Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Cantonese was the dominant Chinese language of the Chinese Australian community from the time the first ethnic Chinese settlers arrived in the 1850s until the mid-2000s, when a heavy increase in immigration from Mandarin-speakers largely from mainland China led to Mandarin surpassing Cantonese as the dominant Chinese dialect spoken. Cantonese ...
Mandarin Chinese is the most popular dialect, and is used as a lingua franca across China. Linguists classify these varieties as the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family . Within this broad classification, there are between seven and fourteen dialect groups, depending on the classification.
Scholars say it is closer to ancient Chinese than Mandarin is — a Tang Dynasty poem would sound more like the original if read in Cantonese. The two languages share a common writing system.
Standard Chinese is much more widely studied than any other variety of Chinese, and its use is now dominant in public life on the mainland. [19] Outside of China and Taiwan, the only varieties of Chinese commonly taught in university courses are Standard Chinese and Cantonese. [20]
In terms of dialects, a number of Chinese variants are spoken in Brunei such as Hokkien, Hakka, Mandarin, Foochow and Cantonese. Notably, the Chinese community in the capital city of Bandar Seri Begawan mostly speaks Hokkien and Mandarin. Chinese migrants who speak a dialect can also be found to have been clustered in early settlements.
Chinese, including Mandarin and Cantonese among other varieties, is the third most-spoken language in the United States, and is mostly spoken within Chinese-American populations and by immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, especially in California and New York. [6]
Because of its tradition of usage in music, cinema, literature and newspapers, this form of Cantonese is a cultural mark of identity that distinguishes Cantonese people from speakers of other varieties of Chinese, whose languages are prohibited to have strong influences under China's Standard Mandarin policy.
The variation in vocabulary among varieties has also led to informal use of "dialectal characters", which may include characters previously used in Literary Chinese that are considered archaic in written Standard Chinese. [50] Cantonese is unique among non-Mandarin regional languages in having a written colloquial standard, used in Hong Kong ...