Words R Us
- Cantonese (yue)

Cantonese is spoken especially in the provinces of Guangdong, Hainan and Hunan, and the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, and also in Hong Kong and Macau. There were about 80 million speakers of Cantonese in China, including 6.6 million in Hong Kong and 507,000 in Macau.

Cantonese is also spoken in places with many overseas Chinese who came from Cantonese- speaking parts of China, such as Melbourne(281,000). It is also the most common language of overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and North America(1.8 million) It is said that over 100,000,000 people speak Cantonese. While Cantonese is only the third most spoken dialect of Chinese, only behind Mandarin and Wu, its official status in Hong Kong and Macau make it widely known among other Chinese dialects.

Even though Cantonese is called a dialect of Chinese, but Cantonese is very different from Mandarin, the most spoken dialect of Chinese, It is considered that Cantonese is more closely related to Classical Chinese or the Traditional Chinese than Mandarin.

Cantonese is the de facto official language of Hong Kong, along with English, and the co-official language in Macau, along with Portuguese. It is the main language of education, business, media and government in both places.

Cantonese is used mainly in personal correspondence, diaries, comics, poetry, advertising, popular newspapers, magazines and to some extent in literature.

There are two standard methods of written Cantonese: a formal version and a colloquial version. The formal version is quite different from spoken Cantonese but very similar to Standard Chinese and can be understood by Mandarin speakers without too much difficulty. The colloquial version is much closer to spoken Cantonese and largely unintelligible to Mandarin speakers.

Sources: Wikipedia
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