LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Cantonese: Standard Cantonese
built 650 days ago
Although Cantonese speakers typically write in Standard Written Chinese, it is possible to write Cantonese as it is spoken. In addition to the thousands of standard Chinese characters, there are several hundred dialectal characters in use in newspapers, comics, magazine articles, and even some novels, but written vernacular Cantonese is still generally rare. Most of these Cantonese-specific characters are created from an existing Chinese character with the same sound, with a "mouth" radical added to the left side. Additionally, it is usually necessary to learn to recognize both the traditional and simplified forms of characters, since Hong Kong uses traditional and mainland China uses simplified. Learning at least 2000-3000 characters is required for basic literacy in the written language. There are ... several systems of romanization for Cantonese, the most common ones being Yale, Jyutping, and Sidney Lau's system.
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Cantonese is usually referred to as a spoken dialect, and not as a written dialect. Spoken vernacular Cantonese differs from modern written Chinese, which is essentially formal Standard Mandarin in written form. Written Chinese spoken word for word sounds overly formal and distant in Cantonese. As a result, the necessity of having a written script which matched the spoken form increased over time. This resulted in the creation of additional Chinese characters to complement the existing characters. Many of these represent phonological sounds not present in Mandarin.
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In PRC, Cantonese is used alongside Mandarin. The latter is used as the medium of education and government administration. There are ... some television and radio programs in Cantonese. Because of PRC's language policies, articulated through the National Language Standardization Conference (October 1955), most people in China today are proficient in Mandarin. As a consequence, Cantonese-Mandarin bilingualism is increasing in Cantonese-speaking provinces of the country.
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In many schools in Hong Kong and Macau, Cantonese is the medium of instruction, though the students are taught to read and write standard Chinese, which they read with Cantonese pronunciation. Cantonese is ... the main language of business, the media and government in both Hong Kong and Macau.
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A problem for the student of Cantonese is the lack of a widely accepted, standardized transcription system. Another problem is with Chinese characters: Cantonese uses the same system of characters as standard written Chinese, but it often uses different words, which have to be written with different or new characters. An example of Cantonese using a different word and a different character to write it: the Mandarin word for "to be" is shì and is written as
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[T]he Cantonese Culture Promotion Society strongly objects to the pronunciations used in these Cantonese news programs. To rectify the situation in Canada, we will send a petition to the news departments of Fairchild TV and OMNI.2 Television, as well as Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to completely abolish the use of Dr. Ho’s standard by reinstating the use of Modern Cantonese.
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Standard Cantonese