Written Cantonese

Written Cantonese refers to the written language used to write colloquial standard Cantonese using Chinese characters.

Cantonese is usually referred to as a spoken variant, and not as a written variant. Spoken vernacular Cantonese is different from Written Standard Chinese, which is essentially formal Standard Mandarin in written form. Written Chinese spoken word for word in Cantonese sounds overly formal and distant. As a result, an informal locally written script which matched the spoken features of language developed over time. This resulted in the formation of additional Chinese characters to complement the existing characters. Many of these represent phonological sounds not present in Mandarin. A good source for well documented written Cantonese words can be found in the scripts for Cantonese opera.

With the advent of the computer and standardization of character sets specifically for Cantonese, many printed materials in predominantly Cantonese spoken areas of the world are written to cater to their population with these written Cantonese characters. As a result, mainstream media such as newspapers and magazines have become progressively less conservative and more colloquial in their dissemination of ideas. Generally speaking, some of the older generation of Cantonese speakers regard this trend as a step backwards and away from tradition. This tension between the "old" and "new" is a reflection of a transition that is taking place in the Cantonese-speaking population.

History

Before the 20th century, the standard written language of China was Classical Chinese, which has grammar and vocabulary based on the Chinese used in ancient China, Old Chinese. However, while this written standard remained essentially static for over two thousand years, the actual spoken language diverged further and further away. Some writings based on local vernacular speech did exist but these were rare. In the early 20th century, Chinese reformers like Hu Shi saw the need for language reform and championed the development of a vernacular that allowed modern Chinese to write the language the same way they speak. The vernacular language movement took hold, and the written language was standardized as Vernacular Chinese. For unity's sake, the Mandarin dialects were chosen as the basis for the new standard, despite the variation in colloquial speech throughout China, on the basis of the number of speakers.

The standardization and adoption of Vernacular Chinese as standard written Chinese pre-empted the development and standardization of other vernaculars based on other Chinese varieties. No matter what dialects one spoke, one still wrote in standard written Chinese for everyday writing. However, Cantonese is unique among the non-Mandarin spoken varieties in having a widely used colloquial written form. Because of Cantonese speaking Hong Kong’s isolation from the rest of Mainland China while under British rule, Cantonese is also unique in having a large number of speakers who do not speak Mandarin, a fact which has prompted the creation of a standard for Written Cantonese to facilitate written communication between Cantonese speakers without the need for translation. But even so, this kind of writing is considered by some people to be informal, non-standard and unprofessional. Cantonese speakers have to use standard written Chinese in most formal written communications, since written Cantonese contains many unique characters and grammatical structures that may be unfamiliar or even unintelligible to other speakers of other Chinese spoken variants.

Historically, written Cantonese has been used in Hong Kong for legal proceedings in order to write down the exact spoken testimony of a witness, instead of paraphrasing spoken Cantonese into standard written Chinese. However, its popularity and usage has been rising in the last two decades, the late Wong Jim being one of the pioneers of its use as an effective written language. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in certain tabloids, online chat rooms, and instant messaging. Some tabloids like "Apple Daily" write colloquial Cantonese; papers may contain editorials that contain Cantonese; and Cantonese-specific characters can be increasingly seen on advertisements and billboards. Written Cantonese remains limited outside of Hong Kong, even in other Cantonese-speaking areas such as Guangdong, where the use of colloquial writing is discouraged. Despite the relative popularity of written Cantonese in Hong Kong, some disdain it, believing that being too accustomed to write in such a way would affect a person's ability to use standard written Chinese in situations that demand it.

Cantonese characters

Written Cantonese contains many characters not used in standard written Chinese in order to transcribe words not present in the standard lexicon. Despite attempts by the government of Hong Kong in the 1990’s to standardize this character set, culminating in the release of the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set for use in electronic communication, there is still significant disagreement about which characters are ‘correct’ in written Cantonese.

Synonyms

Some characters used to represent words in Cantonese are simply synonyms of words used in standard written Chinese. The most common are the character for the verb "to be" ( _zh. 是) and the character for "not" ( _zh. 不), which are simply replaced by _zh. 係; and _zh. 唔, respectively. Another example is the third-person pronoun ( _zh. 他/ _zh. 她 "he/she"), which is replaced by _zh. 佢. The plural pronoun marker ( _zh. 們) is replaced by _zh. 哋. The possessive particle ( _zh. 的) is replaced by _zh. 嘅. For instance:

Cognates

There are certain words that share a common root with words in standard written Chinese. However, because they have diverged in pronunciation, tone, and/or meaning, they are often written using a different character. One example is the doublet _zh. 來 lai2 (standard) and _zh. 嚟 lei4 (Cantonese), meaning "to come." Both share the same meaning and usage, but because the colloquial pronunciation differs from the literary pronunciation, they are represented using two different characters, _zh. 嚟 and _zh. 來, respectively. Some people argue that representing the colloquial pronunciation with a different (and often extremely complex) character is superfluous, and encourage using the same character for both forms since they are cognates (see Derived characters below).

Native words

Some words are native to Cantonese and have no equivalents in Standard Chinese (though equivalents may exist in other varieties of Chinese). Another situation is that some Cantonese words, with their corresponding characters, did exist in Standard Chinese in ancient times, but have since become obsolete in Standard Chinese, and only the words, not the characters, survive in Cantonese.

Today those characters can mainly be found in ancient rime dictionaries such as "Guangyun". Some scholars have made some "archaeological" efforts to find out what the "original characters" are. Often, however, these efforts are of little use to the modern Cantonese writer, since the characters so discovered are not available in the standard character sets available to computer users.

On the other hand, some of the characters have only been corrupted in Cantonese, not disappeared in Standard Chinese. For instance, it is suggested that the common word leng3 (meaning pretty), written with the character _zh. 靚 in Cantonese (the character has another meaning in standard Chinese), should rather be written with the character _zh. 令. [http://www.cantonese.org.cn/Articles/2006/200606/Articles_20060623184855.html]

Loanwords

These are characters created to represent loanwords borrowed into Cantonese.

Examples:

* Elevator: _zh. 車立 (single character "