Cantonese language

Cantonese is a variety of Chinese originating from the city of Guangzhou (also known as Canton) and its surrounding area in Southeastern China. It is the traditional prestige variety of the Yue Chinese dialect group, which has about 68 million native speakers.

Cantonese is viewed as a vital and inseparable part of the cultural identity for its native speakers across large areas of Southeastern China, Hong Kong, and Macau, as well as in overseas communities. Cantonese is also widely spoken amongst Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia (most notably in Vietnam and Malaysia, as well as in Singapore and Cambodia. Although Cantonese shares much vocabulary with Mandarin, the two varieties are mutually unintelligible because of differences in pronunciation, grammar, and lexicon. Sentence structure, in particular the placement of verbs, 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 formalised written form is adopted, which is more Mandarin written form. This results in the situation in which a Cantonese and a Mandarin text may look similar but are pronounced differently.