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Feng Jiaxin
Studied at Princeton UniversityUpdated 10mo
Where exactly are the Cantonese people supposed to be from? Guangdong, Hong Kong, or Guangzhou?
You do raise a good point. “Cantonese” itself is a very imprecise term. It is technically an adjective relating to Guangzhou (known as “Canton”), its inhabitants, or their dialect. The problem arises with how frequently the word “Canton” is conflated with “Guangdong” — the province which Guangzhou is the capital of. While there is an overarching Yue Chinese culture and the Guangzhou dialect (Cantonese) served as the historical lingua franca for Guangdong — using “Canton” for Guangdong is still not accurate and really confusing.

The Guangzhou dialect is a Yue Chinese language and there are multiple Yue Chinese branches. You may hear some people call Taishanese a “Cantonese language” but it is not mutually intelligible with Cantonese despite it also being a Yue Chinese language. In this case, they are using “Cantonese” as a synonym for “Yue Chinese” or “Guangdong languages”. Yet the latter descriptor also falls apart because Guangdong has many other languages that are not Yue Chinese.

I know an elderly man from Chaozhou, Chaozhou is a city in eastern Guangdong that speaks a Min Nan dialect and is a part of the Chaoshan cultural region. He always call the Guangzhou dialect, “Guangzhou hua” or “Guangzhou dialect” and never “Guangdong hua” or “Guangdong dialect” — which is the term that Guangzhou dialect speakers and people from outside of Guangdong use. The majority of Hakka also live in Guangdong province (my paternal family is from there) and they speak Hakka Chinese which is more closely related to Gan Chinese from Jiangxi province than it is to Yue or Min Chinese.

Across different bodies of literature, you may encounter writings that call both Teochews and Hakkas “Cantonese” in reference to their inhabitancy of Guangdong province, but also “not Cantonese” in reference to them not being native Yue Chinese speakers. I once heard a woman say “All Taishanese are Cantonese but not all Cantonese are Taishanese”. This does sort of make sense…but it also really doesn’t.

There are so many Taishanese-Americans who have told me that they thought everyone in their family was speaking “Cantonese” when they were young because they only knew of “Cantonese” as an adjective for things relating to Guangdong province and not Guangzhou specifically. They are shocked when they meet actual Cantonese people from Guangzhou for the first time (Cantonese people make up the majority of Chinese diaspora in the Western world) who ask why they are speaking “gibberish Cantonese”. To the Taishanese people, the “Guangdong dialect” is Taishanese and not Cantonese.

Some people think calling all Yue Chinese dialects “Cantonese dialects” is acceptable as long as you call Gaungzhou Cantonese “Standard Cantonese” but there are already multiple dialects based on Cantonese itself. They make up their own “Guangfu dialects” mini-family. The Guangzhou dialect of Cantonese is considered the Standard whereas Macau, Xiguan, Wuzhou (all the way in Guangxi!), and Hong Kong Cantonese are the other dialects in the mini-family.

Hong Kong has never been a part of Guangzhou and it is not even a part of Guangdong anymore. Rather than fulfilling the geographic requirement, Hong Kong is considered culturally and linguistically Cantonese because the bulk of Hong Kong’s population were immigrants from Guangzhou and a dialect of Cantonese continues to be spoken there today. Prior to the British colonisation of Hong Kong, Hong Kong was still a part of Guangdong but Cantonese (the Guangzhou dialect) was not spoken there.

There are some Hong Kongers who hold the status of “Indigenous inhabitants of the New Territories” because they lived in Hong Kong prior to the mass migration of people from Guangzhou. The indigenous inhabitants of Hong Kong spoke the Yue Chinese Weitou dialect (which is different from the newcomers who spoke Cantonese), Tanka (the Tanka are Sinicized Austronesian peoples who live almost entirely on boats), Hakka (once the majority of Hong Kong’s population), and even Hokkien (we know the least about the Hong Kong Hoklos because they had the smallest population and there isn’t much written about them).

This means “Cantonese” can alternatively and contradictorily mean:

Anybody who lives in Guangzhou - Meaning you don’t have to be able to speak Cantonese to be a Cantonese person.
Anybody who is a Yue Chinese speaker - Including Taishan, Lianzhou, Weitou, Yangjiang, etc. Even if they are distinct from or not mutually intelligible with Cantonese.
Anybody who speaks the Guangzhou dialect natively - Including Wuzhounese, Hong Kongers, and Macanese because the bulk of them trace their ancestries back to Guangzhou.
Anybody from Guangdong - Including Leizhou Min, Teochews, Hakka, Tanka, Hmong people, etc. who all have their own cultural identities separate from Yue Chinese traditions. The irony is that the Hainanese have more culturally in common with Cantonese (Guangzhou) people than the Cantonese do with Guangdong Hakka.
Anybody who identifies themselves as Cantonese - Quite self-explanatory and common with overseas Chinese who may consider themselves “Cantonese” by cultural upbringing even if they neither speak Cantonese nor ever lived in Guangzhou.
The broad and context-dependent Western term “Cantonese” actually has no direct translation into Chinese.

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BingSee Teh
· April 26, 2021
I am a second generation Malaysian Chinese n my grandparents hailed from Hokkien province in China .There are so many branches of the dialect . We are Eng Choon.Will be grateful if you can elaborate

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Anton Taiki
· April 27, 2021
A brief on Yongchun ( 永春 pinyin Min Nan: Éng-chhun) —

Many overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia have ancestors from Yongchun.

Yongchun (Chinese: 永春; pinyin: Yǒngchūn; Min Nan: Éng-chhun; lit. 'eternal spring') is a county in western Quanzhou city of southern Fujian province, People's Republic of China, (located on the upper reaches of the Jin River). It is under the administration of Quanzhou City.

Quanzhou - also called Licheng and Citong Cheng in Pinyin - is one of the most famous historical and cultural cities in China. It is an important seaport located in southeast Fujian Province and is the economic and political center of the province. To its east is Taiwan separated from Quanzhou by the East Sea, making the city the famous mother town of Chinese compatriots in Taiwan and overseas.

Quanzhou (pronounced Chienchou) is about a two hour bus ride from Fuzhou - both places have strong ancestral links to Malaysian Chinese as it was the springboard for the early Chinese migrants.

Languages and dialects spoken: Min (variants include Fuzhounese, Hokkien and others), Mandarin, She, Hakka.

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BingSee Teh
· April 27, 2021
Thank you for the info

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Weili Chen
· April 29, 2021
Honestly, it's hard to precisely answer OP's question from language POV, since there are so many tones and versions of Guangdong Hua or Yue Yu.

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Koko Nusantara (印尼哥哥)
· April 30, 2021
In certain overseas Chinese communities such as Indonesia, Hainan is even included as part of Guangdong. As when most of the Hainanese emigrants left, Hainan was still part of Guangdong administratively.

“The irony is that the Hainanese have more culturally in common with Cantonese (Guangzhou) people than the Cantonese do with Guangdong Hakka.”

Could you elaborate on this? I’m not sure I agree. Guangdong Hakka are very diverse. Many of them live side by side with Cantonese, in regions such as Qingyuan, Guangzhou, Dongguan, Shenzhen, and many more. Others such as the Hakka from Meizhou live entirely in their Hakka bubble. Then there’s the Hakka in areas like Chaoshan and Leizhou that live side by side with Guangdong Min peoples, and even with non-Han in Shaoguan.

There are some Yue people in Hainan, but that’s just a small portion of Yue interaction the Hainanese people in general have compared to the Guangdong Hakka.

It’s a bit of a misnomer to call the Hong Kong Hoklos as Hokkien (implying they speak exactly like those in southern Fujian). If you go far back enough (centuries), sure. But they’re more closely related to the Min people along Shanwei, Huizhou, Macau, and Zhongshan.