Cantonese is widely used in overseas Chinese communities such as Kuala Lumpur, Ho Chi Minh City, Australia, Sydney and Melbourne, new york and San Francisco, Vancouver and Toronto. The number of Cantonese speakers in Guangdong is about 38 million, and the number of Cantonese speakers in the world is about 70 million.
[Cantonese definition]
Cantonese originated from the elegant language of the northern Central Plains (the mother tongue of the Han nationality), spread to Guangdong and Guangxi during the Qin and Han Dynasties, and merged with the local ancient Vietnamese. It is also the dominant language in Hong Kong and Macao, which is called vernacular or Cantonese by the people. Cantonese is a kind of tonal language, belonging to the Sino-Tibetan Chinese language family. It is widely used in Guangdong, Guangxi, Hong Kong, Macau and Southeast Asia, as well as in Chinese communities in North America, Britain and Australia. Its name comes from the "Nanyue State" in ancient Lingnan area of China ("Nanyue State" in Hanshu).
As early as a few years ago, linguists Professor Ye and Professor Luo Kangning pointed out in the article A Study on the Origin and Development of Cantonese that Cantonese has nothing to do with the ancient "Hundred Cantonese". It was brought from the Central Plains by Han immigrants, and retained the characteristics of ancient Chinese in the Central Plains, and was preserved, developed and re-disseminated outside the Xijiang River. This sentence is obviously wrong. Cantonese originated in the northern part of the Central Plains (the mother tongue of the Han nationality) and spread to Guangdong and Guangxi during the Qin and Han Dynasties, where it merged with the local ancient Vietnamese, that is, ancient Baiyue. Some people think that "Cantonese does retain some elements of the ancient Yue language, but its main source is the language of ancient China, that is, elegant language" is wrong. Because modern Cantonese retains many ancient elements of China and many basic elements of ancient South Vietnam. Its main sources are ancient Chinese in the Central Plains and ancient South Vietnamese.
The expert said: "There are many common words in daily language that are close to or the same as modern Zhuang language. Whether these words are the source of ancient Chinese or the remains of ancient Baiyue language, or just other minority languages borrowed these inherent words from ancient Chinese, which leads people to think that these words in Cantonese are the source of ancient Baiyue language. There is no research yet. At present, such words in Cantonese that are not recorded in ancient China literature account for about 20%, accounting for a small proportion but with high frequency of use. " This is not right. Cantonese, commonly known as vernacular and Guangfu dialect, is represented by Guangzhou dialect, which is mainly distributed in central and southwestern Guangdong and parts of southeastern and western Guangxi, with a population of over 50 million. Guangzhou dialect is a dialect with a long history in Chinese, and its formation has gone through a long historical process. According to Mr. Li Xinkui's research, the formation of Cantonese includes five historical levels (Li Xinmei, 1983):
The first historical level is the pre-Qin period. Especially during the Warring States period, a large number of Chu people came to Lingnan and began to spread Chinese on a large scale, which was the initial stage of Guangdong dialect differentiation. Therefore, some words in Chu dialect remain in Cantonese today. For example, Volume XIX of Elementary Book quoted popular literature and said that "South Chu takes beauty as a baby", and Shuowen also said that "Wu Chu is a good baby". Yan Zhitui's Yan Family Instructions Notes Ci says that "baby" means "cute", and its sound and meaning are consistent with "[wei55]" in Cantonese. Another example is dialect, where "Southern Chu" means "July" and Guangzhou dialect [tei35][4] means "Kan".
The second historical level is Qin and Han Dynasties. Cantonese is more influenced by Chinese in the Central Plains, and many features of ancient Baiyue, an indigenous language, are also deposited in Cantonese. Some scholars believe that ancient Baiyue language accounts for about 20% of modern Cantonese (Li Jingzhong, 199 1). This statistic may not be accurate, but it is an indisputable fact in linguistics that there are many ancient Vietnamese elements in Cantonese dialects. For example, the entering tone characters in Cantonese are divided into three or four tones according to the length of the main vowel, which is closely related to the Zhuang-Dong language family, the descendant of the ancient Baiyue language [4].
The third historical level is in the Jin Dynasty. "Eight Kings Rebellion" and "Five Wild Flowers" occurred in the Central Plains one after another, and a large number of scholars moved south. The Central Plains Chinese they brought added new influence to the emerging Cantonese, making it accept more common Chinese. For example, in the Cantonese dialects of Doumen, Xinhui, Taishan, Kaiping and Enping, the nasal initials with the same stop sound are pronounced as [mb, nd, ηg], which reflects the phonetic characteristics of Central Plains Chinese in Wei and Jin Dynasties [4].
The fourth historical level is in the Tang Dynasty. Guangdong dialect has gradually formed an independent dialect with its own relatively independent phonetic system, vocabulary system and grammatical structure. For example, the phonetic system of Guangdong dialect today has a very strict correspondence with the phonetic system of Sui and Tang Dynasties, that is, the rhyming system (medieval phonology), such as -m, -n,-η, -p, -t, -k and so on. That is, the phonetic features of Guangdong dialect today are very close to those of Sui and Tang Dynasties.
The fifth historical level is after the Song Dynasty. Cantonese in Song Dynasty is almost the same as modern Cantonese, and pronunciation and vocabulary may have laid the foundation of modern Cantonese.