I believe that everyone living in our country can feel the profoundness of language and culture, especially when they are in a strange city and listen to the local people speaking dialects. The motherland has long considered this problem, and in order to better promote the exchanges between people of all ethnic groups and provinces, Putonghua has been adopted as the national language of our country.

But even if Mandarin is standardized, dialects in some places are still very popular, and Cantonese is one of them. Although Cantonese is a dialect, its influence in China is still very extensive. As for the reason, it can be found many years ago, which is already a doomed trend.

As Cantonese people go to the world, Cantonese has been brought to every corner of the world. Now Cantonese is not only the official language of Hong Kong and Macao, but also the third largest language in the United States and Canada and the fourth largest language in Australia. Therefore, the status of Cantonese is very high overseas, and the number of people using Cantonese in the world exceeds 1 100 million. So Cantonese has long been defined as? Language? Instead of. Dialect? .

Linguistically, languages that cannot talk to each other at all are usually defined as different languages. If they can talk to each other more or less, they are different dialects of the same language. The difference between Cantonese and other branches of Chinese, such as Mandarin and Min, has reached the point where it is out of the question. According to the survey of 1988, 10 1 commonly used words are Cantonese and Beijing dialect.

So purely from the linguistic standard, if Chinese is regarded as a? Language family? Cantonese can be regarded as an independent language besides Mandarin, but when political science standards are added to define the language, the conclusion is completely different. According to the definition of modern nation-state, a nation can only have a unified language, even if the branches of this language are very different, it can only be regarded as a language.

So in China, Cantonese is a dialect, and Cantonese spoken by overseas Chinese all over the world can be called a language.