The Cantonese Dialect

    Today, I will be writing about Cantonese and its characteristics, history, uses, and other interesting things about the dialect. Firstly, Cantonese is one of the various dialects found in China. Also, it belongs to the "Yue" family language and it is clustered with many other dialects like "Hakka" and "Hokkien" and it´s found around the city of Guanzhou and its surroundings. In addition, it is considered the main dialect spoken around the city of the previously mentioned Guangzhou and the province of Guandong. It is also, the official language of Hong Kong and Macau.

Now, let's discuss it´s linguistics using a system of romanization called "Jyutping" created by linguistics professionals. Firstly, in "Jyutping" there are 6 different tones in Cantonese, but also, sometimes considered to have 9 because, Cantonese has an entering tone and a final tone, unlike modern Mandarin. Additionally, Cantonese is a Sinetic language, so it shares similarities with Mandarin but both are mutually unintelligible. Why is this case? Because, mostly because of the sentence structure, different sounds for the same words and special sounds not found in the other language. Such as, for example in Cantonese, for words starting with "G" or "K" need to be pronounced with the opening or closing of the mouth because they retain a more ancient pronunciation. Also cantonese has unique words such as "Tung4", and "Ji1" and any word starting or ending with "Ng" has to start or end in the throat. but, with "Ji1" it exists in Mandarin but it needs a particle to accompany it but in Cantonese, it can go alone with no end particle. But setting it aside, now let us put it aside, now let us talk about literature and why it is recommended to read literature in Cantonese. most scholars will recommend this because it retains a more ancient, philosophical way of structure rather than Mandarin, by retaining elements of middle Chinese where most literary works were written. because Mandarin is more of an artificial, newer language and ironically cantonese is labeled as a "dialect", but it is more Chinese than what most people associate with "Chinese".

Now let´s see its grammar, Cantonese suffers from a problem called "diglossia", meaning that the written form is different from the spoken form or vice versa. But, the thing is that spoken Cantonese can be written, and written Cantonese can be spoken.  but luckily them switching places isn't as common. They are used in different occasions such as in spoken written Cantonese just being used for informal writing and written spoken Cantonese just being used for formal occasions such as political events, news broadcasts, and songs. Well, in conclusion, with all the reasons I have stated previously, I can say why Cantonese, although just being a dialect, is a very interesting language regarding it just being a dialect and not widely known, we can see its characteristics and why we can say that it is better than Mandarin Chinese.