Cantonese language

Cantonese language, variety of Chinese spoken by more than 55 million people in Guangdong and southern Guangxi provinces of China, including the important cities of Canton, Hong Kong, and Macau. Throughout the world it is spoken by some 20 million more. In Vietnam alone, Cantonese (Yue) speakers (who went there as soldiers and railroad workers) number nearly 1 million.

Cantonese preserves more features of Ancient Chinese than do the other major Chinese languages; its various dialects retain most of the final consonants of the older language and have at least six tones, in contrast to the four tones of Modern Standard Chinese, to distinguish meaning between words or word elements that have the same arrangement of consonant and vowel sounds. The language has fewer initial consonants than Modern Standard Chinese and about twice as many distinctively different syllables. Before the mid-20th century the majority of Chinese immigrants spoke Cantonese.