Language comparison
Chinese vs Cantonese
Both belong to the Sino-Tibetan family; their closest common node in the Glottolog tree: Middle-Modern Sinitic. Both are used in: Hong Kong SAR China, Macao SAR China.
Relatedness is not mutual intelligibility: languages of one branch can be unintelligible to each other, while very close ones (such as Serbian and Croatian) differ mainly in status and script. That is why we give no “similarity percentage”.
Chinese
中文
- Family and branch (Glottolog)
- Sino-Tibetan
- Sinitic (Chinese)
- Classical-Middle-Modern Sinitic
- Middle-Modern Sinitic
- Northern Chinese
- Mandarinic
- Chinese
- Script
- Simplified Han
- Hello / thank you
- 你好 / 谢谢 (nǐ hǎo / xièxie)
- Speakers (estimate)
- c. 1.3 billion sum over countries per CLDR, including second-language users
- Official (2)
- China, Taiwan
- Co-official (3)
- Hong Kong SAR China, Singapore, Macao SAR China
- Without status
- widely used in 2 countries, a minority language in 12 countries
Cantonese
粵語
- Family and branch (Glottolog)
- Sino-Tibetan
- Sinitic (Chinese)
- Classical-Middle-Modern Sinitic
- Middle-Modern Sinitic
- Yue-Pinghua
- Cantonese
- Script
- Traditional Han
- Hello / thank you
- 你好 / 多謝 (néih hóu / dō jeh)
- Speakers (estimate)
- c. 82 million sum over countries per CLDR, including second-language users
- Co-official (1)
- Macao SAR China
- Without status
- widely used in 1 country, a minority language in 3 countries
Where they are spoken
- Chinese 5
- Cantonese 0
- both 2
Countries where the language has a legal status or is known by at least 10% of the population (CLDR); countries where it is only a minority language are not shown.