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Generally speaking, Cantonese is a tonal language with six phonetic tones, two more than the four in Standard Chinese Mandarin. This makes Cantonese in general harder to master due to required ability of users to readily be able to process two additional phonetic tones.
As special administrative regions of China, both Hong Kong and Macau list the ambiguous "Chinese" as one of their official languages, although in practice, the regionally spoken Cantonese dialect is used by the government as the official variant of Chinese rather than Mandarin as on the mainland. Cantonese is also highly influential in the ...
It is used as a colloquial language in all areas of daily life, government, and administration. As a written language, Cantonese became more popular with the boom of the Cantonese-language Hong Kong entertainment industry in the 1980s. Movie subtitles, magazines, popular literature, and comics have been published in written Cantonese.
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.
In Nanning, the provincial capital, Cantonese has become an endangered language, replaced by a "Nanning Mandarin" dialect mixed with Cantonese and Zhuang accents. The most local dialect of Nanning, Pinghua, has become even more marginalized under the dual pressures of Mandarin and Cantonese.
Distribution of Chinese dialect groups within the Greater China Region This video explains the differences in pronunciation and vocabulary among Mandarin Dialects (Std. Mandarin, Sichuan Mandarin and NE Mandarin) and Cantonese. The following is a list of Sinitic languages and their dialects.
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]
Cantonese and, more recently, Mandarin have been used in Chinese-language schools and both variants are found in major cities such as Jakarta, Medan, Batam and Surabaya, with Mandarin usage increasing with recent arrivals from China (especially in the North China and Taiwan）, as well as Cantonese speakers originating from Guangdong, Guangxi ...