Cantonese phonology
The standard pronunciation of Cantonese is that of Guangzhou, also known as Canton, the capital of Guangdong Province. Hong Kong Cantonese is related to the Guangzhou dialect, and the two diverge only slightly. Yue dialects in other parts of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces, such as Taishanese, may be considered divergent to a greater degree.
Cantonese syllables
A syllable generally corresponds to a word or character. Most syllables are etymologically associated with either standard Chinese characters or colloquial Cantonese characters. Modern linguists have discovered there are about 1,760 syllables being used in the entire Cantonese vocabulary, which cover the pronunciations of more than 10,000 Chinese characters. Therefore, the average number of homophonous characters per syllable is six.Phonetically speaking, a Cantonese syllable has only two parts – the sound and the tone.
Sounds
A Cantonese syllable usually consists of an initial and a final. There are about 630 syllables in the Cantonese syllabary.Some of these, such as and , , are no longer common; some, such as and , or and , have traditionally had two equally correct pronunciations but are beginning to be pronounced with only one particular way by its speakers, thus making the unused sounds effectively disappear from the language; some, such as , , , , have alternative nonstandard pronunciations which have become mainstream, again making some of the sounds disappear from the everyday use of the language; and yet others, such as , , have become popularly believed to be made-up/borrowed words to represent sounds in modern vernacular Cantonese when they have in fact been retaining those sounds before these vernacular usages became popular.
On the other hand, there are new words circulating in Hong Kong which use combinations of sounds which had not appeared in Cantonese before, such as get1 ; the sound is borrowed from the English word get meaning "to understand".
Initial consonants
Initials refer to the 19 initial consonants which may occur at the beginning of a sound. Some sounds have no initials and they are said to have null initial. The following is the inventory for Cantonese as represented in IPA:Note the aspiration contrast and the lack of voicing contrast for stops. The affricates are grouped with the stops for compactness in the chart.
The position of the coronals varies from dental to alveolar, with and more likely to be dental. The position of the coronal affricates and sibilants,, is alveolar and articulatory findings indicate they are palatalized before the close front vowels and. The affricates and also have a tendency to be palatalized before the central round vowels and. Historically, there was another series of alveolo-palatal sibilants as discussed below.
Vowels and terminals
Finals are the part of the sound after the initial. A final is typically composed of a main vowel and a terminal.A main vowel can be long or short, depending on vowel length. The vowels, and are each long-short pairs with corresponding formants on acoustic findings, while the vowels, and are also phonologically analysed as a long-short pair. The vowels of Cantonese are as shown:
A terminal can be a semivowel, a nasal consonant, or a stop consonant. The semivowel is rounded after rounded vowels. Nasal consonants can occur as base syllables in their own right and these are known as syllabic nasals. The stop consonants are unreleased.
The following chart lists all the finals in Cantonese as represented in IPA.
Note: Finals,,, and only appear in colloquial pronunciations of characters. They are absent from some analyses and romanization systems.
When the three checked tones are separated, the stop codas become allophones of the nasal codas respectively, because they are in the complementary distribution in which the former three appear in the checked tones and the latter three appear in the non-checked tones.
Tones
Like other Chinese dialects, Cantonese uses tone contours to distinguish words, with the number of possible tones depending on the type of final. While Guangzhou Cantonese generally distinguishes between high-falling and high level tones, the two have merged in Hong Kong Cantonese and Macau Cantonese, yielding a system of six different tones in syllables ending in a semi-vowel or nasal consonant. In finals that end in a stop consonant, the number of tones is reduced to three; in Chinese descriptions, these "checked tones" are treated separately by diachronic convention, so that Cantonese is traditionally said to have nine tones. However, phonetically these are a conflation of tone and final consonant; the number of phonemic tones is six in Hong Kong and seven in Guangzhou.For purposes of meters in Chinese poetry, the first and fourth tones are the "flat/level tones", while the rest are the "oblique tones". This follows their regular evolution from the four tones of Middle Chinese.
The first tone can be either high level or high falling usually without affecting the meaning of the words being spoken. Most speakers are in general not consciously aware of when they use and when to use high level and high falling. In Hong Kong, most speakers have merged the high level and high falling tones. In Guangzhou, the high falling tone is disappearing as well, but is still prevalent among certain words, e.g. in traditional Yale Romanization with diacritics, sàam means the number three 三, whereas sāam means shirt 衫.
The relative pitch of the tones varies with the speaker; consequently, descriptions vary from one sources to another. The difference between high and mid level tone is about twice that between mid and low level : 60 Hz to 30 Hz. Low falling starts at the same pitch as low level, but then drops; as is common with falling tones, it is shorter than the three level tones. The two rising tones, and, both start at the level of, but rise to the level of and, respectively.
The tone 3, 4, 5 and 6 are dipping in the last syllable when is an interrogative sentence or an exclamatory sentence. 眞係? "really?" is pronounced.
The numbers "394052786" when pronounced in Cantonese, will give the nine tones in order, thus giving a mnemonic for remembering the nine tones.
Like other Yue dialects, Cantonese preserves an analog to the voicing distinction of Middle Chinese in the manner shown in the chart below.
The distinction of voiced and voiceless consonants found in Middle Chinese was preserved by the distinction of tones in Cantonese. The difference in vowel length further caused the splitting of the dark entering tone, making Cantonese one of the few Chinese varieties to have further split a tone after the voicing-related splitting of the four tones of Middle Chinese.
Cantonese is special in the way that the vowel length can affect both the rime and the tone. Some linguists believe that the vowel length feature may have roots in the Old Chinese language.
There are also two changed tones, which add the diminutive-like meaning "that familiar example" to a standard word. For example, the word for "silver" in a modified tone means "coin". They are comparable to the diminutive suffixes 兒 and 子 of Mandarin. In addition, modified tones are used in compounds, reduplications and direct address to family members. The two modified tones are high level, like tone 1, and mid rising, like tone 2, though for some people not as high as tone 2. The high level changed tone is more common for speakers with a high falling tone; for others, mid rising is the main changed tone, in which case it only operates on those syllables with a non-high level and non-mid rising tone. However, in certain specific vocatives, the changed tone does indeed result in a high level tone, including speakers without a phonemically distinct high falling tone.
Historical change
Like other languages, Cantonese is constantly undergoing sound change, processes where more and more native speakers of a language change the pronunciations of certain sounds.One shift that affected Cantonese in the past was the loss of distinction between the alveolar and the alveolo-palatal sibilants, which occurred during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This distinction was documented in many Cantonese dictionaries and pronunciation guides published prior to the 1950s but is no longer distinguished in any modern Cantonese dictionary.
Publications that documented this distinction include:
- Williams, S., A Tonic Dictionary of the Chinese Language in the Canton Dialect, 1856.
- Cowles, R., A Pocket Dictionary of Cantonese, 1914.
- Meyer, B. and Wempe, T., The Student's Cantonese-English Dictionary, 3rd edition, 1947.
- Chao, Y. Cantonese Primer, 1947.
| Sibilant Category | Character | Modern Cantonese | Pre-1950s Cantonese | Standard Mandarin |
| Unaspirated affricate | . The alveolo-palatal sibilants occur in complementary distribution with the retroflex sibilants in Mandarin, with the alveolo-palatal sibilants only occurring before, or. However, Mandarin also retains the medials, where and can occur, as can be seen in the examples above. Cantonese had lost its medials sometime ago in its history, reducing the ability for speakers to distinguish its sibilant initials. In modern-day Hong Kong, many younger speakers do not distinguish between certain phoneme pairs such as vs. and vs. the null initial and merge one sound into another. Examples for this include 你 being pronounced as, 我 being pronounced as, and 國 being pronounced as. Although that is often considered as substandard and is denounced as being "lazy sounds", it is becoming more common and is influencing other Cantonese-speaking regions 肚餓 is sometimes read as not, 雪櫃 is sometimes read as not, but sound change of these morphemes are limited to that word. |