Modern Cantonese speakers have therefore developed new characters for words that do not exist and have retained others that have been lost in standard Chinese.

[2] While this written standard remained essentially static for over two thousand years, the actual spoken language diverged ever further.

Mukjyu texts were popular light reading, their primary audience were women, as female (and overall) literacy was unusually high in that region.

[5] The earliest known mukjyusyu work with elements of written Cantonese, Faazin Gei (花箋記, Jyutping: Faa1zin1 Gei3, Hanyu Pinyin: Huājiān Jì, literally "The Flowery Paper"), was composed by an unknown author during the late Ming dynasty; its oldest extant edition is dated to 1713.

[5] The naamyam (南音; Jyutping: naam4 jam1, Hanyu Pinyin: nányīn, literally "southern songs"), a genre of song that flourished from the late Ming dynasty and frequently sung in Canton's brothels with accompanying string instruments, possessed language that was generally very literary, with only occasional instances of colloquial Cantonese words.

[5] Written Cantonese vocabulary was used much more extensively in the lungzau (龍舟, Jyutping: lung4zau1, "Dragon boat") songs, performed mainly by beggars on the streets.

[5] An important landmark in the history of written Cantonese was the publication of Jyut-au (粵謳, Jyutping: jyut6au1, Hanyu Pinyin: yuè'ōu, literally: "Cantonese love songs") by Zhao Ziyong (招子庸, Jyutping: Ziu1 Zi2jung4, Hanyu Pinyin: Zhāo Zǐyōng) in 1828, marking the beginning of an extremely popular genre.

Being an educated juren, Zhao Ziyong earned some prestige and respect for the previously rejected "heavy" vernacular literature.

Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong used to be a British colony isolated from mainland China before 1997, so most HK citizens do not speak Mandarin.

The theatrical art form became popularised further through the 1950s with the post-war Hong Kong film industry, during which one third of all cinema production was devoted to Cantonese opera.

[4] With the consistent use of on-screen subtitles, the film-going audiences regularly encountered written Cantonese at the cinema, as well as on the backs of phonograph records and later audiocassette and CD cases.

However, its popularity and usage has been rising in the last two decades, the late Wong Jim being one of the pioneers of its use as an effective written language.

It has been stated that written Cantonese remains limited outside Hong Kong, including other Cantonese-speaking areas in Guangdong Province.

Thus the resulting "hybrid" text lies on a continuum between two norms: standard Chinese and colloquial Cantonese as spoken.

On the other hand, men, and both blue-collar workers and college-educated high-income demographics, are factors that tend towards a convergence to standard written Chinese.

Cantonese character versions of the Bible, Pilgrims Progress, and Peep of Day, as well as simple catechisms, were published by mission presses.

[5] Ouyang Shan made a corpus-based estimate concluding that one third of the lexical items used in regular Cantonese speech do not exist in Mandarin, but that between the formal registers the differences were smaller.

For example, some suggest that the common word 靚 leng3, meaning pretty in Cantonese but also looking into the mirror in Mandarin, is in fact the character 令 ling3.

In Southeast Asia, Cantonese people may adopt local Malay words into their daily speech, such as using the term 鐳 leoi1 to mean money rather than 錢 cin2, which would be used in Hong Kong.

Other common characters are unique to Cantonese or are different from their Mandarin usage, including: 乜, 冇, 仔, 佢, 佬, 俾, 靚 etc.

Some Cantonese writers use simple romanization (e.g., use D as 啲), symbols (add a Latin letter "o" in front of another Chinese character; e.g., 㗎 is defined in Unicode but will not display if not installed on the device in use, hence the proxy o架 is often used), homophones (e.g., use 果 as 嗰), and Chinese characters which have different meanings in Mandarin (e.g., 乜, 係, 俾; etc.)