Cantonese (廣東話 Gwóng dōng wá) is a widely spoken Chinese language. It is the local language in current use within the province of Guangdong, China, official language in the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong, as well as in the Special Administrative Region of Macau, and used in many overseas Chinese communities in South-East Asia and elsewhere, with Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) being two places where Cantonese is the dominant language in a Chinese community that is in turn huge and influential. Cantonese is also the dominant language in many Chinatowns all over the world, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Chicago, London, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Vancouver, Toronto, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. The dialect of Chinese spoken by many inhabitants of eastern Guangxi Province in mainland China, is often referred to a form of Cantonese as well.
Chinese languages are mutually unintelligible, with difference ranging from that between Italian and French to that between English and Swedish, which we would call "related languages" rather than "dialects".
All Chinese dialects, in general, use the same set of characters in reading and writing in formal settings. A Cantonese speaker and a Mandarin speaker cannot talk to each other, but either can generally read what the other writes. However, there can be significant differences when the "dialects" are written in colloquial form. For example Cantonese as used in Hong Kong, more informal phrasings are used in everyday speech than what would be written. Thus, there are some extra characters that are sometimes used in addition to the common characters to represent the spoken dialect and other colloquial words.
There are different local languages in Guangdong that are sometimes considered Cantonese dialects but in fact are separate languages, such as Taishanese, spoken in Taishan in the far west of Guangdong. However, most people throughout Guangdong know how to speak standard Cantonese (Guangzhou dialect) and Hongkongers and Macanese speak standard Cantonese with slight influences from Western languages, especially from English in Hong Kong Cantonese. The Cantonese spoken in Singapore and Malaysia also differ slightly due to Malay influences.
Some of the phrases in the list are difficult to translate from English to Cantonese.
The pronunciations given in this guidebook use the Yale Romanization system. Sounds can only be approximated at best. This guide gives a general indication of the correct sound to make, but the best way to be completely accurate is to listen closely to native speakers and to mimic the sounds they make.
Cantonese is a tonal language. This means that the same syllable, pronounced in a different tone, has a different meaning. To complicate this, there may be more than one character pronounced as the same syllable with the same tone (though this is uncommon). In this case, context usually helps resolve the ambiguity. This may sound daunting, but is in fact is better than say, English, where there are a great deal of words that are spoken identically (eg. their, there, they're) and have nothing but context to help determine which one it is. Cantonese has context and tone to help distinguish words.
Different variations of the Cantonese dialect have a different number of tones, from as few as six to as many as ten or more. Most speakers, however, and all modern linguistic interpretations get by with being able to distinguish (both in spoken and heard Cantonese) between the following six tones:
Yale
Description
Start-to-end pitch
Yale
Description
Start-to-end pitch
1
ā
High Level
4
àh
Low Falling
2
á
Mid Rising
5
áh
Low Rising
3
a
Mid Level
6
ah
Low Level
The tonal pronunciation of Cantonese is by far the most difficult aspect of the often daunting language. The very minor initial difficulty in learning the tones is sometimes more than made up for by simple grammar, and absence of almost all plurals, genders, tenses and forms that make many other world languages seem difficult by comparison.
To be or not to be?
Cantonese, as in Chinese, does not have words for "yes" and "no" as such; instead, questions are typically answered by repeating the verb. Common ones include:
To be or not to be
係 haih, 唔係 mh'haih
To have or not have / there is or is not
有 yáuh, 冇 móuh
To be right or wrong
啱 āam, 唔啱 mh'āam
Hello.
你好. Néih hóu.
How are you?
你好嗎? Néih hóu ma?
How are you recently? (more popular in daily usage)
近排點呀? Gahnpàaih dím a? (informal)
Fine.
好. Hóu. (No need to say "thank you" after answering "fine" in Cantonese)
What is your name?
你叫乜嘢名呀? Néih giu māt'yéh mèhng a?
What is your name (formal, literally means "How do I address you")?
請問點稱呼? Chíngmahn dím chīngfū?
My name is ______ .
我個名叫______. Ngóh go méng giu ______ .
Nice to meet you.
幸會. Hahng'wúih.
Please.
請. Chíng.
Thank you. (when someone helps you)
唔該. M̀h'gōi.
Thank you. (when someone gives you a gift)
多謝 Dōjeh.
You're welcome.
唔使客氣. M̀h'sái haak-hei.
Excuse me. (getting attention)
唔好意思. M̀h'hóu yisi
Excuse me. (to get past)
唔該. M̀h'gōi or 唔該借借 M̀h'gōi jeje.
Sorry.
對唔住. Deui-m̀h-jyuh. (In Hong Kong, it's more common to use the English word "sorry" instead)
In Cantonese, "train" is translated into 火車 (fóchē) and "bus" is 巴士 (bāsí). The language uses measure words or numeral classifiers before the actual nouns. In context of the following examples, the respective Cantonese measure words for 火車 and 巴士 are 班 (bāan) and 架 (ga).
Reading a Chinese Menu
Look for these characters to get an idea of how your food's cooked. With help from The Eater's Guide to Chinese Characters (J. McCawley).
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