Hong Kong is now considered to be the cultural center of Cantonese. Cantonese or Yue is one of the five major Chinese languages. The main language, Mandarin or Putonghua, is the official language in China but it has only been around for less than 800 years. Cantonese has a 2000-year history as a spoken language. Cantonese is spoken by more than 100 million people in the southern provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi and in neighboring areas such as Hong Kong and Macao, as well as throughout South-East Asia in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. It is also the dominant Chinese language in the United States, Canada, Australia and other European countries because of the large population of immigrants from Hong Kong and the Guangdong areas.

The four major dialect groups of Cantonese are: Yuehai, the dialect spoken in Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macau; Siyi (sei yap) in Taishan; Gaoyang in Yangjing; and Guinan in Guangxi. Yuehai is the most widely spoken Cantonese dialect among the four. Cantonese is mainly an oral language. As a colloquial language, Cantonese is full of slang and non-standard usage and the language is constantly evolving. Each generation creates new slang and trendy expressions for the particular era.

Writing System

Although formal written Cantonese does not exist, it is used infomally for transcription of speech and informal forms of communications, such as advertisments, gossip columes in magazine articles, comics, emails, etc. Sometimes formal written characters do not exist for Cantonese spoken words.  In those cases, people use characters that share the same sound in place of it. Some characters are also created that cannot be look up in traditional Chinese dictionaries.

For reading and writing, people in Hong Kong use traditional Chinese or complicated strokes. The standard written language in Hong Kong is essentially the same writing system as in China. The only difference is Hong Kong and overseas communities use traditional characters, whereas mainland Chinese people uses simplified characters. Simplified Chinese characters came about when chairman Mao Zedong attempted to increase literacy in China in 1950.

Written Chinese, either in traditional or simplified characters, does not have an alphabet. Rather, they are characters composed of various brushstrokes, which express a meaning.  Originally, many Chinese characters derived from drawings of ideas. Over time, the drawings evolved to the modern Chinese characters. These characters are given a pronunciation, but the pronunciation varies from dialect to dialect while the meaning is constant.

There is no upper limit to the number of characters. The largest Chinese dictionaries include about 56,000 characters, but most of them are archaic, obscure or rare variant forms. Knowledge of about 3,000 characters is sufficient to read Modern Standard Chinese. To read Classical Chinese though, you need to be familiar with about 6,000 characters. Characters can be used on their own, in combination with other characters or as part of other characters.  

A character may consist of between 1 and 84 stokes. The strokes are always written in the same direction and there is a set order to write the strokes of each character. In Chinese, the order in which a character is written is important.  A character written with an incorrect stroke order is not only technically wrong, it may even become a different word altogether. Although sometimes the distinction in brush-strokes may not be apparent written in pen or pencil, they may be more obvious when using a Chinese calligraphy brush.  

1. Strokes are written top to bottom         

2. Strokes are written left to right

3. Characters are written top to bottom

4. Characters are written left to right

5. Characters are written outside to inside, but closing an outer box last

6. Complex characters can be broken down into independent parts

7. A vertical line is drawn after horizontal lines it passes through, but before a horizontal line on which it terminates.

When writing Chinese, every character is given exactly the same amount of space, no matter how many strokes it contains. There are no spaces between characters and the characters which make up multi-syllable words are not grouped together, so when reading Chinese, you not only have to work out what the characters mean and how to pronounce them, but also which characters belong together.

In dictionaries, characters are ordered partly by the number of stokes they contain.Chinese characters are written with the following twelve basic strokes:

Tones

There are a total of 9 individual tones and 7 of them are illustrated in the tone chart below:

The 4 tone categories in Cantonese are:

• Ping (平 ) – tone 1 and 4
• Seung (上 ) – tone 2 and 5
• Hui (去 ) – tone 3 and 6
• Yap (入 ) – tone 7, 8 and 9

Each word or phrase must be spoken at the right pitch or it will be misunderstood otherwise.  One must pay particular attention to the silent "H" sound, which is used to denote low tones.  Also note there is no middle falling tone, so a sound with no "h" and falling marks is pronounced as High Falling (tone 1). The high falling tone is now commonly pronounced as a simple high tone. In Hong Kong, the high level tone is often used interchangeably with the high falling tone without affecting the meaning of the words being spoken.

Sounds

I. Consonants

Cantonese has 20 consonant sounds:

p, b, t, d, ts, dz, k, g, kw, gw, f, h, l, m, n, ng, s, y and w.

The consonants in the first column (p, t, ts, k and kw) are pronounced with a heavy puff of air, called aspiration. This is what distinguishes them from their unaspirated counterparts in the second column (b, d, dz, g, gw). Younger Cantonese-speakers use k and g instead of kw and gw for many words.

The remaining 10 consonants are pronounced more or less the same as in English.

Syllables ending in p, t and k are pronounced faster, with a much shorter vowel. The consonant is "clipped", almost as if you were cutting your breath suddenly in the middle of the consonant at the end of the word, with no audible release.

II. Finals

There are nine groups of finals for Cantonese sound:

single “a”, double “a”, “e”, “i”, “o”, double “o”, “u”, “ue” and nasal (“m” & “ng”) 

1. Single “a” finals:
    

2. Double “a” finals:
    

3. “e” finals:
    

4. “i” finals:
    

5. “o” finals:
    

6. Double “o” finals:
    

7. “u” finals:
    

8. “ue” finals:
    

9. Nasal finals:
    

Here are few notes about the Cantonese finals:

Single "a" is like the "u" in fun when followed by a consonant, while "aa" is similar to the "a" in yawn.  When "a" is the entire final- as in "fa", "ma", "gwa", "ha", "pa", etc., it is pronounced the same as "aa".  The question particle "ma" (嗎 ) is a special case.  It is pronounced both ways under different circumstances. “au” is pronounced like you dropped a hammer on your toe "ow".

"i" sound is always pronounced as a long "ee" sound.  “eu” is pronounce like you make a sound to ask a question "eh?" but then get hit in the stomach.

“eui”  and “oi” are a lot alike, but there is a difference.  Practice the “eu” sound and then add a long "ee" at the end for the former.  The later just sounds like "oy".

“eung” and “euk”  could be quite difficult to pronounce for beginners.  There is a slight "r" sound in theses two sounds when you blend the vowels together. “u” sound is pronounced similar to "oo" but not exactly.

“m” and “ng” can form a syllable of their own. For example, the word for no, (唔) sounds just like like “mmh”.

Romanization

Penkyamp (拼音) is a romanization system for transliterating Cantonese Chinese. The alphabet systems include:

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, K, L, M, N, O, P, (q), S, T, U, W, Y, and  Z

Below is a list of words written in traditional Chinese characters with the penkyamp with tone level and English meaning: