Hi Ted, She might have been surprised by the question since Mandarin is spoken outside of China for the most part (Taiwan, etc.) As an fyi, Mandarin is soft and gentle sounding.
I did a google because I had always understood Mandarin to be in the north whereas Cantonese was in the south around Canton.
Here are the definitions of each dialect:
"Standard Mandarin is the official Chinese spoken language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China on Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore.
The phonology of Standard Mandarin is based on that of the Beijing dialect, which belongs to Mandarin, a large and very diverse group of Chinese dialects spoken across northern and southwestern China. The vocabulary is largely drawn from this group of dialects. The grammar of Standard Mandarin is standardized to the body of modern works written in Vernacular Chinese, which in practice follows the tradition of the Mandarin group of dialects most closely with some notable exceptions. As a result, Standard Mandarin itself is usually called "Mandarin" in non-academic, everyday usage in the West. However, linguists use "Mandarin" to refer to the entire group of dialects. This convention will be adopted by the rest of this article."
en.wikipedia.org
"Cantonese (??/??, lit. "Y?et (Guangdong) dialect") is one of the major dialect groups or languages of the Chinese language or language family. It is mainly spoken in the south-eastern part of Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, by the Chinese minorities in Southeast Asia and by many overseas Chinese of Cantonese origin worldwide. Its name is derived from Canton, the former French romanisation used as the colonial English name for Guangzhou, the capital city of Guangdong Province. It is a tonal language.
en.wikipedia.org |
