Cantonese
From Free net encyclopedia
Cantonese generally refers to people or things associated with Guangdong Province, Hong Kong, or Macau in China.
- Cantonese people: people residing in, or with ancestry in, Guangdong and environs
- Many people of Cantonese descent reside in Canada, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, UK, Ireland and the United States, and other places, part of the Chinese overseas diaspora.
- The Cantonese language: the native speech of many Cantonese people and residents of Guandong, Hong Kong, Macau, and other Chinese communities in China and elsewhere, including a large proportion of overseas Chinese. (Considered a language mainly by non-Chinese scholars, based on intelligibility, or a dialect mainly by Chinese scholars, and in Western popular speech, based on writing system and cultural-historical factors)
- The Cantonese language/dialect, broadly, is the speech originally developed among populations of Guangdong and environs.
- Standard Cantonese is the prestige and mainstream (sub)dialect of Cantonese, historically based on that of Guangzhou, also usually simply called Cantonese.
- Cantonese includes various dialects, such as Taishan dialect or Waitau.
- Cantonese cuisine: cuisine of the style historically popularized in Guangzhou, or broadly, among Chinese communities abroad with origins in Guangdong.
Etymology
The term "Cantonese" derives from the place-name "Canton", a former name used in Western languages for Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province. Most likely, it is a development of the Cantonese-language pronunciation Gwong Dung, the name of the province, romanized in former systems as Kwang Tung or Kwangtung. The name 'Canton' was then erroneously applied to the city of Guangzhou. In some European languages both the city and the province is known as Canton (or similar spellings). Additional confusion may have come about as a result of confusion between Cantonese-language and other Chinese versions of the name (e.g. Mandarin), as well as mispronunciations by users of the romanization systems.