10 Interesting Facts about Cantonese

1. Depending on how you slice it, Cantonese has more speakers than Persian or Korean

Drawing distinctions between the languages spoken in China is notoriously difficult. Even the collection of dialects normally gathered under the umbrella term “Cantonese” vary from each other greatly. Because of that, it’s also difficult to determine the number of native speakers of the languages. Depending on where you draw the line, Cantonese has somewhere between 55 and 80 million speakers – a pretty big difference.