Sino-Tibetan · ISO 639-3 yue
Yue Chinese Language 廣東話
Yue Chinese is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken by about 79 million people in 5 countries. It is an official language of Macau. It is written in the Simplified Han and Traditional Han scripts.
Where Yue Chinese is spoken
- Official language
- Regional official
- Spoken by 10%+
- 1–10%
- Smaller communities
Countries that speak Yue Chinese
Language family
- Sino-Tibetan
- Sinitic
- Classical-Middle-Modern Sinitic
- Middle-Modern Sinitic
- Yue-Pinghua
- Yue Chinese
Writing system
Simplified Han and Traditional Han scripts
Related languages
About the Yue Chinese language
Yue Chinese (廣東話) is spoken by about 79 million people, which makes it the 25th most spoken language in the world — just behind Tamil (82 million) and ahead of Egyptian Arabic (78 million). It belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family and, more precisely, to the Yue-Pinghua group within the Classical-Middle-Modern Sinitic branch.
Where is Yue Chinese spoken?
Yue Chinese is used in 5 countries. The largest communities live in China (74 million), Hong Kong (6.6 million), Canada (775,896), Macau (554,206) and Singapore (126,597). More than half of the population speaks it in Hong Kong and Macau — the places where travellers will hear it everywhere.
Share of the population that speaks Yue Chinese: China 5.2% (74 million), Hong Kong 90% (6.6 million), Canada 2% (775,896), Macau 86% (554,206) and Singapore 2.1% (126,597).
Yue Chinese is an official language in 1 country: Macau.
Writing system and status
Yue Chinese is written in the Simplified Han and Traditional Han scripts. It is a safe, widely transmitted language: children still learn it at home as their first language.
Its closest relatives in the same branch of the family are Mandarin Chinese, Wu Chinese, Jinyu Chinese, Hakka Chinese, Xiang Chinese, Gan Chinese and 2 more.
ISO codes: ISO 639-3 yue.
Frequently asked questions about Yue Chinese
How many people speak Yue Chinese?
Where is Yue Chinese spoken?
In which countries is Yue Chinese an official language?
What language family does Yue Chinese belong to?
What is Yue Chinese called in Yue Chinese?
Is Yue Chinese an endangered language?
Data: Languages of the World dataset (MIT) — ISO 639-3, Glottolog (CC BY 4.0), Unicode CLDR, Google LinguaMeta (CC BY 4.0) and Wikidata; country lists: samayo/country-json (MIT). Speaker numbers include first- and second-language speakers where sources report them.