Cantonese, or Standard Cantonese (t廣東話, s广东话; originally known as t廣州話, s广州话), is the dialect of Yue Chinese spoken in the vicinity of Canton in southern China. It is the traditional prestige dialect of Yue. Cantonese is the language of the Cantonese people. In mainland China, it is a lingua franca of Guangdong Province and some neighbouring areas, such as eastern Guangxi Province. It is the majority language of Hong Kong, Macau and the Pearl River Delta region of China. Cantonese is also one of the most spoken varieties of Chinese among overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia (most notably in Vietnam and Malaysia, and to a lesser extent in Singapore and Cambodia) and the predominant variety in the Western world, especially Canada, Australia, Western Europe, and the United States. While the term Cantonese refers narrowly to the prestige variety, it is often used in a broader sense for the entire Yue branch of Chinese, including related but largely mutually unintelligible dialects such as Taishanese. When standard Cantonese and the closely related Yuehai dialects are classified together, there are about 80 million total speakers. Cantonese is viewed as part of the cultural identity for its native speakers across large swathes of southern China, Hong Kong and Macau. Although Cantonese shares some vocabulary with Mandarin Chinese, the two varieties are mutually unintelligible because of differences in pronunciation, grammar, and lexicon. Sentence structure, in particular the placement of verbs, sometimes differs between the two varieties. A notable difference between Cantonese and Mandarin is how the spoken word is written; both can be recorded verbatim but very few Cantonese speakers are knowledgeable in the full Cantonese written vocabulary, so a non-verbatim formalised written form is adopted which is more akin to the Mandarin written form. This results in the situation in which a Mandarin and Cantonese text may look similar, but are pronounced differently.

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