Written Cantonese is the most complete written form of a Chinese language after that for Mandarin Chinese and Classical Chinese. Although it uses many of the same characters as written Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese has a number of native words and grammatical particles that are not represented by standard Chinese characters. People have therefore developed new characters for words that do not have characters for them and have retained others that have been lost or seldom used in standard Mandarin Chinese.
With the advent of the computer and standardization of character sets specifically for Cantonese, many printed materials in predominantly Cantonese-speaking areas of the world are written to cater to their population with these written Cantonese characters.
History Early history Before the 20th century, the standard written language of China was Classical Chinese, with a grammar and vocabulary based on the Old Chinese of the Spring and Autumn period, of the 8th to the 5th century BCE. While this written standard remained essentially static for over two thousand years, the actual spoken language diverged ever further. The formation of Yue Chinese occurred among the Han population in the Pearl River Delta across many centuries, with the main linguistic influences being the Middle Chinese of the tenth century CE, corresponding to the end of the Tang dynasty, and that of the thirteenth century CE or late Song dynasty, as well as the Tai-Kadai substrate and some influence from pre-Tang Sinitic varieties.
The first Cantonese writings belong to a literary form specific to Canton, called mukjyusyu (, Jyutping: , Hanyu Pinyin: , ), that supposedly has its roots in Buddhist chants accompanied by wooden fish. Mukjyu texts were popular light reading, their primary audience were women, as female (and overall) literacy was unusually high in that region. The mukjyus were intended to be sung, similar to other genres such as naamyam, although without musical instruments.
The earliest known mukjyusyu work with elements of written Cantonese, Faazin Gei (, Jyutping: , Hanyu Pinyin: , ), was composed by an unknown author during the late Ming dynasty; its oldest extant edition is dated to 1713. The Faazin Gei is an example of the "scholar and beauty" genre popular at the time, with its story set in Suzhou. Its text, while still being close to Literary Chinese, contains a lot of specific Cantonese wording and even Cantonese vernacular characters, especially in the dialogue sentences, but also in the narrative text. Other such renowned early works include Ji-Hofaa Si (, Jyutping: , "The Two Lotus Flowers") and Gamso-Jyunjoeng Saanwusin Gei (, Jyutping: , "Coral Fan and Golden-lock Mandarin-ducks Pendant").
The naamyam (; Jyutping: , Hanyu Pinyin: , literally "southern songs"), a genre of song that flourished from the late Ming dynasty and frequently sung in Canton's brothels with accompanying string instruments, possessed language that was generally very literary, with only occasional instances of colloquial Cantonese words. The purpose of such inclusions is debated; they were likely added purely for rhythmic purposes. An example of such practice is Haaktou Cauhan (, Jyutping: , "The Traveler's Autumn Regrets") written in the first decade of 1800s, which is considered one of the most outstanding examples of the naamyam genre.
Written Cantonese vocabulary was used much more extensively in the lungzau (, Jyutping: , "Dragon boat") songs, performed mainly by beggars on the streets. These songs were considered the least prestigious genre and were rarely published, and then only after careful editing to make them less vernacular in style.
An important landmark in the history of written Cantonese was the publication of Jyut-au (, Jyutping: , Hanyu Pinyin: , literally: "Cantonese love songs") by Zhao Ziyong (, Jyutping: , Hanyu Pinyin: ) in 1828, marking the beginning of an extremely popular genre. Being an educated juren, Zhao Ziyong earned some prestige and respect for the previously rejected "heavy" vernacular literature.
Modern times In the early 20th century, Chinese reformers like Hu Shih saw the need for language reform and championed the development of a vernacular that allowed modern Chinese to write the language the same way they speak. The vernacular language movement took hold, and the written language was standardized as vernacular Chinese. Mandarin was chosen as the basis for the new standard.
The standardization and adoption of written Mandarin preempted the development and standardization of vernaculars based on other varieties of Chinese. No matter which dialect one spoke, they still wrote in standardized Mandarin for everyday writing. However, Cantonese is unique amongst the non-Mandarin varieties in having a widely used written form. Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong used to be a British colony isolated from mainland China before 1997, so most HK citizens do not speak Mandarin. Written Cantonese has developed as a means of informal communication. Still, Cantonese speakers must use standard written Chinese, or even literary Chinese, in most formal written communications, since written Cantonese may be unintelligible to speakers of other varieties of Chinese.
By the 1920s, with the rise of fully written libretti () for Cantonese opera, a well-recognised system had arisen for the use of written Cantonese. The theatrical art form became popularised further through the 1950s with the post-war Hong Kong film industry, during which one third of all cinema production was devoted to Cantonese opera. With the consistent use of on-screen subtitles, the film-going audiences regularly encountered written Cantonese at the cinema, as well as on the backs of phonograph records and later audiocassette and CD cases.
Historically, written Cantonese has been used in Hong Kong for legal proceedings in order to write down the exact spoken testimony of a witness, instead of paraphrasing spoken Cantonese into standard written Chinese. However, its popularity and usage has been rising in the last two decades, the late Wong Jim being one of the pioneers of its use as an effective written language. Written Cantonese has become quite popular in certain tabloids, online chat rooms, instant messaging, and even social networking websites; this would be even more evident since the rise of localism in Hong Kong from the 2010s, where the articles written by those localist media are written in Cantonese. Although most foreign movies and TV shows are subtitled in Standard Chinese, some, such as The Simpsons, are subtitled using written Cantonese. Newspapers have the news section written in Standard Chinese, but they may have editorials or columns that contain Cantonese discourses, and Cantonese characters are increasing in popularity on advertisements and billboards.
It has been stated that written Cantonese remains limited outside Hong Kong, including other Cantonese-speaking areas in Guangdong Province. However, colloquial Cantonese advertisements are sometimes seen in Guangdong, suggesting that written Cantonese is widely understood and is regarded favourably, at least in some contexts. Attitudes toward written Cantonese in Guangzhou have been found to be in general positive, though this was limited to the informal and casual domains of life, where the social value of written Cantonese as a marker of cultural solidarity is highest.
Some sources will use only colloquial Cantonese forms, resulting in text similar to natural speech. However, it is more common to use a mixture of colloquial forms and standard Chinese forms, some of which are alien to natural speech. Thus the resulting "hybrid" text lies on a continuum between two norms: standard Chinese and colloquial Cantonese as spoken. It has been found that female gender and a middle class-income are demographic factors that promote a clear separation between standard written Chinese and written Cantonese. On the other hand, men, and both blue-collar workers and college-educated high-income demographics, are factors that tend towards a convergence to standard written Chinese.
Cantonese characters
Early sources A good source for well documented written Cantonese words can be found in the scripts for Cantonese opera. Readings in Cantonese colloquial: being selections from books in the Cantonese vernacular with free and literal translations of the Chinese character and romanized spelling (1894) by James Dyer Ball has a bibliography of printed works available in Cantonese characters in the last decade of the nineteenth century. A few libraries have collections of so-called "wooden fish books" written in Cantonese characters. Facsimiles and plot precis of a few of these have been published in Wolfram Eberhard's Cantonese Ballads. See also Cantonese love-songs, translated with introduction and notes by Cecil Clementi (1904) or a newer translation of these by Peter T. Morris in Cantonese love songs : an English translation of Jiu Ji-yung's Cantonese songs of the early 19th century (1992). Cantonese character versions of the Bible, Pilgrims Progress, and Peep of Day, as well as simple catechisms, were published by mission presses. The special Cantonese characters used in all of these were not standardized and show wide variation.
Characters today
Written Cantonese contains many characters not used in standard written Chinese in order to transcribe words not present in the standard lexicon, and for some words from Old Chinese when their original forms have been forgotten. Despite attempts by the government of Hong Kong in the 1990s to standardize this character set, culminating in the release of the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS) for use in electronic communication, there is still significant disagreement about which characters are correct in written Cantonese, as many of the Cantonese words existed as descendants of Old Chinese words, but are being replaced by some new invented Cantonese words.
Vocabulary General estimates of vocabulary differences between Cantonese and Mandarin range from 30 to 50 percent. Donald B. Snow, the author of Cantonese as Written Language: The Growth of a Written Chinese Vernacular, wrote that "It is difficult to quantify precisely how different" the two vocabularies are. Snow wrote that the different vocabulary systems are the main difference between written Mandarin and written Cantonese. Ouyang Shan made a corpus-based estimate concluding that one third of the lexical items used in regular Cantonese speech do not exist in Mandarin, but that between the formal registers the differences were smaller. He analyzed a radio news broadcast and concluded that of its lexical items, 10.6% were distinctly Cantonese. Here are examples of differing lexical items in a sentence:
+Written Cantonese and standard written Chinese equivalents with corresponding Jyutping romanizationGlossWritten CantoneseStandard Written Chineseis hai6 si6 (Mandarin: shì)not m4 bat1 (Mandarin: bù)they/them keoi5-dei6 taa1-mun4 (Mandarin: tāmen)(possessive marker) ge3 dik1 (Mandarin: de)Is it theirs?hai6-m4-hai6 keoi5-dei6 ge3?Si6-bat1-si6 taa1-mun4 dik1? (Mandarin: Shì bùshì tāmen de?)
The two Chinese sentences are grammatically identical, using an A-not-A question to ask "Is it theirs?" (referring to an aforementioned object). Though the characters correspond 1:1, the actual glyphs used are all different.
Cognates