ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the Cantonese culture through its dialect, mainly through its folk sayings. Cantonese dialect, to begin with, has to be studied from the perspective of the Chinese language. Chinese, or to be more exact Putonghua in its colloquial form, is a language spoken by about one fifth of the world’s population as China is a vast country with a huge population. According to statistics, the number of Chinese language speakers exceeds 1.4 billion, which includes 50 million people who have Chinese as their second language. The case of English is more or less the same. Though the number of native speakers of English is much smaller than that of Chinese, English is ranked second in the world of languages in terms of speakers, totaling around 700 million in 2017. As for Cantonese, it is the major dialect in the southern part of China, with around 59 million speakers in 2017. Though Cantonese, by virtue of its designation, is the speech of Canton – present-day Guangzhou – its usage goes far beyond a city of Guangdong province. Cantonese nowadays generally refers to a dialect that is commonly used in Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Macao, and Cantonese-speaking communities in other parts of the world, such as Malaysia and Singapore in southeast Asia, Toronto and Vancouver in Canada, London in the United Kingdom, and New York and San Francisco in the United States.
