Cantonese · 廣東話

About Cantonese

Language family

Sino-Tibetan, Sinitic

Where it's spoken

Guangdong province, Hong Kong, Macau, and diaspora communities worldwide

Speakers

roughly 85 million speakers

Cantonese preserves more features of Middle Chinese than Mandarin does, including a fuller set of tones (traditionally counted as six to nine, depending on analysis) and final consonants that Mandarin lost. It shares a written tradition with Mandarin through Chinese characters even though the two are not mutually intelligible in speech. Hong Kong and Macau's colonial and trading history gave Cantonese an especially large global diaspora footprint relative to its home-region speaker count.