Studies in Cantonese discourse: Two examples

Cantonese is the second most widely spoken dialect of Chinese after Mandarin. The majority of the roughly 70 million people who speak Cantonese live in Guangxi and Guangdong. Most research done on Cantonese relates to the variety spoken in Hong Kong, which is very similar to that spoken in Macau, Guangzhou, and areas adjacent to those cities, plus a large number of overseas Cantonese-speaking immigrant communities throughout the world. Although far less research has been done on Cantonese discourse than on Mandarin discourse, a detailed report of Cantonese discourse studies could easily fill a book. This chapter only focuses on two aspects of Cantonese studies: its orthography and Cantonese sentence-final particles.