Cantonese, also known as Cantonese and Guangfu dialect, is commonly known as vernacular Chinese, and is called Tang dialect overseas. It is one of the seven dialects of Chinese tonal language and Chinese, belongs to Sino-Tibetan language family, and is also the mother tongue of Guangfu people of Han nationality.
Since ancient times, Guangdong and Guangxi have been connected by mountains and rivers and cultures. It was not until the Song Dynasty that Guangdong and Guangxi were separated, and Cantonese was formed much earlier than the Song Dynasty. Because of this, Cantonese is popular in Guangdong and Guangxi. Cangwu, an ancient country in Lingnan for about 5,000 years, is the birthplace of Lingnan culture and Pearl River culture, and also the birthplace of Cantonese. Cantonese, with nine tones and six tones, is a dialect with many ancient Chinese elements, which is a combination of Yayan in the Central Plains and Ancient Yue in Lingnan.
Cantonese not only retains a large number of ancient Chinese vocabulary and grammar, but also retains the pronunciation and tone of ancient Chinese, especially the entering tone. But now the popular Mandarin has no tone. The so-called "entering three tones" has been sent to three tones: flat, up and down. Because there is no entering tone, reading China's classical poems in Mandarin can't tell the difference between level tone, rhyme and rhyme. It is also very troublesome for people in Putonghua areas to write ancient poems. Cantonese speakers have this advantage, and their intonation is innate, so reading China's ancient poems in Cantonese is particularly attractive. In Hakka dialect and Chaoshan dialect, a large number of ancient Chinese, especially in the Middle Ages, are also preserved. ?
The tone of Cantonese is also very different from that of the north. There are six tones, one is clear, two are clear, three are clear, four are turbid, five are turbid and six are turbid. After that, promoting sound clarity is the high entrance, promoting sound clarity is the middle entrance, and promoting sound turbidity is the low entrance. Nine o'clock. Modern Cantonese grammar, such as "Shuida", "Dried Vegetable", "Renke", "Chicken Gong" and "Fish Sheng", all have a common grammatical structure, that is, adjectives are used as modifiers after nouns.
Extended data
Cantonese is a combination of the elegance of the ancient Central Plains and the ancient Yue language, with complete nine tones and six tones, which retains more features of ancient Chinese. Cantonese is widely popular in overseas Chinese communities in China, such as Kuala Lumpur, Ho Chi Minh City, Sydney, Melbourne, Christmas Island, new york, San Francisco, Vancouver and Toronto.
The Qing dynasty closed its doors to the outside world, leaving only Guangzhou as a port for foreign trade. Many foreigners came to China and mastered Cantonese instead of Mandarin. Many Beijing officials often come into contact with Cantonese in order to do business with foreigners, which makes Cantonese spread back to the Central Plains for the first time. During this period, a large number of Cantonese migrated to America, Australia and Southeast Asia, and Cantonese began to spread all over the world.
When the Republic of China was founded, although there was a tendency for northern vernacular to replace classical Chinese, there was not much restriction on the actual use of Cantonese. At one time, there was a proposal to use Cantonese as the national Putonghua. However, after the founding of the People's Republic of China, in the national campaign to promote the northern language as Putonghua, Cantonese was more and more influenced by Putonghua, so that many young people in Cantonese-speaking areas in Chinese mainland did not know how to pronounce some special words in Cantonese. This situation has made many Cantonese speakers feel a sense of crisis in their mother tongue.
Baidu Encyclopedia-Cantonese (a language in Sino-Tibetan language family)