CANTONESE LANGUAGE

also called Yeh, variety of Chinese spoken in Kwangtung and southern Kwangsi provinces, including the important cities of Canton, Hong Kong, and Macau. Cantonese preserves more features of Ancient Chinese than do the other major Chinese languages; it retains most of the final consonants of the older language and has six tones, in contrast to the four tones of Modern Standard Chinese, to distinguish meaning between words or word elements that have the same arrangement of consonant and vowel sounds. The language has fewer initial consonants than Modern Standard Chinese and about twice as many distinctively different syllables. The majority of Chinese emigrants are from areas where Cantonese is spoken.