Chinese Cantonese Voice Over Agency

Cantonese, or Standard Cantonese (traditional Chinese: 廣東話 / 廣州話; simplified Chinese: 广东话 / 广州话), is the dialect of Yue Chinese spoken in the vicinity of Canton (Guangzhou) in southern China. It is the traditional prestige dialect of Yue.

Cantonese is the language of the Cantonese people. Inside mainland China, it is a lingua franca in Guangdong Province and some neighbouring areas, such as the eastern part of Guangxi Province. It is the majority language of Pearl River Delta, Hong Kong and Macau. It is also traditionally the most spoken variety of Chinese among overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia (most notably in Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore) and the Western world, especially Canada, Australia, Western Europe, and the United States.

While the term Cantonese refers narrowly to the prestige variety described in this article, it is often used in a broader sense for the entire Yue branch of Chinese, including related dialects such as Taishanese. When standard Cantonese and the closely related Yuehai dialects are classified as one variant, there are about 70 million total speakers.

Cantonese is viewed as part of the cultural identity for its native speakers across large swathes of southern China, Hong Kong and Macau. Although Cantonese shares much vocabulary with Mandarin Chinese, the two varieties are not mutually intelligible because of pronunciation, grammatical, and also lexical differences. Sentence structure, in particular the placement of verbs, sometimes differs between the two varieties. The use of vocabulary in Cantonese also tends to have more historic roots. One of the most notable differences between Cantonese and Mandarin is how the spoken word is written; with Mandarin the spoken word is written as such, whereas with Cantonese there may not be a direct written word matching what was said. This results in the situation in which a Mandarin and Cantonese text look almost the same, but are pronounced differently.

During the Southern Song period, Guangzhou became the cultural centre of the region. Cantonese emerged as the prestige dialect of Yue Chinese when the port city of Guangzhou on the Pearl River Delta became the largest port in China, with a trade network stretching as far as Arabia. Cantonese was also used in the popular Yuèōu, Mùyú and Nányīn folksong genres, as well as Cantonese opera. Additionally, a distinct classical literature was developed in Cantonese, with Middle Chinese texts sounding more similar to modern Cantonese than other present-day Chinese varieties, including Mandarin.

As Guangzhou became China’s key commercial center for foreign trade and exchange in the 1700s, Cantonese became the variety of Chinese that came into the most interaction with the Western world. Around this period and continuing into the 1900s, the ancestors of most of the populations of Hong Kong and Macau arrived from Guangzhou and surrounding areas after the territories were ceded to Britain and Portugal respectively. In Mainland China, standard Mandarin has been promoted as the medium of instruction in schools and as the official language, especially after the communist takeover in 1949. Meanwhile, Cantonese has remained the official variety of Chinese in Hong Kong and Macau, both during and after the colonial period.

Spoken Chinese has numerous regional and local varieties, many of which are mutually unintelligible. Most of these are rare outside their native areas, though they may be spoken outside of China. Since a 1909 Qing Dynasty decree, China has promoted Mandarin for use in education, the media and official communication. The proclamation of Mandarin as the official national language however was not fully accepted by the Cantonese authority in the early 20th century, who argued for the “regional uniqueness” of its local dialect and commercial importance of the region. The use of Cantonese in mainland China is unique relative to non-Mandarin Chinese varieties in that it continues to persist in a few state television and radio broadcasts today.

Nevertheless, there have been recent attempts to curb the use of Cantonese in China. The most notable has been the 2010 proposal that Guangzhou Television increase its broadcast in Mandarin at the expense of Cantonese programs. This however led to mass protests in Guangzhou, which eventually dissuaded authorities from enforcing the linguistic switch. Additionally, there have been reports of students being punished for speaking non-Mandarin forms of Chinese at school, resulting in a reluctance of younger children communicating in their native Chinese variety, including Cantonese. Such actions have further strengthened the role of Cantonese in local Guangdong culture, with the variety being seen as an identity of the province’s native people, in contrast to migrants who have generally arrived from poorer areas of China and largely speak Mandarin.

Due to the linguistic history of Hong Kong and Macau, and the use of Cantonese in most established overseas Chinese communities, international usage of Cantonese is relatively widespread compared to its proportion of speakers who make up the population in China. Cantonese is the predominant Chinese variety spoken in Hong Kong and Macau. In these areas, political discourse takes place almost exclusively in Cantonese, making it the only variety of Chinese other than Mandarin to be used as the primary language for official state functions. Because of their use by non-Mandarin-speaking Yue speakers overseas, Cantonese and Taishanese are the primary forms of Chinese that many Westerners encounter.

Increasingly since the 1997 Handover, Cantonese has been used as a symbol of local identity in Hong Kong, largely through the development of democracy in the territory and desinicization practices to emphasise a separate Hong Kong identity.

A similar identity situation exists in the United States, where social conflicts have arisen within the Chinese American community due to a large recent influx of Mandarin-speakers from Taiwan and China. While many established Taiwanese immigrants have learned Cantonese to foster relations with the traditional Cantonese-speaking Chinese American population, more recent arrivals and the larger number of mainland Chinese immigrants have largely continued to use Mandarin, sometimes as their exclusive language as well rather than attempting to use English. This has contributed to a segregation of communities based on variety of Chinese spoken, as well as a growing number of Chinese Americans (including American-born Chinese) of Cantonese background defending the historic Chinese American culture before the recent arrival of Mandarin-speakers, including dis-identification with China itself in favor of their families’ countries of origin (e.g. Hong Kong, Macau, Vietnam, etc.) if not from the mainland.

Along with Mandarin and Hokkien, Cantonese has its own popular music, Cantopop. In Hong Kong, Cantonese lyrics predominate within popular music, and many artists from Beijing and Taiwan have learned Cantonese to make Cantonese versions of their recordings. Popular native Mandarin speaking singers, including Faye Wong, Eric Moo, and singers from Taiwan, have been trained in Cantonese to add “Hong Kong-ness” to their performances.

Films were also made in Cantonese from the early days of Chinese cinema, and the first Cantonese talkie, White Gold Dragon (白金龍), was made in 1932 by the Tianyi Film Company. Despite a ban on Cantonese films by the Nanjing authority in the 1930s, Cantonese film production continued in Hong Kong which was then under British colonial rule. From the mid-1970s to the 1990s, Cantonese films made in Hong Kong were very popular among overseas Chinese communities.