The Special Cantonese Dialect Study

In order to satisfy the requirements of the Cantonese dialect speakers of the dialect have in addition to making use of commonly used Chinese characters as a standard written language, also created many dialect characters. With regard to the study of special characters specific to Cantonese, there has been very little research done to date. Owing to this lack of research, this thesis paper is an attempt to compile and record Cantonese-specific characters to provide an overall and systematic overview of them. This paper places Cantonese dialect specific characters into five categories:i) original ancient characters;ii) dialect sub-cultural characters;iii) original connotation - new pronunciation characters;iv) borrowed characters;v) Cantonese homonym characters or characters similar in pronunciation within Cantonese dialect.The paper reflects a rather comprehensive report on die current status of special characters commonly used and specific to the Cantonese dialect. Research materials include various famous works on dialectology, dialectic dictionaries and other research tools, academic papers, literally works in the Cantonese dialect, Cantonese periodicals, Cantonese television broadcasts, contemporary Cantonese films (subtitles) and characters included in The Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set. Specific research presented in the paper also includes a comprehensive analysis and recording of the pronunciation, definitions and usages (with example sentences), the origin of special Cantonese characters, the structure formation of characters unique to Cantonese dialect.