Where is the birthplace of Cantonese?

The source of Cantonese is the elegant language from the northern Central Plains and the Chu language of Chu State. Yiya language: Cantonese is a language that originated in the northern Central Plains, spread to Guangdong and Guangxi during the Qin and Han Dynasties, and merged with the local ancient Vietnamese. Elegant speech was originally the official language of the Zhou Dynasty, and Confucianism took elegant speech as the carrier from the day of its birth. Confucius taught with elegance, emphasizing that "poetry and calligraphy should be polite". After Qin unified Lingnan, 500,000 people moved from the Central Plains, and the elegant words brought by immigrants became the earliest source of Cantonese. "Chu Yu Er" said: Li Xinkui, a linguist, believes that "the earliest source of Cantonese should be the result of Chu people moving south and Chu language moving south".

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. Today, the phonetic features of Cantonese are very close to those of Sui and Tang Chinese. The first official authoritative work of phonology and prosody in China's history, Guang Yun (full name: Rebuilding Guang Yun in the Great Song Dynasty), in which the pronunciation of the words marked is highly consistent with the current Cantonese. 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". 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.