A Snippet of Cantonese 廣東話

Cantonese, or Yue is one of the major languages in China. It is considered as a kind of very popular and trendy Chinese language. The word Cantonese comes from Canton, the old English name of Guangzhou. Cantonese is originated from Guangzhou, widely used in Guangdong province and its neighboring areas such as Guangxi, HongKong and Macau. Cantonese is the dominant form of Chinese spoken in the Chinatowns of many major cities in the United States, Canada, Australia and elsewhere.The Guangzhou Cantonese has the puriest accent. However, through years of mass media and pop culture influence, Hong Kong has also become the cultural centre of Cantonese, and it is hardly to tell the different accent in between.

Even though Cantonese is basically an oral language, which does not have its own writing standard, it develops a colloquial writing style that is very different from the Mandarin one. It contains characters and phrases which may be unfamiliar to a Mandarin-speaking reader. Analogously, a person who only know American English does not understand "petrol" which is a British English spelling word for "gasoline". However, under formal circumstance, Cantonese still obey Mandarin writing style in the same written characters with a few exceptions, so that they can communicate with each other. The Chinese words were united by Emporer Qin Shihuang around 221B.C. (more than 2220 years ago) in China.

Cantonese is a beautiful, fluent lanugage with 2000-year history compared to 800 year of Mandarin. The pronunciation of the two are totally different. Hong Kong people humorously call it "the chicken talking to the duck" -- they cannot understand each other. Mandarin has four tones and Cantonese has more than six. The two are both tonal languages (different tones has different meanings for the same sound) and they also have different vowels and consonants too.

Since the 1950's, Mainland China decided to reform the Chinese writing system in an attempt to increase literacy in China. Initiated by chairman Mao Zedong, thousands of characters were simplified. However, not all the simplifications adopted were simply taken from existing variants. The following shows a few examples:

Traditional	Japanese	Simplified
廣	広	广
東	東	东
無	無	无
國	国	国
界	界	界

Simplified Chinese is used in mainland China. HongKong, Macau and Taiwan are still using traditional Chinese. People from mainland China has a much better knowledge in both of these written characters than the others.