As the most commonly spoken language in Hong Kong, it shares a recent and direct lineage with the Guangzhou (Canton) dialect.
As of 2021, 88.2% of Hong Kong's population identified Cantonese as their "usual spoken language," while 93.7% reported being able to speak it.
Guangdong speech) by its native speakers, while the government also officially refers to it as gwong2 zau1 waa2 (廣州話, lit.
[1] Before the arrival of British settlers in 1842, the inhabitants of Hong Kong mainly spoke the Dongguan-Bao'an (Tungkun–Po'on)[2] and Tanka dialects of Yue, as well as Hakka[3] and Hokkien.
After the British acquired Hong Kong Island, Kowloon Peninsula and the New Territories from the Qing in 1841 (officially 1842) and 1898, large numbers [quantify] of merchants and workers came to Hong Kong from the city of Canton, the main centre of Cantonese.
[citation needed] Illegal immigration from mainland China into Hong Kong nevertheless continued.
Consequently, the vocabularies of Cantonese in mainland China and Hong Kong substantially differ.
In modern-day Hong Kong, many native speakers no longer distinguish between certain phoneme pairs, leading to instances of sound change through mergers.
Although considered non-standard and denounced as "lazy sound" (懶音) by purists, the phenomena are widespread and not restricted to Hong Kong.
List of observed shifts:[5] In educated Hong Kong Cantonese speech, these sound mergers are avoided, and many older speakers still distinguish between those phoneme categories.
With the sound changes, the name of Hong Kong's Hang Seng Bank (香港恆生銀行), Jyutping: Hoeng1 gong2 hang4 sang1 ngan4 hong4, /hœ́ːŋ kɔ̌ːŋ hɐ̏ŋ sɐ́ŋ ŋɐ̏n hɔ̏ːŋ/, literally Hong Kong Constant Growth Bank, becomes /hœ́ːn kɔ̌ːn hɐ̏n sɐ́n ɐ̏n hɔ̏ːn/, sounding like Hon' Kon' itchy body 'un cold ('香港'痕身un寒).
The merger of /n/ and /l/ also affects the choice of characters when the Cantonese media transliterates foreign names.
[citation needed] Prescriptivists who try to correct these "lazy sounds" often end up introducing hypercorrections.
For instance, while attempting to ensure that people pronounce the initial /ŋ/, they may introduce it into words which have historically had a null-initial.
Life in Hong Kong is characterised by the blending of southern Chinese with other Asian and Western cultures, as well as the city's position as a major international business centre.
As a result, a large number of loanwords are created in Hong Kong and then exported to mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, and Japan.
An excellent example (though dated) of the convenience and efficiency of such mixing is "打 collect call" replacing "打一個由對方付款嘅長途電話", i.e. 13 syllables reduced to four.