Cantonese

Cantonese is the traditional prestige variety of Yue Chinese, a Sinitic language belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family. It originated in the city of Guangzhou (formerly romanized as Canton) and its surrounding Pearl River Delta. Although Cantonese specifically refers to the prestige variety in linguistics, the term is often used more broadly to describe the entire Yue subgroup of Chinese, including varieties such as Taishanese, which have limited mutual intelligibility with Cantonese.

Cantonese is viewed as a vital and inseparable part of the cultural identity for its native speakers across large swaths of southeastern China, Hong Kong, and Macau, as well as in overseas communities. In mainland China, it is the lingua franca of the province of Guangdong (being the majority language of the Pearl River Delta) and neighbouring areas such as Guangxi. It is also the dominant and co-official language of Hong Kong and Macau. Further, Cantonese is widely spoken among overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia (most notably in Vietnam and Malaysia, as well as in Singapore and Cambodia to a lesser extent) and the Western world. With about 80 million total speakers as of 2023, standard Cantonese is by far the most spoken variant of Yue Chinese and non-Mandarin Chinese language.

Although Cantonese shares much vocabulary with Mandarin and other varieties of Chinese, these Sinitic languages have very limited to no mutual intelligibility, largely because of phonological differences, but also differences in grammar and vocabulary. Sentence structure, in particular the verb placement, sometimes differs between the two varieties. A notable difference between Cantonese and Mandarin is how the spoken word is written; both can be recorded verbatim, but very few Cantonese speakers are knowledgeable in the full Cantonese written vocabulary, so a non-verbatim formalized written form is adopted, which is more akin to the written Standard Mandarin. However, it is only non-verbatim with respect to vernacular Cantonese as it is possible to read Standard Chinese text verbatim in formal Cantonese, often with only slight changes in lexicon that are optional depending on the reader's choice of register. This results in a situation in which a Cantonese and a Mandarin text may look similar but are pronounced differently. Conversely, written (vernacular) Cantonese is mostly used in informal settings like social media and comic books.