Cantonese Language

History

After the First Opium War, centuries of maritime prohibitions ended. Large numbers of Cantonese people from the Pearl River Delta, especially merchants, subsequently migrated by boat to other parts of Guangdong and Guangxi. These migrants established enclaves of Cantonese in areas that primarily spoke other forms of Yue or even non-Sinitic languages such as Zhuang, as with the case of the Yong–Xun Yue dialect of Nanning. Many Cantonese migrants sailed also overseas, bringing the Cantonese language with them to Southeast Asia, North and South America, and Western Europe. Such enclaves of Cantonese are still found in Chinatowns across many of these major cities outside China. During the late 19th century, the pedagogical work Cantonese made easy, written by James Dyer Ball in 1883, articulated the provenance of the prestige accent of Cantonese: that of the district of Xiguan (simplified Chinese: 西关; traditional Chinese: 西關; Jyutping: Sai1 Gwaan1; Cantonese Yale: Sāigwāan) in the west of Guangzhou. It is known for its distinctive use of an apical vowel (/ɿ/, or in more conventional IPA: /ź̩~ɯ~ɨ/) in some cases where modern Cantonese would use a /i/ final.