Cantonese

How to spell cantonese

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce cantonese

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cantonese mean?

1. nounThe variety of Chinese spoken mainly in Guangdong province, Hong Kong, and Macau.
2. adjectiveRelating to the city of Guangzhou (Canton), its people, language, or cuisine.

Cantonese in a sentence

• noun

  Her grandmother speaks cantonese at home but writes in standard Chinese.

• adjective

  The restaurant is famous for its cantonese roast duck.

• noun

  The menu listed the dish in both cantonese and English.

• adjective

  They hired a cantonese chef to run the new kitchen.

Where does cantonese come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is built on Canton, the name Western traders long used for the southern Chinese port now usually written Guangzhou, in the province of Guangdong. The name reached English through Portuguese, whose sailors and merchants rendered the regional name as Cantao in the 1500s, and English then settled on the spelling Canton. To this base English added the suffix -ese, which comes through Old French and ultimately from the Latin -ensis, meaning 'belonging to' or 'originating from' a place; the same ending appears in Chinese, Japanese, and Portuguese. The form Cantonese, meaning the language and people of that region, became common in English during the nineteenth century as trade and missionary contact with southern China grew. The spelling trap is mostly the single n in the middle and the -ese ending, which writers sometimes confuse with -ise or -eze. Although it derives from a Chinese place, the modern shape of the word is firmly a French-influenced Latin suffix bolted onto a Westernised place name.

How the word is built

• Canton (older Western name for Guangzhou, China)
• -ese (suffix forming names of languages and peoples)