Yue () is a branch of the Sinitic languages primarily spoken in Southern China, particularly in the provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi (collectively known as Liangguang).
The term Cantonese is often used to refer to the whole branch, but linguists prefer to reserve the name Cantonese for the variety used in Guangzhou (Canton), Wuzhou (Ngchow), Hong Kong and Macau, which is the prestige dialect of the group. Taishanese, from the coastal area of Jiangmen (Kongmoon) located southwest of Guangzhou, was the language of most of the 19th-century emigrants from Guangdong to Southeast Asia and North America. Most later migrants have been speakers of Cantonese.
Yue languages are not mutually intelligible with each other or with other Chinese languages outside the branch.Victor H. Mair (2009): Mutual Intelligibility of Sinitic Languages They are among the most conservative varieties with regard to the final consonants and tonal categories of Middle Chinese, but have lost several distinctions in the initial consonants and medial glides that other Chinese varieties have retained.
People from Hong Kong and Macau, as well as Cantonese people abroad, generally refer to their language as . In Guangdong and Guangxi, people also use the terms and (plain/colloquial speech); for example, the expression means 'Nanning colloquial speech'.
After the fall of Qin, the Lingnan area was part of the independent state of Nanyue for about a century, before being incorporated into the Han empire in 111 BC. After the Tang dynasty collapsed, much of the area became part of the state of Southern Han, one of the longest-lived states of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, between 917 and 971.
Large waves of Chinese migration throughout succeeding Chinese dynasties assimilated huge numbers of Yue aborigines, with the result that today's Southern Han Chinese Yue-speaking population is descended from both groups. The colloquial layers of Yue varieties contain elements influenced by the Tai languages formerly spoken widely in the area and still spoken by people such as the Zhuang people and Kam people.
Guangzhou became the centre of rapidly expanding foreign trade after the haijin was lifted, with the British East India Company establishing a chamber of commerce in the city in 1715. The ancestors of most of the Han Chinese population of Hong Kong came from Guangzhou after the territory was ceded to Britain in 1842. As a result, Hong Kong Cantonese, the most widely spoken language in Hong Kong and Macau, is an offshoot of the Guangzhou dialect. The popularity of Cantonese-language media, Cantopop and the Cinema of Hong Kong has since led to substantial exposure of Cantonese to China and the rest of Asia. On the mainland, the national policy is to promote Standard Chinese, which is also the medium of instruction in schools. The place of local Cantonese language and culture remains contentious. In 2010, a controversial proposal to switch some programming on Guangzhou local television from Cantonese to Mandarin was abandoned following widespread backlash accompanied by public protests.
The influence of Guangzhou has spread westward along the Pearl River system, so that, for example, the speech of the city of Wuzhou some upstream in Guangxi is much more similar to that of Guangzhou than dialects of coastal districts that are closer but separated from the city by hilly terrain. One of these coastal languages, Taishanese, is the most common Yue variety among overseas communities. Yue varieties are not totally mutually intelligible with one another.
Yue Chinese is the most widely spoken local language in Guangdong. Its native speakers constitute around a half (47%) of its population. The other half is equally divided between Hakka and Min Chinese, mostly Chaoshan Min, but also Haklau Min and Leizhou Min.
Yue is also the most widespread Sinitic language in Guangxi, spoken by slightly more than a half of its Han population. The other half is almost equally divided between the Southwestern Mandarin, Hakka, and Pinghua; there is also a considerable Xiang Chinese-speaking population and a small Hokkien-speaking minority. Yue Chinese is spoken by 35% of the total population of Guangxi, being one of the two largest languages in that province, along with Zhuang languages.
In China, as of 2004, 60% of all Yue speakers lived in Guangdong, 28.3% lived in Guangxi, and 11.6% lived in Hong Kong.
]] In Yuan Jiahua's 1962 dialect manual, Yue dialects were divided into five groups:
In the Language Atlas of China, some varieties spoken in western Guangxi formerly classified as Yue are placed in a separate Pinghua group. The remaining Yue dialects are divided into seven groups. Three groups are found in the watershed of the Pearl River:
The remaining four groups are found in coastal areas:
Anne Yue-Hashimoto has proposed an alternative classification based on a wider sampling of features:
The Dapeng dialect is a variety displaying features of both Cantonese and Hakka, spoken by 3,000–5,500 people in Dapeng, Shenzhen.
By law, Standard Chinese, based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin, is taught nearly universally as a supplement to local languages such as Cantonese. In Guangzhou, much of the distinctively Yue vocabulary have been replaced with Cantonese pronunciations of corresponding Standard Chinese terms.
Cantonese is the de facto official language of Hong Kong (along with English) and Macau (along with Portuguese), though legally the official language is just "Chinese". It is the oral language of instruction in Chinese schools in Hong Kong and Macau, and is used extensively in Cantonese-speaking households. Cantonese-language media (Hong Kong films, television serials, and Cantopop), which exist in isolation from the other regions of China, local identity, and the non-Mandarin speaking Cantonese diaspora in Hong Kong and abroad give the language a unique identity. Colloquial Hong Kong Cantonese often incorporates English words due to historical British influences.
Most wuxia films from Canton are filmed originally in Cantonese and then dubbed or subtitled in Mandarin, English, or both.
In many Yue varieties, including Cantonese, Middle Chinese has become or in most words; in Taishanese, has also changed to , for example, in the native name of the dialect, "Hoisan". In Siyi and eastern Gao–Yang, Middle Chinese has become a voiceless lateral fricative .
Most Yue varieties have merged the Middle Chinese retroflex sibilants with the alveolar sibilants, in contrast with Mandarin dialects, which have generally maintained the distinction. For example, the words and are distinguished in Mandarin, but in modern Cantonese they are both pronounced as .
Many Mandarin varieties, including the Beijing dialect, have a third sibilant series, formed through a merger of palatalized alveolar sibilants and velars, but this is a recent innovation, which has not affected Yue and other Chinese varieties. For example, , , and are all pronounced as in Mandarin, but in Cantonese the first pair is pronounced , while the second pair is pronounced . The earlier pronunciation is reflected in historical Mandarin romanizations, such as "Peking" for Beijing, "Kiangsi" for Jiangxi, and "Tientsin" for Tianjin.
Some Yue speakers, such as many Hong Kong Cantonese speakers born after World War II, merge with , but Taishanese and most other Yue varieties preserve the distinction. Younger Cantonese speakers also tend not to distinguish between and the zero initial, though this distinction is retained in most Yue dialects. Yue varieties retain the initial in words where Late Middle Chinese shows a shift to a labiodental consonant, realized in most Northern varieties of Chinese as . Nasals can be independent syllables in Yue words, e.g. Cantonese , and , although Middle Chinese did not have syllables of this type.
In most Yue varieties (except for Tengxian), the rounded medial has merged with the following vowel to form a monophthong, except after velar initials. In most analyses velars followed by are treated as labio-velars.
Most Yue varieties have retained the Middle Chinese palatal medial, but in Cantonese it has also been lost to monophthongization, yielding a variety of vowels.
While northern and central varieties have lost some of the Middle Chinese final consonants, they are retained by most southern Chinese varieties, though sometimes affected by sound shifts. They are most faithfully preserved in Yue dialects. Final stops have disappeared entirely in most Mandarin dialects, including the Beijing-based standard, with the syllables distributed across the other tones. For example, the characters , , , , , , , , , and are all pronounced in Mandarin, but they are all distinct in Yue: in Cantonese, , , , , , , , , , and , respectively.
Similarly, in Mandarin dialects the Middle Chinese final has merged with , but the distinction is maintained in southern varieties of Chinese such as Hakka Chinese, Min Chinese and Yue. For example, Cantonese has and versus Mandarin , and versus Mandarin , and versus Mandarin , and and versus Mandarin .
Middle Chinese is described in contemporary dictionaries as having four tones, where the fourth category, the entering tone, consists of syllables with final stops. Many modern Chinese varieties contain traces of a split of each of these four tones into two registers, an upper or register from voiceless initials and a lower or register from voiced initials. Most Mandarin dialects retain the register distinction only in the level tone, yielding the first and second tones of the standard language (corresponding to the first and fourth tones in Cantonese), but have merged several of the other categories. Most Yue dialects have retained all eight categories, with a further split of the upper entering tone conditioned by vowel length, as also found in neighbouring Tai dialects. A few dialects spoken in Guangxi, such as the Bobai dialect, have also split the lower entering tone.
Some Yue dialects, including Cantonese, can use the same word , for both 'who' and 'which'. Other dialects, including Taishanese, use (cf. Mandarin ) for 'who', and words meaning 'which one' for 'which'.
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