To discuss the origin of Cantonese, we must first find out where Cantonese comes from. Some people think that Cantonese originated from the ancient Lingnan "Baiyue" language, which is incorrect. Cantonese does retain some elements of the ancient Baiyue language in Lingnan, but its main source is the elegant language in the ancient Central Plains. Nowadays, Cantonese has a wide influence, and many TV dramas have added many humorous plots in Cantonese, such as Legend of Wulin.

Yayan is based on the primitive Chinese used by the Chinese tribal alliance headed by the Yellow Emperor. In the Zhou Dynasty, it developed into the national language of the Central Plains, which can be said to be the earliest "Mandarin" in China. During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, the dialects of various vassal States were different, and elegant words were used in official exchanges, scholars' lectures and sacrificial activities. Confucius once said: "Confucius speaks politely, and poetry and calligraphy are polite." The Qin dynasty conquered the land of Baiyue and recruited fugitives from the former six countries, as well as their husbands and wives, to be "squatters" in Lingnan. These settlers "come from all corners of the country", so they must use elegance in communication. However, because the settlers settled in the fields alone, their language was only transmitted from village to village, but not throughout Lingnan. Until South Vietnam was established in Zhao Tuo, Baiyue indigenous costumes and customs were adopted, and Baiyue indigenous language was spoken. It can be seen that Yayan has not been spread in Lingnan, but there are several "Yayan Island" with small area. The spread of elegant ci in Lingnan began after the Western Han Dynasty. Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty set up a "toe-toe secretariat" to supervise the county. In the Eastern Han Dynasty, he withdrew his toe secretariat and set up a state of communication. Toe Secretariat and Jiaozhou are both Han regimes, so official communication must be polite. Most of the time, the Toe Toe Secretariat and the Jiaozhou Government were located in Guangxin, which was the first to use Yayan. Guangxin was also the early commercial center of Lingnan. Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty sent envoys from Xuwen and Hepu to open up the Maritime Silk Road and bought back overseas treasures such as pearls, glazed pottery and stones with silk and porcelain. , and through the Nanliujiang-Beiliujiang and Jianjiang-Nanjiang trade channels, it is imported into Guangxin, and then exported to the Central Plains through Hejiang-Xiaoshui. Elegant words introduced from the Central Plains gradually spread in this area through commercial activities.

Guangxin was also the early cultural center of Lingnan. During the Eastern Han Dynasty, a large number of scholars took this as a position to carry out cultural activities, set up museums and teach students. Among them, the most prominent scholars are Chen Yuan and Shi Xie. Known as "Linghai Confucianism", Chen Yuan returned to Guangxin to run a school in his later years and became one of the pioneers of Lingnan culture. Shangxie served as the magistrate of Jiaotoe County for more than 40 years and was once the "Governor of Seven Counties". Many scholars in the Central Plains have come to attach themselves to his name, and they take traveling, crossing toes and giving lectures as their profession. What these literati used to spread China culture in the Central Plains was, of course, the elegant words with Chinese characters as the recording symbols. While learning China culture and Chinese characters, the aborigines also learned elegant characters. The languages of these aborigines are very different. They can't communicate with each other and have no written language. Therefore, in addition to using elegance in communication with Han people, tribes also use elegance in communication. In this way, elegance has become the homophonic of various indigenous tribes, just as elegance was used in the communication of various vassal States in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, forming a bilingual system, using one's own mother tongue in one's own tribe and elegance in foreign communication. At the same time, some factors in ancient Baiyue language were also absorbed by the language of Han immigrants, thus gradually forming a dialect of Chinese-Cantonese.

At the beginning of the formation of Cantonese, there was no obvious difference between Cantonese and Central Plains Chinese. After the Jin Dynasty, there was the "Five Chaos in China", followed by the partition of the north and the south for more than 200 years. The nomadic people in the north entered the Central Plains, which had a great influence on the culture and language there. Since the Zhou Dynasty, they have gradually disappeared as the same language as the people. Here it is. During this period, the Lingnan region maintained a relatively stable situation, and Cantonese, which evolved from elegant words in the Central Plains, did not change as much as Central Plains Chinese, and maintained its original phonology. As Professor Li Rulong said; "The differentiation of initial consonants of medieval affricates, the confluence of nasal vowels, the weakening and shedding of initial consonants of affricates, and the three tones of voiced sounds and entering tones are common in many dialects, but they are all rejected by Cantonese." Therefore, Yayan has disappeared in today's north and central plains, but many of its factors have remained in today's Cantonese.

The stop sound in Fengchuan dialect: a living fossil of early Cantonese

Cantonese retains a large number of factors that occupy the elegance of generations, which can be confirmed by the comparison between Cantonese and Qieyun. Qieyun is China's earliest phonological work. The book was written in the early years of Sui Dynasty, which recorded the phonology of scholars in the Southern Dynasty, that is, the phonology in the late period of Yayan. Comparing the phonology of Qieyun with the seven dialects of Chinese today, we can see that Cantonese is the most complete phonology. Take the ancient milk students as an example. Influenced by nomadic languages, northern Chinese dialects are generally out of rhyme. So people in this field don't know what lactation is all about now. Although other Chinese dialects retain some entering tones, they are not complete. Cantonese abandons the tone sandhi rule of "Rushan Tone", so it retains the whole set of Rushan Tone in ancient times, which corresponds neatly to nasal rhyme.

In the areas where Cantonese was formed, the factors of the phonology of quaint words were more clearly preserved. There is a group of voiced initials in the phonology of Qieyun, which has disappeared in most Chinese dialects and in Cantonese today. However, this set of voiced cold initials is completely preserved in closed Cantonese. What's more noteworthy is that when Cantonese is opened, not only the words Bing, Ding and Qun which are pronounced as voiced consonants in Qieyun are still pronounced as voiced consonants, but also some words Bang, Duan and Jian which are pronounced as voiced consonants in Qieyun. As we know, "voiced and unvoiced" is a law of the evolution of Chinese initials. According to this law, the more developed the initial consonants of voiced consonants are, the longer their age will be. The voiced stop of Fengkai Cantonese is more developed than the cut rhyme, which shows that it preserved the rhyme earlier than the cut rhyme, that is, the rhyme of elegant words in Han Dynasty. Therefore, it is a rare living fossil of quaint words, and it is also a living fossil of early Cantonese, and it is a witness to the formation of ancient Cantonese.

Traffic area

Cantonese is popular in Guangdong and Guangxi, centering on Guangzhou dialect. The user population is around 40 million. The visit area is roughly as follows:

There are 47 counties and cities in Guangdong Province that are pure Cantonese or mainly Cantonese, accounting for more than 1/3 of the total area of the province, namely Guangzhou, Foshan, Zhaoqing, Jiangmen, Shenzhen, Maoming, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Nanhai, Panyu, Dongguan, Shunde, Longmen, Fogang, Zengcheng, Conghua, Huadu, Qingyuan, Lianxian and Yangshan. In addition, Cantonese is also spoken in Huizhou, Shaoguan, Zhanjiang, Haifeng, Boluo, Huiyang, Huidong, Renhua, Lechang, Yingde, Baoan, Dianbai, Suixi, Haikang, Xuwen and Lianjiang 16 counties and cities.

There are 24 counties and cities in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region that speak Cantonese, namely Nanning, Hengxian, Guigang, Guiping, Pingnan, tengxian, Wuzhou, Yulin, Beiliu, Rongxian, Bobai, Luchuan, Fangcheng, Qinzhou, Hepu, Pubei, Lingshan, Beihai, Cangwu, Cenxi, Zhaoping, Mengshan, Hezhou and Zhongshan. In addition, there are many overseas Chinese whose mother tongue is Cantonese, who are mainly distributed in Southeast Asia, North and South America, Australia, New Zealand and other countries. Almost more than 90% of overseas Chinese and Chinese Americans come from Cantonese dialect areas.

Cantonese dialects are distributed in central-southwestern Guangdong, Danzhou dialect-Maihua-Jia Dan dialect in Hainan, eastern-southern Guangxi and Hong Kong and Macao. (Southeast Asia-most overseas Chinese in North and South America also use it as their mother tongue, and Guangzhou dialect is the most different dialect from Mandarin. The number of users accounts for about 5% of the total population of Han nationality, represented by Guangzhou dialect.

Baise-Nanning-Guiping-Wuzhou-Zhaoqing-Guangzhou is the golden waterway for Xijiang shipping, accessible in Cantonese. Guangzhou dialect was formed in the late Tang Dynasty, which is the product of the integration of Wuhu-Liao Li, a native of Xijiang, into the Han nationality, and the combination of medieval Chinese and Xijiang native language. In ancient times, there were three ancient nationalities living in Lingnan: Panyu (South Guangdong), Luoyue and Xi 'ou. When Qin Bing arrived in Lingnan, Panyu and Qin people combined to form Nanzu; Xi 'ou nationality in Xijiang River basin and Luoyue nationality in Xijiang South Road remain relatively independent. Can the differences between Nanhai-Panyu-Shunde dialect, Zhaoqing dialect and Xinxing County dialect in Yunfu City be traced back to this time? Han unified Lingnan, and Guangxin (now opened in the east of Wuzhou) became the focus of using Chinese in Lingnan. At the end of the Han Dynasty, Xi 'ou evolved into Wu Hu (in the Tang Dynasty, the part that was not sinicized evolved into Huang Dong Man), and Luo Yue merged with the Han people who moved south to form Liao Li. During the Han Dynasty, Chinese spread in Lingnan to a certain extent, but it was far from universal. During this period, Wuhu dialect of Xijiang indigenous people was inextricably linked with ancient Chinese. It is the predecessor of Cantonese, but it has not yet become a Chinese dialect. After the chaos in China, the number of Han people who moved south also increased, but the number was far less than that of the aborigines, and they were assimilated by them. Liao Li, the ancestor of the Han nationality who recovered from the war, was not a part of the Han nationality at that time, but a part of the aborigines. Therefore, Wuhu-Liaoliao language is the mother tongue of Zhuang and Dong languages today. During the Liang-Chen period, Guangzhou was located in Gaoyao (south of Zhaoqing) and became the center of promoting Chinese. During the Southern Dynasties, influential people who migrated to the south became indigenous Qu Shuai, such as Feng, Ning, Huang and Chen, who played an important role in the combination of Chinese and indigenous languages. The distribution of sub-dialects in Cantonese today is related to it. The distribution area of rulaiwen dialect is mainly Feng's activity range; The distribution area of Qinlian dialect is mainly the activity range of Ning. The distribution area of Yongxun dialect is mainly Huang's activity range; The distribution area of Guangfu dialect is mainly Chen's activity range.

From the early Tang Dynasty to the prosperous Tang Dynasty, Qu Shuai's influence was still quite strong. Lingnan was a bilingual area at that time: Chinese and indigenous languages were used at the same time. After the late Tang Dynasty, Guangfu dialect, a combination of Chinese and indigenous languages in the Central Plains, came into being. In the Song Dynasty, Guangfu dialect experienced the process of further absorbing Chinese from the Central Plains and making itself closer to Chinese. Since the Yuan Dynasty, Guangfu Dialect began to part ways with Central Plains Chinese: Northern Dialect evolved the middle ancient sound to the front of the mouth, resulting in the development of pre-initials and pre-finals, while Guangfu Dialect evolved the middle ancient sound to the back of the mouth, resulting in the development of post-initials and post-finals; Northern dialects merged with ancient tones, while Guangfu dialects continued to differentiate ancient tones.

Cantonese is divided into different categories according to local regions:

Guangdong dialect film (standard Guangdong)

Guangzhou dialect: Guangzhou dialect, also known as "Guangzhou dialect", is a typical representative of Cantonese, but Guangfu dialect itself is constantly changing and developing. Before 1949, the words used in Guangzhou dialect were quaint and less influenced by the northern dialect.

Divided into the following categories:

Nanfanshun dialect: Guangzhou itself is composed of Panyu and a part of the South China Sea, so Guangzhou dialect can actually be regarded as a special case of Nanfanshun dialect. The dialects of Guangzhou, Panyu and Nanhai are close, but the pronunciation of many words in Shunde is different from other places. For example, the pronunciation of "concave" is [NAP] instead of [lap]; Eating is not called eating rice, but eating rice.

Luoguang dialect: distributed in Zhaoqing, Sihui, Luoding, Guangning, Huaiji, Fengkai, Deqing, Yunan, Yangshan, Lianxian and Lianshan. Represented by Zhaoqing dialect.

Although all the phonetics and vocabulary are close to Guangzhou dialect, the intonation still retains the characteristics of the early ancient saying. For example, the high and low key of Yin Ping Tone is obviously different from that of Gao Pingtiao Tone, and the tone of Yin Ping Tone is biased (the tone value is similar to the fourth tone of Putonghua). There is almost no prevalent lazy sound in Cantonese dialect. For example, all words with non-I vowels are prefixed with initials [ng], ke [ngo 1], short [ngai2], sub [ngaa3], love [ngoi3] and evil [ngok3]. [n], [l] The sounds are different

(Modern) Hong Kong Dialect: Before 1949, Hong Kong Dialect had a strong Cantonese-Hakka mixed accent (that is, Hakka dialect was influenced by the tone and vocabulary of Guangfu dialect, and vice versa). Among them, Jintian dialect is the representative, but this accent only exists among the elderly people in Hong Kong today.

After 1949, a large number of lazy sounds began to appear in Hong Kong dialect, among which the disappearance of nasal sounds (that is, n/l is indistinguishable) and the disappearance of W- awkward sounds are the most obvious. The new generation of young people generally pronounce "you [nei]" and "I" [NGO] as [lei] and [o]. Misread "Guo" as "[gok]" and "Guo" as "Geh". This phenomenon seems to be related to a large number of foreign immigrants. For them, the pronunciation of n/l is not very different, and in most cases, confusing the two will not bring serious communication obstacles. Therefore, when they come to Hong Kong to learn this new dialect, they often give up what is difficult and take what is easy, thus diluting some indistinguishable pronunciation differences. This is also called "theory of human nature", which has also appeared in the evolution of desktop Mandarin and American English.

However, before the 1980s, the mass media still tried their best to avoid lazy voices in radio and TV programs. To this day, there are still Hong Kong linguists who criticize lazy pronunciation many times and put forward the activity of "correcting pronunciation". However, the lazy voice seems to be the characteristic of Cantonese in Hong Kong. In most mass media and singers' performances, lazy voices are regarded as "fashionable" and "fashionable" accents. But on the whole, Hong Kong dialect and Guangzhou dialect are still very close.

English is more popular in Hong Kong. In the past, Hong Kong usually came into contact with foreign new things before the mainland. In the past, the lower classes who didn't know English spelled everyday English words in Cantonese, so English loanwords in Cantonese are very common in Hong Kong. For example, "coiled pipe worker" and "foreman", brakes are called brakes, bearings are called bearings, strawberries are called strawberries, and so on. Many old people still call stamps stamps and insurance insurance. These idioms may confuse foreign Chinese users.

Toishane dialect:

Siyi dialect refers to the dialects of Xinhui, Enping, Kaiping and Taishan, among which Taishan dialect is the representative. Half of Zhuhai people speak Cantonese (especially in Doumen area), while other areas use Xiangshan Cantonese. The pronunciation of Siyi dialect is very different from that of Guangzhou dialect.

Movies in Levin dialect:

Levin dialect is mainly distributed in Yangjiang and Leizhou Peninsula.

Southern Guangxi dialect (Cancerese):

Mainly distributed in southeastern Guangxi. Take the county in northeast Guangxi to Nanning and Pingxiang in south Guangxi as the dividing line. Cantonese is mainly spoken in the southeast of Guangxi, accounting for almost one-third of the total area of Guangxi; Mandarin is mainly spoken in the northwest of the line. Cantonese in Guangxi is similar to Cantonese in Guangzhou, and everyone can understand it. However, in the early days, some Cantonese residents moved into ethnic minority areas and absorbed ethnic minority language elements, forming a dialect that is completely different from Guangzhou dialect, such as Goulou Cantonese. It mainly includes Yongxun Cantonese, Wuzhou Cantonese, Goulou Cantonese and Qinlian Cantonese.

The classification is as follows:

Yongxun Cantonese (Nanning dialect): Close to Wuzhou Cantonese. Mainly popular in towns with convenient transportation on both sides of Yongzhou and Zhou Xun, such as Nanning, Yongning, Chongzuo, Ningming, Hengxian, pingnan county and parts of Liuzhou. Take Nanning as the representative point.

Wuzhou Cantonese (Wuzhou dialect): Very close to Guangzhou dialect. They are mainly distributed in Wuzhou City, Daan, Danzhu and Wulin in Pingnan County, Jintian Town in Guiping County and Cangwu County, and Hexian County (now Hezhou) and its vicinity. The internal differences are very small. Represented by Wuzhou dialect, the phonetic system has 2 1 initials and 46 finals.

Goulou Cantonese (Yulin dialect): mainly distributed in Yulin, Guigang (except Pingnan County and Guiping County) 13 counties and cities. The phonology is complex, with 10 tones. There are rare voiced initials B and D in other dialects of Cantonese. Many words have lost their endings, such as [lar] in the second reading. And the vocabulary is also very distinctive. It is very different from Guangzhou dialect, so it is difficult for both of them to communicate.

Qinlian Cantonese (Qinlian dialect): It is basically the same as Yongxun Cantonese, with little internal difference. Mainly distributed in Qinzhou City, Hepu County (formerly known as Lianzhou), Pubei County, Fangcheng County, Lingshan and Beihai City.

Wuchuan dialect: distributed in Wuchuan City and Zhanjiang City, Guangdong Province.

Egg family: Egg family is a Cantonese who claims to be on the water. Egg talk, also known as water talk, is widely used in houses, ships, Guangdong and Guangxi.