Cantonese language in the context of Cantonese people


Cantonese language in the context of Cantonese people

⭐ Core Definition: Cantonese language

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.

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Cantonese language in the context of IETF language tag

An IETF BCP 47 language tag is a standardized code that is used to identify human languages on the Internet. The tag structure has been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in Best Current Practice (BCP) 47; the subtags are maintained by the IANA Language Subtag Registry.

To distinguish language variants for countries, regions, or writing systems (scripts), IETF language tags combine subtags from other standards such as ISO 639, ISO 15924, ISO 3166-1 and UN M.49.For example, the tag en stands for English; es-419 for Latin American Spanish; rm-sursilv for Romansh Sursilvan; sr-Cyrl for Serbian written in Cyrillic script; nan-Hant-TW for Min Nan Chinese using traditional Han characters, as spoken in Taiwan; yue-Hant-HK for Cantonese using traditional Han characters, as spoken in Hong Kong; and gsw-u-sd-chzh for Zürich German.

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Cantonese language in the context of Xinhui

Xinhui, alternately romanized as Sunwui and also known as Kuixiang, is an urban district of Jiangmen in Guangdong, China. It grew from a separate city founded at the confluence of the Tan and West Rivers. It has a population of about 735,500, 98% of whom are Han Chinese and many of them speak a dialect of Cantonese as their first language. Xinhui is best known in China for its chenpi, a kind of dried Mandarin orange peel.

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Cantonese language in the context of Sycee

A sycee (/ˈss, sˈs/; from Cantonese 細絲, Jyutping: Sai3 Si1, lit.'fine silk') or yuanbao (traditional Chinese: 元寶; simplified Chinese: 元宝; pinyin: yuánbǎo; Jyutping: jyun4 bou2; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Goân-pó; lit. 'primary treasure') was a type of gold and silver ingot currency used in imperial China from its founding under the Qin dynasty until the fall of the Qing in the 20th century. Sycee were not made by a central bank or mint but by individual goldsmiths or silversmiths for local exchange; consequently, the shape and amount of extra detail on each ingot were highly variable. Square and oval shapes were common, but boat, flower, tortoise and others are known. Their value—like the value of the various silver coins and little pieces of silver in circulation at the end of the Qing dynasty—was determined by experienced moneyhandlers, who estimated the appropriate discount based on the purity of the silver and evaluated the weight in taels and the progressive decimal subdivisions of the tael (mace, candareen, and cash).

In present-day China, gold sycees remain a symbol of wealth and prosperity and are commonly depicted during the Chinese New Year festivities. Paper imitations of gold- or silver-colored sycees are burned along with hell money as a part of Chinese ancestral veneration for Tomb Sweeping Day and the Ghost Festival.

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Cantonese language in the context of Fen (currency)

A fen (Chinese: ; pinyin: fēn) (Cantonese: sin [Chinese: ]), is a unit of currency used in Greater China, including the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan), Hong Kong (called a cent in English) and Macao (called an avo in Portuguese). One fen is equal to 1100 of a yuan or 110 of a Chinese jiao.

  • Renminbi were issued in coin denominations of 1, 2, and 5 fen and also banknote denominations of 1, 2, and 5 fen. The fen banknotes have stopped circulation since 1 April 2007, while the fen coins are still legal tenders by de jure, but generally limited to interests settlement by banks or exchange of foreign remittances, and rarely used in normal shopping purpose, as shops usually rounded it to jiao (e.g. ¥4.55 is rounded to ¥4.60).
  • The character is also used to translate "cent" in other currencies. A euro cent is called 欧分; 歐分; Ōufēn in Chinese.
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Cantonese language in the context of Singapore English

Singapore English (SgE, SE, en-SG) is the set of varieties of the English language native to Singapore. In Singapore, English is spoken in two main forms: Singaporean Standard English, which is grammatically similar to British English, and Singaporean Colloquial English—better known as Singlish—the colloquial register of English spoken between Singaporeans. Many Singaporeans code-switch between the two forms where necessary; hence, Singapore English can be described as diglossic.

Singapore is a cosmopolitan society. In 2020, nearly half of Singaporeans of Chinese descent reported English as their main language at home, while only a third spoke Mandarin. The remaining spoke various varieties of Chinese such as Hokkien, Cantonese or Teochew. Most Singaporeans of Indian descent speak either English or a South Asian language. Many Malay Singaporeans use Malay as the lingua franca among the ethnic groups of the Malay world, while Eurasians and mixed-race Singaporeans are usually monolingual in English.

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Cantonese language in the context of City of Fairfield

The Fairfield City Council is a local government area in the west of Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. The council was first incorporated as the "Municipal District of Smithfield and Fairfield" on 8 December 1888, and the council's name was changed to the "Municipality of Fairfield" in 1920, before being proclaimed a city in 1979. The City of Fairfield comprises an area of 102 square kilometres (39 sq mi) and as of the 2021 census had a population of 208,475. The mayor of the City of Fairfield is Cr. Frank Carbone, the first popularly-elected independent mayor of Fairfield.

Fairfield is considered one of the most ethnically diverse suburbs in Australia. At the 2021 census, the proportion of residents in the Fairfield local government area who stated their ancestry as Vietnamese and Assyrian, was in excess of sixteen times the national average. The area was linguistically diverse, with Vietnamese, Arabic, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, or Cantonese languages spoken in households, and ranged from two times to seventeen times the national averages.

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