Cantonese has nine tones. Beginning in the 1950s, the Chinese government tried to make Mandarin the national language in an effort to bridge the myriad dialects across the country.

As efforts began to save Cantonese at Stanford, the language remained under threat worldwide. It is being swamped by Mandarin, the official language of more than 1 billion people in China and ...

Released last month, Visual Fonts uses Jyutping – a Cantonese romanisation system that has letters and numbers representing sounds and tones – to annotate Chinese characters on the screen of a ...

Sixth Tone: How did Cantonese cooking shed that reputation? Zhou: The elevation of Cantonese cuisine’s status is closely tied to the upheaval of the early 20th century. First, popular perceptions of ...

Released last August, it is one of the first children’s books to teach Cantonese nursery rhymes with Jyutping, a romanisation system that helps people learn Cantonese tones and pronunciation.

Speakers of tonal languages such as Cantonese appear to have a genetic variant that makes it easier to hear lexical tones. But the genetic effect is only small. Having had music lessons is much ...

That's a far cry from the U.S., where even in San Francisco there are few opportunities to pursue Cantonese in high school and beyond. The San Francisco Unified School District has Cantonese and ...

With nine tones, Cantonese is even more challenging to learn. Scholars say it is closer to ancient Chinese than Mandarin is — a Tang Dynasty poem would sound more like the original if read in ...