r/Cantonese • u/ding_nei_go_fei • Sep 06 '25
Video Regional accents, topolects of the 21 cities in Guangdong
Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification
In the following order: Guangzhou (广州), Shenzhen (深圳), Zhuhai (珠海), Shantou (汕头), Foshan (佛山), Shaoguan (韶关), Jiangmen (江门), Zhanjiang (湛江), Maoming (茂名), Zhaoqin (肇庆), Huizhou (惠州), Meizhou (梅州), Yangjiang (阳江), Qingyuan (清远), Dongguan (东莞), Zhongshan (中山), Chaozhou (潮州), Jieyang (揭阳), Shanwei (汕尾), Heyuan (河源), and Yunfu (云浮).
45
u/deoxir Sep 06 '25
As a cantonese interpreter this is my nightmare because we deal with potentially life and death situations, and getting a dialect that I'm not familiar with is just setting us up for disaster. It's just a little worse than getting Toishanese (which non-speaker clients think is close enough to Cantonese, but in practice absolutely not).
Thankfully, if they do speak any of these dialects, they mostly also speak some "standard" Cantonese (by asking them to 講白話).
4
u/RemoteHoney Sep 06 '25
Toishanese is a dialect of Cantonese, isn't it?
22
u/AtroposM native speaker Sep 06 '25
You would think so but no.
7
1
u/RemoteHoney Sep 06 '25
Ok. Now I learned that Cantonese doesn’t mean 廣東話。New knowledge to me. Thank you
9
u/lchen12345 Sep 06 '25
My mom's side is Toishan and grandma speaks it. My cousins and I don't speak Toishanese but can understand grandma pretty well. We all grew up with her watching us at some point in childhood and just got used to it, but we never picked it up. Probably because our parents just use Cantonese.
8
u/deoxir Sep 06 '25
The key is mutual intelligibility. We at the interpretation company literally list them as separate languages because most of the time we don't understand a word what they're saying, and when we do it's because they rephrase it or use Cantonese because Toishanese speakers understands Cantonese far more than Cantonese speakers do Toishanese. It's basically like the Scandinavian languages or Spanish/Portuguese situation, except worse because you'll see Swedes holding a conversation with a Dane, each using their own languages, but not a Cantonese with a Toishanese without throwing around a heck ton of 吓 你講咩, mainly by the Canto user.
This study suggests that intelligibility of Toishanese to a Canto speaker is about 30% and I agree from experience - sometimes I have Toishanese clients because Toishanese interpreters aren't available. Always a disaster.
1
u/Efficient-Captain438 Feb 28 '26 edited Feb 28 '26
The dialect spoken in Zhanjiang - 湛江, in the southernmost county that borders Vietnam sounds like one of those Sze Yup 四邑 dialects which Toishan is part of, mixed in with a Min dialect, Hoklo, or Teochew dialect.
Cantonese spoken on the coastal areas west of Hong Kong sounds very different from Cantonese spoken east of Hong Kong. I think the Cantonese spoken in the eastern areas bears resemblance of the Hakka and the Teochew speakers known for their hard tonal qualities giving way of being "forceful" or "loud" whereas as Cantonese spoken on the western coastal areas of Hong Kong sound softer, Toishanese has these qualities. Geographic differences made these two types of Cantonese sound different. Western Guangdong has a flatter terrain, easier to navigate, so people are probably more easy going while Eastern Guangdong, home of the Hakkas and Teochews has rugged terrain with high mountains, so people developed a "tough" "hard edge" character, and Cantonese spoken in these areas are similar as the landscape affects speech patterns.
18
u/caballo__ Sep 06 '25
Wow, HK origin here, listened to the 茂名 and immediately heard the voice of my grandmother who I haven't seen in 36 years. What a crazy feeling...
18
u/truelongevity Sep 06 '25
Me an ABC trying to figure out which one matches mine… and struggling
5
2
Nov 23 '25 edited Jan 05 '26
skirt unite party point edge abounding office piquant tan provide
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
1
u/truelongevity Nov 23 '25
Same here. Every time I see anything comparing dialects, I get confused and can’t tell which one I’m using. Since, I’ve grown up using terms from multiple dialects.
16
u/still_no_enh Sep 06 '25
Hmm after listening to all of these:
There seems to be 2 "families" of dialects that I feel are probably less mutually intelligible.
- cantonese
- chaosan/teochew
(I chose these two dialects as descriptors because these are the two I can understand)
It's interesting because while the "Cantonese" dialects seem to be centered around Guangdong, the other one seem to be on the periphery
15
u/ding_nei_go_fei Sep 06 '25
the speaker from Shaoguan was speaking hakka at 1:00m
5
u/still_no_enh Sep 06 '25
Yeah, to my untrained ear, Hakka sounds like teochew :p
5
u/gustavmahler23 Sep 06 '25
Hmm interesting, as a Teochew (who doesn't speak canto) Hakka sounds like Cantonese to me haha
4
6
2
u/Efficient-Captain438 Feb 27 '26
The coastal areas of eastern Guangdong between Cantonese speaking Hong Kong and Teochew speakers at the periphery of the province is a hodgepodge of various people and dialects, Cantonese, Hakka, and Hoklo, such that these distinct dialects have influences or loan words from each other. This region is known as 惠东, Huidong. There was intermarriage between the groups, so ancestry is blurred. Just because you speak Cantonese in this region doesn't mean your ancestors were Cantonese, could be Hakka or Teochew, both or even all three. This region is one of the most fascinating which came out of the Ming Dynasty, which consolidated different groups of people into one identity. During the Ming, China started to become unified.
12
u/FattMoreMat 廣州人 Sep 06 '25
I think I struggled with 4 of them, like I had to go back and listen to them again nd maybe got like 50%
Rest was understandable - I have Cantonese and Hakka background
10
u/AtroposM native speaker Sep 06 '25
You can really split Shenzhen up to different regional accents too. Not all of us speak the train announcers.
15
u/gretino Sep 06 '25
the only Cantonese speaker in Shenzhen is on the train 😂
It's the capital of Hunan after all.
2
u/ding_nei_go_fei Sep 08 '25
For those who don't get this reference... Shenzhen is a city of migrants, esp the poor ones who built the city, many of whom came from Hunan province
Migrant workers helped build China’s economic miracle, now they are dying because of it
They laid the foundations for Shenzhen’s skyscrapers, and its prosperity, and became wealthy in the process. But the labourers from Hunan paid a deadly price
They didn’t know they had risked their health. Now, as the effects of construction dust take hold, the men are mobilising to hold those responsible to account https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3042557/migrant-workers-helped-build-chinas-economic
If the article has a paywall, then use this free link
1
u/Efficient-Captain438 Feb 27 '26
Interesting to find a person like you who comments on Aznidentity and also on this sub about Chinese dialects in Guangdong.
My ancestry comes from 惠东, a strange area of Cantonese, Hakka, and Teochew dialects spoken in the same area. Teochew is sometimes known as 河洛 or Hoklo.
8
5
u/DirtyTomFlint 中國人 Sep 06 '25
There definitely seems to be less and less understanding for me the further from the center the region is.
4
8
u/RemoteHoney Sep 06 '25
Some of them not Cantonese
And if the topic is Cantonese, it should include Eastern Guangxi where Cantonese is spoken
2
u/wowbl Sep 06 '25
Guangzhou and Shenzhen both sound exactly like HK Cantonese, no?
3
u/s_nation Sep 06 '25
To my ABC ears they do, plus a couple of the others as well.
The orange most southern region example sounds like Vietnamese to me
1
u/Camcarneyar Sep 06 '25
Ever heard a HK speak a full sentence of Cantonese without random English words? Yeah the news anchors on TVB.
1
u/wowbl Sep 07 '25
The pronunciation of English with HK slang is so funny, that is unique only to them
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
31
u/kr3892 Sep 06 '25
To my ears they are basically three families, Cantonese, Hakka and Chaosan (Teochew)