Cantonese Characters (Simplified)

Cantonese, 粤语 jyut6 jyu5, known in Guangdong as 广东话 “Guangdong speech” or simply 白话 “plain speech”, is a Chinese language of its own: a Mandarin speaker cannot follow it by ear. Its standard form is the speech of Guangzhou, the city Europeans called Canton, which gave the language its English name.

Formal writing in Guangdong is standard written Chinese, the same text a reader in Beijing reads, and any of it can be read aloud with Cantonese pronunciation. Colloquial Cantonese, written the way people talk, appears in chat messages, social media posts, comments, comics, adverts and song lyrics. To write it, Cantonese uses extra characters and gives ordinary ones new meanings, so the same sentence looks different: Mandarin 他不在这里 and Cantonese 佢唔喺度 both mean “he’s not here”, and 我们吃了饭 “we have eaten” becomes 我哋食咗饭.

On the mainland Cantonese is written in simplified characters, the official script of China since the 1950s; in Hong Kong and Macau the same words are written in traditional characters. This page is the simplified set. The Cantonese collection holds the Hong Kong and Macau writing in traditional characters, and the Chinese and Traditional Chinese collections cover standard written Chinese.

The characters of written Cantonese

The heart of written Cantonese is a few dozen grammar words. 佢 keoi5 is “he, she, it”, and 哋 dei6 makes pronouns plural: 我哋 “we”, 你哋 “you all”, 佢哋 “they”. 系 hai6 is “to be” and also “yes”; 喺 hai2 is “at, in”. 唔 m4 negates (唔系 “is not”) and 冇 mou5, 有 “have” with its inside strokes taken out, means “there is none”. 嘅 ge3 is the possessive, like Mandarin 的: 我嘅 “my”. 咗 zo2 marks something done, 啲 di1 is “some, a bit” and 嘢 je5 “thing”, so 乜嘢 is “what?”.

Many of these characters carry the mouth radical 口 on the left: 嘅 咗 啲 嘢 嚟 嗰 咩 喺. The mouth marks a character borrowed for its sound, a spoken word written with a character that sounds like it. The same habit produced the sentence-final particles, the little syllables that carry tone of voice: 啦 laa1 urges or softens (去啦 “go on”), 喎 wo3 reports what someone said, 㗎 gaa3 adds weight, and 咋 zaa3 means “only, that’s all”.

Some common Cantonese words use familiar characters in Cantonese readings or meanings: 食 sik6 “eat” where Mandarin says 吃, 行 haang4 “walk” for 走, 睇 tai2 “look” for 看 and 靓 leng3 “pretty” for 漂亮. Other Cantonese-specific characters include 瞓 in 瞓觉 fan3 gaau3 “sleep” for 睡觉. 揾 wan2 is “look for”, and 揾食, literally “look for food”, means to earn a living.

Cantonese simplified vs traditional characters

Mainland simplification was drawn up for standard written Chinese, so most characters made for Cantonese were never given simplified forms: 佢 哋 喺 嘅 唔 冇 咗 啲 嘢 嚟 嗰 啱 are written the same in Guangzhou and in Hong Kong. Only characters shared with standard Chinese change, in the usual way: 係 becomes 系, 邊 边 (边个 “who”), 點 点 (点解 “why”), 講 讲, 搵 揾, 諗 谂 “think”, 靚 靓, 飲 饮 (饮茶 “yum cha”). The tables put the two forms side by side.

A few words are spelled differently on the two sides for other reasons. “To press”, gam6, is 揿 on the mainland, the simplified form of 撳, while Hong Kong usually writes the colloquial character 㩒. 系 is the mainland form for “to be” because simplification merged 係 into 系, so 系咪 “is it?” is 係咪 in Hong Kong. Converting software handles the ordinary pairs, but check Cantonese words by eye.

Jyutping, Yale and Cantonese tone symbols

Cantonese is tonal, and the meaning of a syllable changes with its pitch. The usual count is six tones, nine if the short syllables ending in -p, -t or -k are counted apart, the stop consonants that Mandarin lost and Cantonese kept (食 sik6, 八 baat3, 十 sap6). The classic drill is 诗 史 试 时 市 事, “poem, history, try, time, market, matter”: the same syllable si in tones one to six.

Jyutping, published by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong in 1993, writes the tone as a digit after the syllable: si1, si2 … si6, and 广东话 is gwong2 dung1 waa2. It needs no special letters, which is why it is common in learner apps and online dictionaries. The older Yale romanisation, still found in many textbooks, marks tones on the vowel: a macron for the high level tone (诗 sī), an acute for the rising tones (史 sí), a grave for the falling tone (时 sìh), and an h after the vowel for the three low tones (时 sìh, 市 síh, 事 sih).

Linguists draw tones with Chao tone letters, a pitch scale from 5 (high) to 1 (low): tone 1 is 55 ˥˥, tone 2 35 ˧˥, tone 3 33 ˧˧, tone 4 21 ˨˩, tone 5 23 ˨˧ and tone 6 22 ˨˨. These are the “Cantonese tone symbols” of phonetics books, and like the Yale vowels they can be copied from the grid.

How to type Cantonese characters

The shared characters of Cantonese can be typed on any Chinese pinyin keyboard by their Mandarin reading, and the Cantonese-only ones are there too, under the Mandarin readings Unicode gives them: 佢 qu, 唔 wu, 冇 mao, 咗 zuo, 啲 di, 嘢 ye, 喺 xi, 嘅 kai. Popular mainland phone keyboards also offer Cantonese voice input, which writes what you say in Cantonese characters. To type by Cantonese sound, use a Jyutping input method such as the free Rime engine with the community Jyutping schema, on Windows, macOS, Linux and Android, or the Cantonese phonetic keyboards built into Apple and Google devices.

A few Cantonese characters sit outside the main Unicode block. 㗎 (U+35CE) and 㩒 (U+3A52) are in CJK Extension A, so some input methods do not offer them and older fonts show a box. Copy them from this page, or in Microsoft Word type the code, such as 35CE, and press Alt+X; in HTML write 㗎.

Chinese keyboards switch punctuation to full width automatically, so , . ? ! give ， 。 ？ ！. The ellipsis …… and the dash —— are typed doubled, filling two character spaces, and 、 is the enumeration comma for lists. The Yale vowels are easy to type: with the Windows US-International layout, ' then a gives á and then a gives à; on a Mac, Option+E then a gives á and Option+ then a gives à, and the ABC – Extended layout adds Option+A then a for ā; on a phone, hold the vowel down and slide to the mark.

Where Cantonese is spoken

Cantonese is the language of Guangdong province, above all the Pearl River Delta around Guangzhou and Foshan, and it is spoken in much of Guangxi too, from Nanning to Wuzhou. Tens of millions of people speak it in mainland China 🇨🇳 and several million in Hong Kong. Mainland Cantonese writing uses simplified characters. 粤 is the short name of Guangdong itself, the character you see first on every Guangdong number plate.

Cantonese is the main language of Hong Kong and Macau, written there in traditional characters (see the Hong Kong SAR China and Macao SAR China collections), and with its close relative Taishanese it was for more than a century the Chinese of Chinatowns from San Francisco to London. Its neighbours are Hakka and Min Nan, spoken in the same provinces with their own collections; the China collection gathers the country’s flags, food and holiday emoji.

Prices in Guangdong are in yuan, ¥ or ￥ before the number and 元 after it, but in speech Cantonese counts money in 蚊 man1: 十蚊 is ten yuan, and 五毫 fifty fen. The emoji people send in Cantonese chats follow its customs: 🫖🍵🥟 for 饮茶, morning tea with dim sum, 🍜 for wonton noodles 云吞面, 🧧 for the 利是 red packets and 🍊 for the mandarin oranges of New Year, 🥮 for Mid-Autumn mooncakes, 🐉 for the dragon boat races of Duanwu on the Pearl River, and 🎭 for Cantonese opera, 粤剧.