Ying and Liang talk about about sweet rice wine in Guangxi, or Mainland, Cantonese, a variety of the Yue Chinese language of Guangxi, Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macau.

This video of Ying and Lian was recorded by Edwin Boc in Ontario, Canada. The Yue language group is part of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Varieties of Yue are commonly spoken in the Guangdong province, with about 84 million speakers total. The variety spoken by Ying and Lian, Cantonese, is the most widespread variety of Yue due to its use in Hong Kong, Macau, and Guangzhou, all of which have their own regional variations of the language that are mutually intelligible - Ying and Lian speak the variety of Cantonese found in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region specifically.

Cantonese quickly became the most spoken language in Southern China between the 1700’s and 1800’s after Guangzhou became a valuable trade center to England’s East India Company, which increased the language's utility for global commerce. Hong Kong's economic important compounded this political and economic significance. Along with the other languages in the Yue group, Cantonese is farther removed from the historical Middle Chinese language variety than other modern Chinese languages in terms of tonality and consonant use. Cantonese’s use is greater than that of Mandarin in both education and everyday use in Southern China, leading many to consider it the official language of the region since it is legally defined only as “Chinese” along with Mandarin, Min, and Wu.

This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. To download a copy, please contact hello@wikitongues.org.