Yue varieties are among the most
conservative of Chinese varieties regarding the final consonants and tonal categories of
Middle Chinese, so that the rhymes of Tang poetry are clearer in Yue dialects than elsewhere. However they have lost several distinctions in the initial consonants and medial vowels that other Chinese varieties have retained.
Initials and medials In addition to aspirated and unaspirated voiceless initials, Middle Chinese had a series of voiced initials, but voicing has been lost in Yue and most other modern Chinese varieties apart from
Wu and
Old Xiang. In the Guangfu, Siyi and Gao–Yang subgroups, these initials have yielded aspirated consonants in the level and rising tones, and unaspirated consonants in the departing and entering tones. These initials are uniformly unaspirated in Gou–Lou varieties and uniformly aspirated in Wu–Hua. In many Yue varieties, including Cantonese, Middle Chinese has become or in most words; in Taishanese, has also changed to , for example, in the native name of the dialect, "Hoisan". In Siyi and eastern Gao–Yang, Middle Chinese has become a
voiceless lateral fricative . Most Yue varieties have merged the Middle Chinese
retroflex sibilants with the
alveolar sibilants, in contrast with
Mandarin dialects, which have generally maintained the distinction. For example, the words and are distinguished in Mandarin, but in modern Cantonese they are both pronounced as . Many Mandarin varieties, including the Beijing dialect, have a third sibilant series, formed through a merger of palatalized alveolar sibilants and velars, but this is a recent innovation, which has not affected Yue and other Chinese varieties. For example, , , and are all pronounced as in Mandarin, but in Cantonese the first pair is pronounced , while the second pair is pronounced . The earlier pronunciation is reflected in historical Mandarin romanizations, such as "Peking" for Beijing, "Kiangsi" for
Jiangxi, and "Tientsin" for
Tianjin. Some Yue speakers, such as many Hong Kong Cantonese speakers born after World War II, merge with , but Taishanese and most other Yue varieties preserve the distinction. Younger Cantonese speakers also tend not to distinguish between and the zero initial, though this distinction is retained in most Yue dialects. Yue varieties retain the initial in words where Late Middle Chinese shows a shift to a labiodental consonant, realized in most Northern varieties of Chinese as . Nasals can be independent syllables in Yue words, e.g. Cantonese , and , although Middle Chinese did not have syllables of this type. In most Yue varieties (except for
Tengxian), the rounded medial has merged with the following vowel to form a
monophthong, except after velar initials. In most analyses velars followed by are treated as
labio-velars. Most Yue varieties have retained the Middle Chinese palatal medial, but in Cantonese it has also been lost to monophthongization, yielding a variety of vowels.
Final consonants and tones Middle Chinese syllables could end with glides or , nasals , or , or stops , or . Syllables with vocalic or nasal endings could occur with one of three tonal contours, called , , or . Syllables with final stops were traditionally treated as a fourth tone category, the
entering tone , because the stops were distributed in the same way as the corresponding final nasals. While northern and central varieties have lost some of the Middle Chinese final consonants, they are retained by most southern Chinese varieties, though sometimes affected by sound shifts. They are most faithfully preserved in Yue dialects. Final stops have disappeared entirely in most Mandarin dialects, including the Beijing-based standard, with the syllables distributed across the other tones. For example, the characters , , , , , , , , , and are all pronounced in Mandarin, but they are all distinct in Yue: in Cantonese, , , , , , , , , , and , respectively. Similarly, in Mandarin dialects the Middle Chinese final has merged with , but the distinction is maintained in southern varieties of Chinese such as
Hakka,
Min and Yue. For example, Cantonese has and versus Mandarin , and versus Mandarin , and versus Mandarin , and and versus Mandarin . Middle Chinese is described in contemporary dictionaries as having
four tones, where the fourth category, the entering tone, consists of syllables with final stops. Many modern Chinese varieties contain traces of a split of each of these four tones into two registers, an upper or register from voiceless initials and a lower or register from voiced initials. Most Mandarin dialects retain the register distinction only in the level tone, yielding the first and second tones of the standard language (corresponding to the first and fourth tones in Cantonese), but have merged several of the other categories. Most Yue dialects have retained all eight categories, with a further split of the upper entering tone conditioned by vowel length, as also found in neighbouring Tai dialects. A few dialects spoken in Guangxi, such as the
Bobai dialect, have also split the lower entering tone. ==Vocabulary==