Overview

Thanks to dedicated efforts of early missionaries, pedagogues, and linguists, we can trace back the evolution of modern Cantonese-one of the most spoken dialects in China, Southeast Asia, and globally-while differences in sounds, words, and grammar distinguish the old from contemporary speech today. Not much was recorded in official documents or gazetteers about the early history of Hong Kong where Cantonese is its most popular dialect. The knowledge of Cantonese is likewise quite limited except for occasional mentions of its culture and customs in writings here and there. For a long time, Cantonese was deemed a local dialect enjoying little prestige among the intellectuals. Its language and its origin remained much of a mystery until the mid-twentieth century when scholars started to accord it with increasing attention. In Cantonese: Since the 19th Century, Cheung offers profound insights to some thirty firsthand century-old materials, with findings that will be useful for ongoing efforts to trace the development of a language that has gone through many rounds of incredible and, at times dramatic, changes during the last two hundred years.

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Hung-nin Samuel Cheung is professor emeritus of East Asian languages and cultures at the University of California, Berkeley, and of Chinese language and literature at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His previous book titles include A Grammar of Cantonese as Spoken in Hong Kong (in Chinese, first published in 1972, and expanded in 2007) and A Practical Chinese Grammar (1994), a widely used language textbook over the past three decades.

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