Cantonese refers to the
Guangzhou Dialect, one of the
Yue Dialects (it is
not a dialect of
mandarin, and in some cases uses different
characters) , the main features of which are as follows:
- Nine tones
- Like middle chinese, it has words ending in the consonants n, p, t, k, and m, whereas mandarin and many other dialects only retain some of these endings- Cantonese has them all.
- The adverb follows the verb in the sentence, where in mandarin the adverb comes first.
- verb--indirect object- direct object word order: the direct object follows the indirect object, whereas in mandarin the direct object comes first
- there are no medial vowels, a feature that Cantonese shares with the Zhuang minority language.