Phonology

Like any dialect, the phonology of Standard Cantonese varies among speakers. Unlike Standard Mandarin, there is no offical agency to regulate Standard Cantonese. Below is the phonology accepted by most scholars and educators, the one usually heard on TV or radio in serious broadcast like news reports. Common variations are also described.

Initials

Initials (or onsets) are initial consonants of possible syllables. The following is the inventory for Standard Cantonese as represented in IPA:

Notice the aspiration contrast and the lack of phonation contrast for stops. The sibilant affricates are grouped with the stops for compactness in displaying the chart.

Some linguists prefer to analyze /j/ and /w/ as part of finals to make them analogous to the /i/ and /u/ final-heads in Standard Mandarin, especially in comparative phonological studies. However, since final-heads only appear with null initial, /k/ or /kʰ/, analyzing them as part of the initials greatly reduces the count of finals at the cost of only adding four initials. Some linguists analyze a /ʔ/ (glottal stop) when a vowel other than /i/, /u/ or /y/ begin a syllable.

The position of the coronals varies from dental to alveolar, with /t/ and /tʰ/ more likely to be dental. The position of the sibilants is usually alveolar, but can be postalveolar or alveolo-palatal, especially before the /y/ vowel. Some linguists prefers to use /ʃ/ in place of /s/ in the chart.

Some native speakers cannot distinguish between /n/ and /l/, and between /ŋ/ and the null initial. Usually they pronounce only /l/ and the null initial. See the discussion on phonological shift below.

Finals

Finals (or rhymes) are the remaining part of the syllable after the initial is taken off. There are two kinds of finals in Cantonese, depending on vowel length. The following chart lists all possible finals in Standard Cantonese as represented in IPA:

Comments to be added later, including alternative interpretion of short vowels.

Tones

Standard Cantonese has nine tones in six distinct tone contours.

For purposes of meters in Chinese poetry, the first and fourth tones are traditionally grouped in the "flat category" (平聲), while the rest are "oblique" (仄聲).

In Hong Kong, the first tone can be either high level or high falling without affecting the meaning of the words being spoken. Most Hong Kong speakers are in general not consciously aware of when they use and when to use high level and high falling.

It is interesting to note that there are not actually more tone levels in Standard Cantonese than in Standard Mandarin (three if one excludes the Cantonese low falling tone, which begins on the third level and needs somewhere to fall), only Cantonese has a more complete set of tone courses.

Standard Cantonese mostly preserves the tones in Middle Chinese in the manner shown in the chart below.

V- = voiceless initial consonant, V+ = voiced initial consonant. The voice distinction was found in Middle Chinese and has been lost in Cantonese, preserved only by tone differences.

Comments to be added later.

Current Phonological Shift

Like other languages, Cantonese is constantly undergoing sound changes, processes where more and more native speakers of a language change the pronunciations of certain sounds. In Hong Kong, younger native speakers are unable to distinguish between certain phoneme pairs and merge one sound into another. Although that is often considered as substandard and is denounced as "lazy" (懶音), it is gaining popularity and is influencing other Cantonese-speaking regions. These are the observed shifts:

• Merging of /n/ initial into /l/ initial
• Merging of /ŋ/(ng) initial into null initial
• Merging of /kw/ and /gw/ initial into /k/ and /g/ when followed by /ɔ/(o)
• Merging of /ŋ/(ng) ending into /n/ ending, eliminating contrast between these pairs of finals: /ɑːn/-/ɑːŋ/, /ɐn/-/ɐŋ/, and /ɔːn/-/ɔːŋ/.
• Merging of /k/ ending into /t/ ending analogously.
• Merging of the two syllabic nasals, /ŋ/(ng) into /m/, eliminating contrast between 五 (five) and 唔 (not).

Today in Hong Kong, people still make an effort to avoid those merges in serious broadcasts and in education. Older people usually do not speak like that, but the majority of the younger generation does. Following the sound changes, the name of a Hong Kong bank 'hoeng gong hang sang ngan hong' (香港恆生銀行) becomes 'hoen gon han san an hon', sounding like 'Hong Kong itchy body bank'. The name of the language itself should be 'gwong dong wa', despite the fact that 'gong dong wa' is overwhelmingly popular.

The shift even affects the way some Hong Kong people speak English. This is especially evident in the pronunciation of certain English names. 'Nicole' becomes 'li col', and 'leonardo' 'leo la do'.

See also

• List of Chinese dialects
• Cantonese (linguistics)

External Links

• The Chinese University of Hong Kong Research Centre for Humanities Computing: Chinese Character Database: With Word-formations Phonologically Disambiguated According to the Cantonese Dialect (http://www.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-can/)