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'''Cantonese''' is the de facto [[official language]] of [[Hong Kong]] and [[Macau]] and is also the lingua franca of Guangdong Province. It is completely different from [[Mandarin]], the official language of [[China]], differing not only [[phonology|phonologically]], but also [[grammar|grammatically]] and in [[vocabulary]].

'''Cantonese''' is the de facto [[official language]] of [[Hong Kong]] and [[Macau]] and is also the lingua franca of Guangdong Province. It is a separate Chinese language from [[Mandarin]], the official language of [[China]], differing not only [[phonology|phonologically]], but also [[grammar|grammatically]] and in [[vocabulary]].  

Linguistic studies have shown that the Cantonese language is '''not''' a dialect of any language in particular but rather a language in its own right with its own history. However, written Cantonese is rarely encountered outside Hong Kong even in overseas Cantonese-speaking communities outside the so-called "Greater China" entity (as coined by the liberal media).

Cantonese preserved many features found in Ancient Chinese that are lost in [[Mandarin]]. It kept many of Ancient Chinese's final [[consonant|consonants]] (i.e. "m", "n", "ng", "p", "t", and "k") and has at least six tones, compared to Mandarin's two final consonants (i.e. "n" and "ng") and Mandarin's four tones. Cantonese also has fewer initial consonants but it also has about twice as many distinctively different syllables compared to Mandarin. Therefore, colloquial Cantonese words tend to be more monosyllabic compared to Mandarin, whose words tend to be more polysyllabic, because Cantonese does not differentiate as many homonyms.

[[Category:China]]

[[Category:China]]