page_title: Cantonese phonology
section_title: Tones
hierarchical_section_title: Cantonese phonology / Tones
context_page_description: The standard pronunciation of Cantonese is that of Guangzhou, also known as Canton, the capital of Guangdong Province. Hong Kong Cantonese is related to the Guangzhou dialect, and the two diverge only slightly. Yue dialects in other parts of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces, such as Taishanese, may be considered divergent to a greater degree.
context_section_description: Like other Chinese dialects, Cantonese uses tone contours to distinguish words, with the number of possible tones depending on the type of final. While Guangzhou Cantonese generally distinguishes between high-falling and high level tones, the two have merged in Hong Kong Cantonese and Macau Cantonese, yielding a system of six different tones in syllables ending in a semi-vowel or nasal consonant. (Some of these have more than one realization, but such differences are not used to distinguish words.) In finals that end in a stop consonant, the number of tones is reduced to three; in Chinese descriptions, these "checked tones" are treated separately by diachronic convention, so that Cantonese is traditionally said to have nine tones. However, phonetically these are a conflation of tone and final consonant; the number of phonemic tones is six in Hong Kong and seven in Guangzhou.
  For purposes of meters in Chinese poetry, the first and fourth tones are the "flat/level tones" (平聲), while the rest are the "oblique tones" (仄聲). This follows their regular evolution from the four tones of Middle Chinese.
  The first tone can be either high level or high falling usually without affecting the meaning of the words being spoken. Most speakers are in general not consciously aware of when they use and when to use high level and high falling. In Hong Kong, most speakers have merged the high level and high falling tones. In Guangzhou, the high falling tone is disappearing as well, but is still prevalent among certain words, e.g. in traditional Yale Romanization with diacritics, sàam (high falling) means the number three 三, whereas sāam (high level) means shirt 衫.
  The relative pitch of the tones varies with the speaker; consequently, descriptions vary from one sources to another. The difference between high and mid level tone (1 and 3) is about twice that between mid and low level (3 and 6): 60 Hz to 30 Hz. Low falling (4) starts at the same pitch as low level (6), but then drops; as is common with falling tones, it is shorter than the three level tones. The two rising tones, (2) and (5), both start at the level of (6), but rise to the level of (1) and (3), respectively.
  The tone 3, 4, 5 and 6 are dipping in the last syllable when is an interrogative sentence or an exclamatory sentence. 眞係? "really?" is pronounced [tsɐn˥ hɐi˨˥].
  The numbers "394052786" when pronounced in Cantonese, will give the nine tones in order (Romanization (Yale) saam1, gau2, sei3, ling4, ng5, yi6, chat7, baat8, luk9), thus giving a mnemonic for remembering the nine tones.
  Like other Yue dialects, Cantonese preserves an analog to the voicing distinction of Middle Chinese in the manner shown in the chart below.
  The distinction of voiced and voiceless consonants found in Middle Chinese was preserved by the distinction of tones in Cantonese. The difference in vowel length further caused the splitting of the dark entering tone, making Cantonese (as well as other Yue Chinese branches) one of the few Chinese varieties to have further split a tone after the voicing-related splitting of the four tones of Middle Chinese.
  Cantonese is special in the way that the vowel length can affect both the rime and the tone. Some linguists believe that the vowel length feature may have roots in the Old Chinese language.
  There are also two changed tones, which add the diminutive-like meaning "that familiar example" to a standard word.  For example, the word for "silver" (銀, ngan4) in a modified tone (ngan2) means "coin".  They are comparable to the diminutive suffixes 兒 and 子 of Mandarin.  In addition, modified tones are used in compounds, reduplications (擒擒青 kam4 kam4 cheng1 > kam4 kam2 cheng1 "in a hurry") and direct address to family members (妹妹 mui6 mui6 > mui4 mui2 "sister"). The two modified tones are high level, like tone 1, and mid rising, like tone 2, though for some people not as high as tone 2. The high level changed tone is more common for speakers with a high falling tone; for others, mid rising (or its variant realization) is the main changed tone, in which case it only operates
caption: Relative fundamental-frequency contours for six Cantonese tones with examples and Jyutping/Yale tone numbers (modified from Francis (2008))