Cantonese | Wikipedia audio article
Channel: wikipedia tts
Date: 2018-12-15

This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:
Cantonese


00:01:55 1 Names
00:04:12 2 Geographic distribution
00:04:21 2.1 Hong Kong and Macau
00:05:27 2.2 China
00:08:03 2.3 Southeast Asia
00:08:29 2.3.1 Vietnam
00:09:09 2.3.2 Malaysia
00:11:01 2.3.3 Singapore
00:13:16 2.3.4 Cambodia
00:13:53 2.3.5 Thailand
00:14:34 2.3.6 Indonesia
00:15:05 2.4 North America
00:15:14 2.4.1 United States
00:19:17 2.4.2 Canada
00:20:24 2.5 Western Europe
00:20:33 2.5.1 United Kingdom
00:21:02 2.5.2 France
00:21:45 2.5.3 Portugal
00:22:18 2.6 Australia
00:23:05 3 History
00:24:39 4 Cultural role
00:28:46 5 Phonology
00:28:55 5.1 Initials and finals
00:31:40 5.2 Tones
00:32:16 6 Written Cantonese
00:33:19 7 Romanization
00:35:00 7.1 Early Western effort
00:39:04 7.2 Cantonese romanization in Hong Kong
00:41:24 7.3 Comparison
00:41:37 7.3.1 Initials
00:41:44 7.3.2 Finals
00:41:52 7.3.3 Tones
00:42:00 8 Loanwords
00:42:48 9 See also



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SUMMARY
=======
Cantonese is a variety of Chinese spoken in the city of Guangzhou (also known as Canton) and its surrounding area in southeastern China. It is the traditional prestige variety and standard form of Yue Chinese, one of the major subgroups of Chinese.
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 the dominant and official language of Hong Kong and Macau. Cantonese is also widely spoken amongst overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia (most notably in Vietnam and Malaysia, as well as in Singapore and Cambodia to a lesser extent) and throughout the Western world.
While the term Cantonese specifically refers to the prestige variety, it is often used in a broader sense for the entire Yue subgroup of Chinese, including related but largely mutually unintelligible languages and dialects such as Taishanese. When Cantonese and the closely related Yuehai dialects are classified together, there are about 80 million total speakers. 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.
Although Cantonese shares a lot of 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 formalized written form is adopted, which is more akin to the Mandarin written form. This results in the situation in which a Cantonese and a Mandarin text may look similar but are pronounced differently.