Cantonese, also known as Cantonese, Cantonese and Vernacular, is a kind of tonal language and belongs to the Sino-Tibetan Chinese dialect. Widely used in central and western Guangdong, central and southern Guangxi, China, Hong Kong, China, Macau and some countries or regions in Southeast Asia, as well as overseas Chinese communities.
From the Han Dynasty to the Tang and Song Dynasties, people from the Central Plains migrated to Lingnan continuously, which promoted the development and stereotypes of Cantonese. Cantonese has not changed much since Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties. However, Li Xinkui, a linguist, believes that "the earliest source of Cantonese should be the result of Chu people moving south and Chu language coming south". Today, the phonetic features of Cantonese are very close to those of Sui and Tang Chinese.
The phonology of Guangzhou written by Li, a scholar in Qing Dynasty, discusses the characteristics and causes of Guangzhou dialect. Chen Li thinks that the tone of Guangzhou dialect conforms to the rhyming words in Sui and Tang Dynasties, because "the people of the Central Plains have migrated to Guangzhou for more than a thousand years, and today's Cantonese is the voice of the Central Plains in Sui and Tang Dynasties". Guang Yun is the first official authoritative work on phonology and prosody in the history of China, which is highly consistent with today's Cantonese phonology. Cantonese is a southern dialect that retains more elements of medieval Chinese, and its most prominent feature is that it completely retains the common entering tones in medieval Chinese.