Full Description
In traditional Chinese dialectology, Cantonese is widely regarded as the standard variety of the Yue (粵) dialect group. According to Ethnologue 2025, Cantonese has an estimated 86 million native speakers worldwide. It is predominantly spoken in the southernmost regions of China, including Hong Kong, Macau, Guangzhou, and Nanning, as well as in various overseas communities.
This Handbook, organized into 46 chapters across seven sections, offers a systematic and comprehensive exploration of Cantonese. It delves into a broad spectrum of topics in Cantonese linguistics, such as phonetics and phonology, syntax, semantics, and morphology, alongside extralinguistic aspects like Cantonese teaching and learning, language and society, the history of Cantonese, and its study in the era of big data. The contributors represent a diverse range of regions, including Australia, Canada, Mainland China, the Czech Republic, France, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Macau, the Netherlands, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
This Handbook serves as an indispensable resource for scholars and students of Chinese and general linguistics. It not only deepens readers' understanding of the Cantonese language system but also highlights its connections with other languages and academic disciplines.
Contents
Preface: Why A Handbook of Cantonese Linguistics? Part I: Historical studies of Cantonese 1. The Origin of Yue dialect as a direct descendent of the Song official language 2. Kam-Tai Substratum in Cantonese 3. The Mainland Southeast Asian linguistic area, with special reference to Cantonese 4. From Middle Chinese to Present-day Cantonese 5. An Overview of Early Cantonese Materials: History, Research, and Resources Part II: Grammar and Discourse 6. Morphology in Cantonese 7. The Cantonese noun phrase 8. Diminutives in Cantonese 9. Serial verb constructions in Cantonese 10. Separable verbs in Cantonese 11. Aspects in Cantonese 12. Verbal suffixes in Cantonese 13. Directional verbs in Cantonese 14. Negations in Cantonese 15. GIVE in Cantonese 16. Comparative Constructions and Equative Constructions 17. On the Syntax of Sentence-final Particles in Cantonese 18. Dislocation Structures in Cantonese 19. Conjunctions in Cantonese 20. Cantonese Discourse Markers 21. Cantonese Conversational Analysis 22. Grammaticalization in Cantonese: A synthesis of research 23. Recent Developments in the Study of Early Cantonese Grammar Part III: Phonetics and Phonology 24. Cantonese Phonetics 25. Cantonese Phonology 26. Ongoing Sound Changes in Cantonese 27. Cantonese Romanization Systems 28. Early Cantonese Phonology Part IV: Acquisition and Learning of Cantonese 29. Development of universal quantification in Cantonese-speaking children 30. Bilingual Acquisition of Cantonese in Early Childhood 31. Teaching Cantonese as a Second Language for Heritage Speakers 32. Teaching Cantonese as a second language for non-Chinese speakers Part V: Language and Society 33. Written Cantonese 34. English in Hong Kong: Kongish vis-à-vis Hong Kong English 35. Translanguaging and Kongish: Cantonese-English Language Contact in Hong Kong 36. A note on overt and covert variations between Cantonese and Mandarin core vocabularies 37. Cantonese diasporas: Southeast Asia and beyond Part VI: Other Yue Dialects 38. The Classification of Yuè Chinese 39. Macau Cantonese 40. Yue dialects in Western Guangdong 41. Pínghuà 42. The Cantonese language and other Jyut/Yue varieties in Southeast Asia Part VII: Cantonese Studies in the Digital Age 43. Promoting Cantonese in and through the Digital World 44. Cantonese linguistic corpus and corpus linguistics 45. Crowdsourcing Approaches in Cantonese Language Resource Construction 46. The Cantonese Wordnet: An Open Lexicographic Database of Cantonese
