The Cantonese people: Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Macau and the world

Who the Cantonese are

The Cantonese are a Han Chinese sub-ethnic group whose home is Guangzhou (the old Canton) and the towns and cities around it in the Pearl River Delta. China officially recognises 56 ethnic groups, and the census counts the Cantonese as Han, the group that numbered 1,286,311,334 people, or 91.11% of the population, in 2020. Our guides to ethnic groups in China and the Han Chinese explain how this works.

In Chinese they are 广府人 (Guǎngfǔ rén; in Cantonese, Gwóngfú yàhn) or 粤人 (Yuè rén, ‘Yue people’). Many Cantonese also call themselves 唐人 (Tángrén), ‘people of Tang’.

Today the Cantonese live across Guangdong and Guangxi, in Hainan, and in Hong Kong and Macau, where Cantonese is the main spoken language. Their neighbours in Guangdong include the Hakka, who are also Han but speak a different language.[1][2][11][12]

The Cantonese language

Cantonese belongs to the Yue (粤语, Yuèyǔ) branch of Chinese and has about 80 million speakers (2023). The pronunciation of Guangzhou is the de facto standard. In Guangzhou it was traditionally called 广州话 (‘Guangzhou speech’); in Hong Kong and Macau people usually say 广东话 (Gwóngdūng wá, ‘Guangdong speech’).

Cantonese and Mandarin have very limited mutual intelligibility, mainly because they sound so different. Cantonese has six tones, two more than Mandarin’s four; traditional counts give nine, by including the so-called checked tones. Formal writing is close to standard written Chinese, while written vernacular Cantonese is mostly used informally, on social media and in comics, usually in traditional characters. Jyutping, developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong, and Yale are the most widely taught romanisations.

In Hong Kong, Cantonese is the de facto official spoken form of Chinese; in Macau it is the predominant spoken form. Overseas, about 458,840 people in the United States spoke it at home (2009 survey), 565,275 Canadians gave it as their native language (2016 census), and about 300,000 people in Britain claim it as a first language. Taishanese, a related Yue language with limited intelligibility with Cantonese, is still spoken in American Chinese communities.[1][2]

Cantonese opera

Cantonese opera (粤剧, Yuèjù; also 大戏, ‘big theatre’) comes from Guangdong and is popular in Guangdong, Guangxi, Hong Kong, Macau and Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. It is thought to have grown from opera traditions brought south from Zhejiang in the late 13th century, and it combines Mandarin operatic conventions with the Cantonese language.

There are four types of role: sheng (male), dan (female), jing (painted face) and chou (clown). The central wenwusheng role demands skill in both singing and fighting. A string and percussion band, led by the gaohu fiddle, accompanies the singers, alongside elaborate costumes and face painting; Western instruments such as the saxophone and guitar also appear. UNESCO inscribed Yueju opera on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009, describing it as a cultural bond among Cantonese speakers in China and abroad. In Hong Kong, the Sunbeam Theatre is one of the last old venues still staging it.[3][4]

The Cantonese around the world

Most overseas Chinese emigrated from just two provinces, Guangdong and Fujian. Cantonese migrants took part in the California and Australian gold rushes and worked on Hawaii’s sugarcane plantations, and many of the world’s Chinatowns were founded by Cantonese communities. Taishan alone may have been the home of most Chinese immigrants to the United States before 1965.

Well-known people of Cantonese heritage include the actors Bruce Lee, Anna May Wong and Andy Lau, the singer and actress Anita Mui, the director John Woo, the novelist Amy Tan, the figure skater Michelle Kwan and the basketball player Yi Jianlian.[1][2]