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 ...
Although texts in Hong Kong-style Chinese are read in Cantonese phonology, its grammar and lexicon are largely derived from the Mandarin-based Modern Standard Chinese. Consequently, people proficient in other varieties of Standard Chinese, like Beijing Mandarin or Taiwanese Mandarin , are able to understand it at least in writing.
Cantonese speakers often find Taishanese difficult to understand and have an average intelligibility of only 30%. This is also true for other Yue Chinese variants such as the Goulou dialects. [4] [5] Unlike most varieties of Chinese, Cantonese has de facto official status in Hong Kong and Macau and has an independent tradition of the written ...
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.
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.
Intelligibility between varieties can be asymmetric; that is, speakers of one variety may be able to better understand another than vice versa. An example of this is the case between Afrikaans and Dutch. It is generally easier for Dutch speakers to understand Afrikaans than for Afrikaans speakers to understand Dutch.
Readings in Cantonese colloquial: being selections from books in the Cantonese vernacular with free and literal translations of the Chinese character and romanized spelling (1894) by James Dyer Ball has a bibliography of printed works available in Cantonese characters in the last decade of the nineteenth century. A few libraries have ...
For example, the Standard Chinese, and widely used Cantonese word for "guest" is 客人; kèrén; 'guest-person', but the same morphemes may be reversed in Cantonese [jɐn ha:k] versus Taishanese [ŋin hak], and Tengxian [jən hɪk]. This has been hypothesized to be the influence of Tai languages, in which modifiers normally follow nouns. [52]