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.
Furthermore, 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.
Historically, speakers called this variety "Canton speech" (廣州話; 广州话; Gwong2 zau1 waa2; Gwóngjāu wá), although this term is now seldom used outside mainland China.
[16] As Guangzhou became China's key commercial center for foreign trade and exchange in the 1700s, Cantonese became the variety of Chinese interacting most with the Western world.
Large numbers of Cantonese people from the Pearl River Delta, especially merchants, subsequently migrated by boat to other parts of Guangdong and Guangxi.
[17] In mainland China, Standard Mandarin has been heavily promoted as the medium of instruction in schools and as the official language, especially after the communist takeover in 1949.
Due to the city's long standing role as an important cultural center, Cantonese emerged as the prestige dialect of the Yue varieties of Chinese in the Southern Song dynasty and its usage spread around most of what is now the provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi.
On the mainland, Cantonese continued to serve as the lingua franca of Guangdong and Guangxi even after Mandarin was made the official language of the government by the Qing dynasty in the early 1900s.
Furthermore, it is also a medium of instruction in select academic curricula, including some university elective courses and Chinese as a foreign language programs.
[27][28] The permitted usage of Cantonese in mainland China is largely a countermeasure against Hong Kong's influence, as its Cantonese-language media has a substantial exposure and following in Guangdong.
As a major economic center of China, there have been concerns that the use of Cantonese in Guangzhou is diminishing in favour of Mandarin, both through the continual influx of Mandarin-speaking migrants from impoverished areas and strict government policies.
In Vietnam, Cantonese is the dominant language of the main ethnic Chinese community, usually referred to as Hoa, which numbers about one million people and constitutes one of the largest minority groups in the country.
Despite the government actively promoting SMC, the Cantonese-speaking Chinese community has been relatively successful in preserving its language from Mandarin compared with other dialect groups.
[50] In Indonesia, Cantonese is locally known as Konghu and is one of the variants spoken by the Chinese Indonesian community, with speakers largely concentrated in certain major cities like Jakarta, Medan, Surabaya, Makassar, Semarang, Manado and Batam.
However, it has a relatively minor presence compared to other Southeast Asian nations, being the fourth most spoken Chinese variety after Hokkien, Hakka and Teochew.
The majority of Chinese emigrants have traditionally originated from Guangdong and Guangxi, as well as Hong Kong and Macau (beginning in the latter half of the 20th century and before the handover) and Southeast Asia, with Cantonese as their native language.
The increase of Mandarin-speaking communities has resulted in the rise of separate neighborhoods or enclaves segregated by the primary Chinese variety spoken.
Among the Chinese community in France, Cantonese is spoken by immigrants who fled the former French Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos) following the conflicts and communist takeovers in the region during the 1970s.
Since the late-20th century, however, Mandarin- and Wu-speaking migrants from mainland China have outnumbered those from Macau, although Cantonese is still retained among mainstream Chinese community associations.
[72] Such actions have further provoked Cantonese speakers to cherish their linguistic identity in contrast to migrants who have generally arrived from poorer areas of China and largely speak Mandarin or other Chinese languages.
In these areas, public discourse takes place almost exclusively in Cantonese, making it the only variety of Chinese other than Mandarin to be used as an official language in the world.
[73] A similar identity issue exists in the United States, where conflicts have arisen among Chinese-speakers due to a large recent influx of Mandarin-speakers.
While older Taiwanese immigrants have learned Cantonese to foster integration within the traditional Chinese American populations, more recent arrivals from the mainland continue to use Mandarin exclusively.
[79] Less prevalent, but still notable differences found among a number of Hong Kong speakers include: Cantonese vowels tend to be traced further back to Middle Chinese than their Mandarin analogues, such as M. /aɪ/ vs. C. /ɔːi/; M. /i/ vs. C. /ɐi/; M. /ɤ/ vs. C. /ɔː/; M. /ɑʊ/ vs. C. /ou/ etc.
This makes Cantonese in general harder to master due to required ability of users to readily be able to process two additional phonetic tones.
In contrast, formal literature, professional and government documents, television and movie subtitles, and news media continue to use standard written Chinese.
Systematic efforts to develop an alphabetic representation of Cantonese began with Protestant missionaries arriving in China early in the nineteenth century.
Earlier Catholic missionaries, mostly Portuguese, had developed romanization-schemes for the pronunciation current in the court and capital city of China but made few efforts to romanize other varieties.
Elijah Coleman Bridgman and Samuel Wells Williams in their Chinese Chrestomathy in the Canton Dialect (1841) were the progenitors of a long-lived lineage of related romanizations that with minor variations are embodied in the works of James Dyer Ball, Ernst Johann Eitel, and Immanuel Gottlieb Genähr (1910).
