William S-Y.Wang

The majority language spoken in Hong Kong is called Cantonese, named after the ancient city nearby. Due to Hong Kong’s colonial history, some differences have developed between the speech of these two cities, particularly in their lexicons. Cantonese belongs to a major dialect group of Chinese, called Yue. This group includes most of the varieties of Chinese spoken in Guangdong, some of which are mutually unintelligible.

In this section, we will examine the sound system of Cantonese. In 1997, the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong has published a spelling system for Cantonese, Yueyu Pinyin Zibiao, abbreviated Yuepin. We will use the Yuepin system here, commenting on the phonetic values of the symbols wherever useful.

The traditional method of describing the dialects of Chinese is in terms of the syllable. This is a useful method because the syllable largely coincides with the unit of writing, the hanzi, and with the unit of meaning, the morpheme. The Chinese syllable may be diagramed as a box as shown in Figure 1 below:

Tone
Initial	Final
	medial	nucleus	ending

The tones of Chinese were first discussed in a famous work by Shen Yue called Sishengkao. The four tones with their traditional names have developed into nine tones in Cantonese, with a new numbering in Yuepin. The relationships between the traditional names and the Yuepin numbers are shown in Figure 2 below.

Ping	Shang	Qu	Ru
1	2	3	1,3
4	5	6	6

The Ru syllables are end in the consonants p,t,k in Cantonese. Since they are readily distinguishable from the other syllables, their tones can be shortened versions of other tones.

There are 20 initials in Cantonese, including a zero initial. These are shown in Figure 3 below together with some of their articulatory properties.

The finals are more complex; there are 53 finals in Cantonese. Referring to Figure 1 above, we note first that Cantonese has no medials. The system of 17 nuclei is represented in Figure 4 below. As the figure shows, there are 7 simple vowels and 10 dip

hthongs. These 17 nuclei may occur as independent finals to form open syllables.

	front unrounded	front rounded	back
high	i, iu	yu	u, ui
mid	e, ei	oe, oei	o. oi, ou
low	ai	aa, aai, aau	au

Cantonese is unusual among the dialects of Chinese in that it has preserved a rich set of 6 endings. These are shown in Figure 5 below:

	labial	dental	velar
nasal	m	n	ng
oral	p	t	k

Not all nuclei combine with all endings to form finals. As shown in Figure 6 below, only simple vowels take endings. Whereas the vowels i, a and aa take all endings, the other vowels are restricted in their distributions. Specifically, yu takes only dental endings, e takes only velar endings, while o and oe do not take labial endings. These total 34 closed finals.

i	yu	u	e	oe	o	a	aa	endings
*						*	*	-m
*						*	*	-p
*	*	*		*	*	*	*	-n
*	*	*		*	*	*	*	-t
*		*	*	*	*	*	*	-ng
*		*	*	*	*	*	*	-k

The 17 open finals with no endings, plus the 34 finals with endings, total 51 finals. There are 2 unusual syllables in Cantonese, which are the syllabic nasals m and ng. Since these two syllabic nasals do not combine with initials, they will not be considered as finals.

Traditionally, open syllables are called yinshengyun. The syllables which close with nasal endings are called yangshengyun, and the syllables which close with oral endings are

called rushengyun. The Cantonese finals, not including the 2 syllabic finals, are presented in Figure 7 below, in IPA notation:

Figures 8, 9 and 10 below present the combination of the initials with the finals in the order of yinshengyun, yangshengyun and rushengyun. Again, the notation here is Yueyin Pinyin Zibiao.