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Chevrolet Tracker (Americas)

The Chevrolet Tracker, formerly the Geo Tracker, is a mini SUV produced for Chevrolet and Geo by CAMI Automotive in Ingersoll, Ontario. The Tracker was produced under many brands in several different editions and in many countries.

First generation

The Geo Tracker was a mini SUV introduced in late 1988 as a 1989 model. It was developed by CAMI which was a joint venture between General Motors of Canada and Suzuki. North American models were to be built in CAMI's Ingersoll, Ontario, Canada plant alongside its almost identical twin, the domestic-built Suzuki Sidekick (Escudo). Nearly all 1989 and some 1990 Trackers were built in Japan and imported to the US because of delays at the CAMI factory in Canada. In late 1989, production began in Ingersoll with about 6,100 Geo Trackers finished, with annual production projected to be around 200,000 units. In the beginning, all Canadian-made Trackers were sent to the United States to circumvent the 25 percent Chicken Tax; the Canadian market was supplied entirely from Japan. Suzuki Sidekicks were added to the production line during 1990.

The Tracker was originally powered by Suzuki's 1.6L SOHC four-cylinder engine producing 80 hp. The trim levels in 1989 were base convertible, base two-door hardtop, two-door XL bed, and LSi hardtop. LSi equipment included air conditioner, chrome rally wheels, intermittent wipers, rear window wiper/washer, spare tire cover, three-speed GM Turbo-Hydramatic 180 automatic transmission, tinted glass, and special red/black front and rear bucket seats. In 1990 the LSi trim was made available on the convertible models also. All Trackers were four-wheel drive until a base two-wheel drive convertible was introduced in 1992. The two-door hardtop models were available until 1995 when they were discontinued to make way for the four-door hardtop wagon that was to be introduced the following year. The two-door XL bed was a North America only edition which came with four more inches in the rear and a sealed two door cab. Although Suzuki started importing four-door Sidekicks in 1991, CAMI did not start producing them until the 1996 model year, when America got a four-door Geo Tracker, now powered by Suzuki's G16B 16-valve 1.6L boasting 96 hp. In 1997, the Geo nameplate was merged back into Chevrolet and all Geo models, including the Tracker, Tracker XL, and all subsequent editions were rebadged as Chevrolet in 1998.

The Tracker was different from most other light SUVs on the market in that it is based on a rugged light-truck chassis and certified as a light truck. Although it appeared to be a comfortable passenger SUV, it was bolstered by a sturdy off-road four-wheel-drive system with a conventional light truck engine and transmission coupled to a hi-lo, 2-4 transfer case. The Tracker had a strong front suspension with a rugged recirculating ball steering box. The conventional front differential was rigidly mounted ahead of the engine, with CV axles connecting the coil-spring front hubs to the differential case. The rear axle was a conventional light truck unit on coil springs. As a result of the truck-like underpinnings, the Tracker had a fairly truck-like ride, but the benefit was its notable durability in harsh conditions.

The production of the first-generation model of the Tracker (and Sidekick) came to an end in Ontario after 1998 in order to make way for the second generation of Tracker/Vitara. However, the first generation Sidekick continued in production in other countries until 2004.

Canada
When the Geo Tracker was introduced in the United States, the Geo brand was not available in Canada. Because of this the Tracker was introduced there as both the Chevrolet Tracker and the GMC Tracker. The Chevrolet Tracker was sold at Chevrolet dealerships in Canada starting in 1989. Initially there were three models: a base convertible, base hardtop and a CL hardtop (CL is equivalent to the LSi in the Geo line). In 1990 a CL convertible was added to the line-up. 1991 was the last year for the Chevrolet Tracker as the Geo marque was brought to Canada in 1992 and all Chevrolet Trackers were renamed Geo Trackers, yet they continued to display the Chevrolet "bowtie" symbol on the front grille emblem until the end of production in 1998. All 1989–1990 Chevrolet Trackers were four-wheel drive. From 1991 on, the Geo Tracker sold in Canada was identical to its US counterpart. The GMC Tracker was also introduced for the 1989 model year to be sold at Pontiac-Buick-GMC dealerships in Canada. Just like the Chevrolet and Geo initially there were three models: base convertible, base hardtop and SLE hardtop (SLE being equipped the same as the CL and LSi of the other marques). In 1990 an SLE convertible was added to the lineup. 1991 was the last year for the GMC Tracker as GM introduced the Asüna marque in 1992 and the GMC Tracker was renamed the Asüna Sunrunner. The Sunrunner was marketed as more upmarket and had no base model, with all of the Sunrunners being equipped like the SLEs were. The Asüna brand did not last long though, and after only two years (1992 and 1993) the Sunrunner was rebranded as a Pontiac. The Pontiac Sunrunner was sold in Canada from 1994 to 1998 in both base and top-of-the-line GT trim. It was available in two- and four-wheel drive and in both convertible and hardtop body-styles. While the Geo Tracker was also sold as a four-door wagon beginning in 1996, the Sunrunner never got this body style. The Sunrunner was discontinued without a direct replacement in 1998.

Second generation
{{Infobox automobile 1999–2008 (Argentina) 1999–2016 (Ecuador) 2000–2008 (Argentina) 2001-2017 {Ecuador) Kosai, Japan Quito, Ecuador Rosario, Argentina Suzuki Samurai Suzuki Vitara Suzuki Grand Vitara Suzuki XL-7 Chevrolet Tracker Suzuki Jimny Suzuki X-90 2.0 L J20A I4 130 hp 2.5 L H25A V6 155 hp 4-speed Aisin 03-72LE (A44DE) automatic 4-door: {{Convert|97.6|in|mm|0|abbr=on}} 2-door 4WD: {{Convert|151.8|in|mm|0|abbr=on}} 4-door 2WD: {{Convert|162.6|in|mm|0|abbr=on}} 4-door 4WD: {{Convert|162.8|in|mm|0|abbr=on}} 2-door 4WD & 1999–2001 2WD 2-door: {{Convert|66.5|in|mm|0|abbr=on}} 4-door 2WD: {{Convert|65.6|in|mm|0|abbr=on}} 4-door 4WD: {{Convert|66.3|in|mm|0|abbr=on}} }}
 * name=Second generation
 * image=Chevrolet Tracker convertible .jpg
 * aka=Suzuki Vitara
 * production=1999–2004 (Canada)
 * model_years=1999–2004 (Canada)
 * assembly=Ingersoll, Ontario, Canada
 * platform=GMT190
 * related=Suzuki Escudo
 * engine=1.6 L L01 I4
 * transmission=5-speed manual
 * wheelbase=2-door: {{Convert|86.6|in|mm|0|abbr=on}}
 * length=2-door 2WD: {{Convert|151.6|in|mm|0|abbr=on}}
 * width={{Convert|67.3|in|mm|0|abbr=on}}
 * height=2002–04 2-door 2WD: {{Convert|65.7|in|mm|0|abbr=on}}

In 1999, the Sidekick was discontinued, and a second generation Tracker was introduced, differing from the Sidekick's successor, the Grand Vitara. A Suzuki version of this North American-exclusive Tracker was sold in the North American market as a Suzuki Vitara, which is shorter than the Grand Vitara. In Mexico, the second-generation Tracker remained in production and was sold there as Chevrolet Tracker. The Tracker series was discontinued in the United States and Canada in 2004, but all models including the LJ80/Jimny are still in production in other Suzuki plants. Some Trackers and Sidekicks were made at a Suzuki plant in Kosai, Japan.

The later (1999 and up) Tracker models reverted to a lightweight automobile-type rack and pinion steering, and thus unpopular with rural and off-road users since the rack and pinion is easily damaged. The 1st generation Tracker was sold as the Chevrolet Vitara in Latin America, and the 2nd generation Tracker is sold as the Chevrolet Grand Vitara in Latin American countries. In North America, the first generation Tracker was sold as a Chevrolet in 1998 after GM discontinued the Geo brand. In Latin America, GM made the Suzuki Vitara/Grand Vitara and sold it as Chevrolet Vitara/Grand Vitara (Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela produced in GM Ecuador) or Suzuki Grand Vitara (Argentina) and Chevrolet Tracker (Brazil and Mexico) - both produced by GM Argentina. On January 27, 2004, production of the Chevrolet Tracker was discontinued at the CAMI plant in Ingersoll, Ontario, and replaced with the Chevrolet Equinox.

Mexico
Geo Tracker was sold since 1994 (Imported from Canada) three-door soft top 4WD or 2WD, automatic or manual transmissions. In 1996 Geo Tracker was dropped, and back 1998 from Canada as Chevrolet Tracker three-door soft top or five-door hard top available in 2WD or 4WD automatic or manual. In 2000, a new generation Chevrolet Tracker was available as a three-door soft top or five-door hard top 2WD or 4WD, manual or automatic; in 2001 the soft top was dropped. The V6 option with 2WD or 4WD automatic was available from 2002 to 2004. Even though the Tracker was discontinued in the U.S. and Canada, the Tracker continued sales in Mexico and Brazil imported from Argentina, although the model was face-lifted in 2005 from Suzuki Grand Vitara. For the 2006 model year, the silver GM logo was added on the front doors. The Tracker was replaced in the summer of 2008 by the Saturn Vue in the U.S. and Canada (Chevrolet Captiva Sport in Mexico).

Philippines
In the Philippines, General Motors introduced the Tracker in late 1999, sold alongside the related Suzuki Grand Vitara. Imported from Canada, it was powered by Suzuki's 2.0 L J20A four-cylinder engine coupled to a 4-speed automatic transmission. Standard equipment included a leather wrapped steering wheel, power seats with lumbar support (driver side only), 4-speaker infotainment system with CD playback, rear seats, and central locking. Some were also equipped with spare tires at the back. Due to low sales, GM pulled the Tracker from the market in 2001.

Brazil
First-generation Geo Trackers made in Canada were never offered by GM officially. Still, private importers brought them to the country, even though Suzuki brought the Suzuki Vitara from Japan. Private importers also brought to the country soft-top and four-door Sidekicks made in Canada.

For the second generation, it became initially available in the country in 2001, with only a diesel engine and four-door body style. Suzuki also offered the Grand Vitara at the time, with more engine choices and also a two-door hardtop and the XL-7. As the dollar soared, Suzuki left the Brazilian market in 2003.

Even though the Tracker was discontinued in the U.S. and Canada, the Tracker continued sales in Mexico and Brazil, although the model received a facelift in 2005. For the 2006 model year, the silver GM logo was added on the front doors. The Tracker was finally replaced by the 4-cylinder versions of the already introduced Chevrolet Captiva Sport (Saturn Vue in the U.S. and Canada, even though the Vue and Captiva are both built in Mexico) in the summer of 2008.

Safety report
According to a 1995 report by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the 1991–1993 two-wheel drive Geo Tracker had 21 driver fatalities for 66,210 registered vehicles, the highest incidence reported, at 3.2 per 10,000 vehicles. The 4x4 version, however, reported 48 driver fatalities for 271,355 registered vehicles (1.8 per 10,000). The IIHS states that the small utility class had a total of 366 driver fatalities for 2,144,891 total registered vehicles (1.6 per 10,000). This study was widely criticized for faulty comparisons. For example, this study does not note the difference between two-door models and four-door models. A later IIHS study clearly shows that, while two-door Trackers have a slightly below-average injury rate, the four-door models are better than the average for utility vehicles.

Rebadged Chevrolet Trax

The Chevrolet Trax was sold in Russia and South America as the Tracker. In Russia, the name Trax would be too closely related to the word trakh (Rus. трах), which is a colloquialism for copulation.

title: Chevrolet Tracker (Americas)


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Geo Prizm

The Geo Prizm and Chevrolet Prizm were compact cars that were rebadged versions of the Toyota Sprinter, a vehicle that the Japanese automaker Toyota never directly sold in the North American market. The Sprinter itself was derived from the Toyota Corolla. The Prizm was marketed under the Geo nameplate until it was discontinued after the 1997 model year. After that, the vehicle was marketed under the Chevrolet nameplate. General Motors (GM) referred to this and other Toyota Corolla derived vehicles as the GM S platform. The cars were produced from 1988 to 2001 (the last ones being sold for model year 2002) alongside the Corolla at NUMMI, an assembly plant operated as a joint venture of GM and Toyota. The Prizm was sold exclusively in the United States and succeeded the 1985–1988 Chevrolet Nova, which was also derived from the Sprinter and produced at NUMMI.

Production
All Prizms were built at NUMMI (New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc.), a joint venture company between Toyota and General Motors in Fremont, California. The NUMMI plant at Fremont had manufactured the Prizm's predecessor, the Chevrolet Nova, and would later manufacture the Pontiac Vibe, one of its replacements.

Production of the newly-rebadged Chevrolet Prizm began in late 1997 as the Geo brand was phased out, alongside the newest North American generation of the Toyota Corolla. The last Prizm was built on December 13, 2001, resulting in a brief 2002 model year.

First generation (E90)
The Prizm was introduced in February 1989 for GM's then-new Geo brand of import cars, for the 1990 model year. The hatchback version sold through 1991 was a rebadged version of the Toyota Sprinter Cielo, although unlike the Sprinter (and Corolla liftback) it received the same front clip as the sedan. The sporty GSi model of 1990–1992 was notable for its 130 hp twin-cam engine, sport suspension, disc brakes, and 14-inch wheels, which made it as a spiritual successor to the 1988 Chevrolet Nova twin-cam but less of a limited edition, available in both body styles and a full array of colors in contrast to the earlier model's black color and sedan model only. They were the only four-door models offered with the 4A-GE engine in America, no other Toyota models ever offered that combination there. The regular engine offered 102 hp. In addition to the base and the GSi, there was also a better equipped standard-engine LSi model. In addition to more equipment, the LSi also received body colored bumpers.

In 1991, the lettering of the car's name was changed, and the B-pillar and door frames on base models were body-colored instead of black. The Prizm was not sold In Canada, with GM offering a sedan version of the Geo Metro instead. The Geo Metro sedan was not available from Chevrolet dealers in the United States until 1995, although a Suzuki Swift-branded version was on sale from 1990.

Design patents were filed by the Toyota Motor Corporation on December 6, 1985, using a final design 1:1 representation, under application number 1985-051078 and registered on July 13, 1988, under registration number 0718088-005.

Trims & options

 * Sedan:
 * base • 1990-1992
 * GSi • 1990-1992
 * LSi • 1990-1992
 * Hatchback:
 * base • 1990-1991
 * GSi • 1990-1991
 * LSi • 1990-1991

Second generation (E100)
The Prizm's second generation, and the last under the Geo brand name, debuted in 1992 for the 1993 model year. The Prizm gained more room (resulting in an upgrade to United States Environmental Protection Agency "compact" car status), a driver's-side airbag, and a new 1.8-liter four-cylinder engine optional on LSi trim. With the larger engine came a rear stabilizer bar, wider tires, and an optional automatic transmission with four speeds instead of three. A second airbag became standard in 1993 for the 1994 model year; leather seats were an option on the LSi of this generation. In contrast with the Sprinters sold in Japan, this generation Prizm lacked a front stabilizer bar in its suspension.

U.S. Electricar used the Prizm as the basis for an electric vehicle conversion that replaced the gasoline drivetrain with an electric traction motor and high-voltage lead-acid storage battery. It was marketed in 1994.

Trims & options

 * Sedan:
 * base • 1993-1997
 * LSi • 1993-1997

Third generation (E110)

The Prizm's 1998 redesign coincided with the conversion of all remaining Geo models into Chevrolets, as General Motors made the decision to discontinue the Geo brand entirely after 1997.

The most notable change was the new 1.8-liter engine, which was now all-aluminum, driven by a timing chain (instead of a timing belt), and making more power (with the same fuel economy) than the engines from the Geo era. The new all-aluminum engine known as the 1ZZ-FE powered all Corollas, Sprinters, and Prizms, making this generation lighter than its predecessor. This new engine incorporated laser etched valve guides directly in the block, rather than the old shrink-to-fit valve guides in the preceding Corolla motors (4A-FE & 7A-FE). This prevents oil burning and valve guide failure in the future. Although these efforts theoretically would have decreased oil burn, a flawed piston ring design affected all engines without VVT-i. This poor design caused oil burning in higher mileage examples.

The Prizm, alongside the Corolla, became the first car in the compact class to offer optional side airbags. All 1998 Prizms without the LSi's optional handling package (containing a front stabilizer bar) were singled out by Consumer Reports for having sloppy emergency handling; Toyota addressed the problem for 1999 by making the handling package standard. For 2000, the engine gained variable valve timing (VVT-i) for a slight increase in power (up to 125 hp). The then-recently introduced VVT-i optimizes cam and valve timing to reduce emissions, and the addition of individual coils for each cylinder helped control spark timing to each individual cylinder.

Due to decreased sales, low popularity, and being in competition with the Chevrolet Cavalier and GM's more direct competitor to the Corolla the Saturn S-series, the Prizm was replaced by the Pontiac Vibe starting in 2003. The Vibe was also made in tandem with a Toyota model, the Toyota Matrix, at the NUMMI plant.

The Prizm along with its Geo siblings suffered severe sales loss when the brand denomination changed from Geo to Chevrolet in 1998. The Geo models outsold the rebadged Chevrolets three to one.

Trims & options

 * Sedan:
 * base • 1998-2002
 * LSi • 1998-2002

Comparison to Toyota Corolla
In all three generations, the Prizm was virtually the same car as the Toyota Corolla. It has more similarities with other Toyotas during the time period it was produced than it does to other cars from Geo and Chevrolet.

Its distinctions from the Corolla came down to minor cosmetic differences, a GM Delco radio after 1992, the non-availability of a wagon in all three generations, and the availability of a hatchback for the 1989-1991 model years (the Corolla was not offered as a hatchback in North America during those years).

The third generation Prizm also featured a Delphi air conditioning system instead of the Corolla's Denso air conditioning system. The Prizms also used the contemporary Sprinter front end to differentiate them from their Corolla counterparts. The third-generation Prizm headlight, front turn signal, and taillight assemblies were also different, making them notable exceptions in a car that shared almost all of its parts with the Toyota Corolla through each of its model years.

Engines
All Prizms are powered by engines from their contemporary Toyota Corolla models:
 * 1990–1992 Geo Prizms are powered by a 4A-FE or optional 4A-GE engine
 * 1993–1997 Geo Prizms are powered by a 4A-FE or optional 7A-FE engine
 * 1998–2002 Chevrolet Prizms are equipped with Toyota's 1.8 L 1ZZ-FE inline-four engine; 2000–2002 models include VVT-i (variable valve timing with intelligence).

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Geo Prizm


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Geo Storm

The Geo Storm is a sport compact car manufactured by Isuzu that was sold in the United States by Geo from 1990 until 1993. The same vehicles, with minor variations, were sold by Geo in Canada in the 1992 and 1993 model years only. The Storm was intended to be a budget car with the look and feel of a sports car. It was sold in two-door liftback and hatchback forms.

The Geo Storm was a rebadged version of the sporty, second generation Isuzu Impulse minus some of that car's more expensive features. The base models were also equipped with a less-powerful SOHC engine. The Storm was sold in Japan as the Gemini Coupé and also as the PA Nero through the Yanase dealerships. The Storm lacked the Impulse's Lotus-tuned suspension as well as the Impulse's optional turbocharger and all-wheel drive drivetrain. Although they were essentially the same car, sales of the Storm were much stronger than those of the Impulse—indeed, the Storm sold better than most small GM cars of that era. Slow sales of the Isuzu version doomed the Storm. When Isuzu ceased building passenger cars in 1993 due to the effects of the crash of the Japanese Bubble Economy, the Isuzu-made Geo Storm was also discontinued with them. Geo offered no sport coupe replacement for the Storm before the brand was folded into Chevrolet after 1997. As of 2010, there were only 40,300 Storms registered for road use.

The Storm was manufactured at Isuzu's main plant in Fujisawa, Kanagawa, Japan.

Versions
The most common body style for the Storm was a three-door liftback. The 1990 and 1991 liftbacks were produced in two trim packages, but all Storms shared front disc and rear drum brakes and had an anti-sway bar to tighten the front suspension. The base model was priced at $10,390, and the GSi was $11,650 .USD

The base model's SOHC inline-four engine produced 95 hp (71 kW) and had a 9.1:1 compression ratio. The more powerful 1990–1991 GSi used a 1.6L DOHC engine that produced 130 hp (97 kW) and had a 9.8:1 compression ratio. The GSi package also included driving lights, a spoiler, a rear anti-sway bar, and a transmission with a gear ratio that was slightly better for acceleration than the base model's manual transmission.

For 1991 and 1992, customers had the option of purchasing a two-door hatchback body style, also called a wagonback. The base price of the hatchback was $11,450, and it was never offered with the stronger GSi engine. The much more popular Storm liftback was marketed as a "coupé".

In 1992, the Storm was restyled to have a smoother front fascia without the pop-up headlight covers on earlier models. The 1992–93 base models retained the same engine, features, and price that were on the earlier car, with slight interior changes such as different stereos, revised rear speaker locations, and interior trim and upholstery. The GSi version from these years cost considerably more ($13,645–14,560) but this price included a larger 1.8 L 140 hp (104 kW) engine.

Canada received the Storm in 1992; it was offered there in base trim and in up-level GSi "Sport Coupe" models (both available as liftbacks). The more upright "Hatchback" model only came in base trim.

The Japanese were also offered the Geo Storm version of the Piazza, called the Yanase-Isuzu PA Nero, which was exclusive to Japanese dealerships called Yanase Co., Ltd. under special arrangement, a dealership that sold GM products in Japan. The Piazza/Impulse was also sold by General Motors Canada as the Asüna Sunfire.

Performance

Modern sport compacts have faster acceleration and better handling, but the performance figures for the Storm were quite respectable for an economical compact car from that era. Autoweek's 1990 review of the Storm was titled "Slick, Quick And Inexpensive", and described the car as "a good performer" that "handles better than the average new car." When Road & Track compared ten sport compact cars they said the Storm had "the highest skidpad rating (0.85 g), sticks like pine tar to the autocross course, is second-quickest through the slalom and stops shorter from 80 mi/h than many highly respected sports cars".

Skid pad test figures ranged from 0.81 g to 0.85 g, meeting or exceeding those of the Mazda RX-7 convertible. Sport Compact Car listed the Storm as number three in their "Top Ten of 1992". Hot Rod Magazine's Jeff Smith drove a Geo Storm that was set up for SCCA Super Production racing and declared it to be "every bit as demanding and fun" as racing a Trans-Am series car.

Two different Geo Storm Celebrity Races were held in 1991, the first on July 13 in Des Moines, Iowa, and the second on August 24 in Denver, Colorado. Although they are not the most common type of race cars, modified Storms are still occasionally used to compete in road racing, drag racing and autocross. One of the 2003 entries in the Grassroots Motorsports Challenge was a Storm GSi.

Reviews

The Storm sold well and was popular with owners, despite getting mixed reviews from automotive magazines. The body styling was "mildly controversial". Kevin Smith of Car and Driver used phrases like "Planet Zarkon" and "space-capsulish" to describe the body, which he listed as one of the best and worst features of the Storm. AutoWeek said that college-aged people tended to "shower the Storm with attention", but that baby boomers tended to "think that at best, the Storm is unusual looking, at worst, odd."

The shape of the body was not the only thing automotive journalists criticized. The engine was described as a "buzzbomb" or "just plain noisy". A few reviewers disliked the suspension, saying the Storm has "above average body lean and needs more rebound control". Some complained about the small cargo area, visibility and the absence of headroom for backseat passengers.

Other aspects of the Storm were more popular with magazine test drivers. Many praised the wide power band of the engine. AutoWeek said, "It revs quickly and easily. Running up to the 7600 rpm redline can be a delight." Automobile Magazine liked the handling, saying, "It's a delight to negotiate twisty...roads with its firm yet compliant suspension."

Year to year changes

 * 1991: A hatchback ("wagonback") model was added, other than that, the Storm carried on unchanged.
 * 1992: All three models of the Storm received a new headlight cluster (with narrow sealed-beam halogen headlamps also seen in that year's Pontiac Grand Prix GTP), tail lights, and front clip. The Storm went on sale in Canada. Base models received a new rear bumper treatment. Instrument panel and gauge graphics were also slightly revised. The GSi version received a new spoiler and a larger DOHC engine which offered 10 extra hp.
 * 1993: The hatchback was dropped, and the center console was fitted with a double-DIN radio. The hp rating of the base model dropped from 95 to 90 because of a camshaft redesign to allow more torque, creating a peppier engine.

Overall, there were six versions of the Storm; the early 1990-91 base and GSi liftbacks, 1991 base hatchback, facelifted 1992-93 base and GSi liftbacks, and base 1992 hatchback.

Racing

 * Isupage
 * Steve Lockett's Storm configured for SCCA Improved Touring (ITB) Road Racing
 * Video: Steve Lockett's 10.9 pass beats a Camaro at the drag strip
 * Geo Storm autocrossing.

title: Geo Storm


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Cantonese

Cantonese is the traditional prestige variety of Yue Chinese, a Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding Pearl River Delta, with over 82.4 million native speakers.

Cantonese is viewed as a vital and inseparable part of the cultural identity for its native speakers across large swaths of southeastern China, Hong Kong and Macau, as well as in overseas communities. In mainland China, it is the lingua franca of the Chinese province of Guangdong (being the majority language of the Pearl River Delta) and neighbouring areas such as Guangxi. It is also the dominant and co-official language of Hong Kong and Macau. Cantonese is also widely spoken among Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia (most notably in Vietnam and Malaysia, as well as in Singapore and Cambodia to a lesser extent) and the Western world.

Although Cantonese shares much vocabulary with Mandarin and other varieties of Chinese, these Sinitic languages are not mutually intelligible, largely because of phonological differences, but also due to the differences in grammar and vocabulary. Sentence structure, in particular the verb placement, sometimes differs between the two varieties. A notable difference between Cantonese and Mandarin is how the spoken word is written; both can be recorded verbatim, but very few Cantonese speakers are knowledgeable in the full Cantonese written vocabulary, so a non-verbatim formalized written form is adopted, which is more akin to the written Standard Mandarin. However, it is only non-verbatim with respect to vernacular Cantonese as it is possible to read Standard Chinese text verbatim in formal Cantonese, often with only slight changes in lexicon that are optional depending on the reader's choice of register. This results in the situation in which a Cantonese and a Mandarin text may look similar but are pronounced differently. Conversely, written (vernacular) Cantonese is mostly used in informal settings like social media and comic books.

Names of Cantonese
In English, the term "Cantonese" can be ambiguous. "Cantonese" as used to refer to the language native to the city of Canton, which is the traditional English name of Guangzhou, was popularized by An English and Cantonese Pocket Dictionary (1859), a bestseller by the missionary John Chalmers. Before 1859, this variant was often referred to in English as "the Canton dialect".

However, "Cantonese" may also refer to the primary branch of Chinese that contains Cantonese proper as well as Taishanese and Gaoyang; this broader usage may be specified as "Yue speech". In this article, "Cantonese" is used for Cantonese proper.

Historically, speakers called this variety "Canton speech", although this term is now seldom used outside mainland China. In Guangdong and Guangxi, people also call it "provincial capital speech" or "plain speech". In academic linguistic circles, it is also referred to as "Canton prefecture speech".

In Hong Kong and Macau, as well as among overseas Chinese communities, the language is referred to as "Guangdong speech" or "Canton Province Speech" or simply as "Chinese".

History

During the Southern Song period, Guangzhou became the cultural center of the region. Cantonese emerged as the prestige variety of Yue Chinese when the port city of Guangzhou on the Pearl River Delta became the largest port in China, with a trade network stretching as far as Arabia. Specifically, the mutually intelligible speech of the Sam Yap, the Three Counties of Guangzhou, namely the historical counties of Panyu (番禺), Nanhai (南海), and Shunde , came to be heralded as the standard. Cantonese was also used in the popular Yuè'ōu, Mùyú and Nányīn folksong genres, as well as Cantonese opera. Additionally, a distinct classical literature was developed in Cantonese, with Middle Chinese texts sounding more similar to modern Cantonese than other present-day Chinese varieties, including Mandarin.

As Guangzhou became China's key commercial center for foreign trade and exchange in the 1700s, Cantonese became the variety of Chinese interacting most with the Western world. Much of the sources for this period of early Cantonese, such as the 18th century rime dictionary Fenyun Cuoyao and the 1828 Vocabulary of the Canton Dialect by the missionary Robert Morrison, were written in Guangzhou during this period of prosperity.

After the First Opium War, centuries of maritime prohibitions ended. Large numbers of Cantonese people from the Pearl River Delta, especially merchants, subsequently migrated by boat to other parts of Guangdong and Guangxi. These migrants established enclaves of Cantonese in areas that primarily spoke other forms of Yue or even non-Sinitic languages such as Zhuang, for example in the way the Yong–Xun Yue dialect of Nanning emerged. Many Cantonese migrants sailed overseas, bringing the Cantonese language with the overseas Chinese to Southeast Asia, North and South America, and Western Europe. Such enclaves of Cantonese are found in Chinatowns across many of these major cities outside China. During the late 19th century, the pedagogical work Cantonese made easy, written by James Dyer Ball in 1883, articulated the provenance of the prestige accent of Cantonese: that of the district of Xiguan in the west of Guangzhou. It is known for its distinctive use of an apical vowel (, or in more conventional IPA: ) in some cases where modern Cantonese would use a final.

Throughout the 19th century and continuing into the 1900s, the ancestors of most of the population of Hong Kong and Macau arrived from Guangzhou and surrounding areas after they were ceded to Britain and Portugal, respectively. The influx of such migrants into Hong Kong established Cantonese as the main language of the city, supplanting local Yue Chinese varieties, which were closer to the dialects of neighboring Shenzhen and Dongguan, as well as the Hakka and Southern Min varieties of the region. With subsequent waves of migration into Hong Kong, even as late as the 1950s, the proportion of Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong had not yet surpassed 50%; nonetheless, this figure has risen to above 90% since the 1970s. On the other hand, the indigenous variety of Yue Chinese in Macau had been close to that of Zhongshan, and this has had an effect on the tonal phonology of the Cantonese spoken in Macau.

As a significant proportion of the entertainment industry in China migrated to Hong Kong in the early decades of the 20th century, the Hong Kong-based entertainment industry underwent a transformation to suit overseas as well as domestic audiences. With the bifurcation of the film industry into Cantonese and Mandarin, the use of the Xiguan accent of Guangzhou as a conservative prestige accent of standard Cantonese was maintained in mass media, with films from the 1930s making prominent use of it. However, during this time many phonological changes can be detected, indicating the change from Early Cantonese to Modern Cantonese.

In mainland China, Standard Mandarin has been heavily promoted as the medium of instruction in schools and as the official language, especially after the communist takeover in 1949. Meanwhile, Cantonese has remained the official variety of Chinese in Hong Kong and Macau, both during and after the colonial period, under the policy of 'biliteracy and trilingualism'. Government and law still function predominantly in Cantonese in these jurisdictions, and officials speak Cantonese even at the most formal occasions.

Hong Kong and Macau
The official languages of Hong Kong are Chinese and English, as defined in the Hong Kong Basic Law. The Chinese language has many different varieties, of which Cantonese is one. Given the traditional predominance of Cantonese within Hong Kong, it is the de facto official spoken form of the Chinese language used in the Hong Kong Government and all courts and tribunals. It is also used as the medium of instruction in schools, alongside English.

A similar situation also exists in neighboring Macau, where Chinese is an official language alongside Portuguese. As in Hong Kong, Cantonese is the predominant spoken variety of Chinese used in everyday life and is thus the official form of Chinese used in the government. The Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong and Macau is mutually intelligible with the Cantonese spoken in the mainland city of Guangzhou, although there exist some minor differences in accent, pronunciation, and vocabulary.

Mainland China
Cantonese first developed around the port city of Guangzhou in the Pearl River Delta region of southeastern China. Due to the city's long standing role as an important cultural center, Cantonese emerged as the prestige dialect of the Yue varieties of Chinese in the Southern Song dynasty and its usage spread around most of what is now the provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi.

Despite the cession of Hong Kong to Britain in 1842 and Macau to Portugal in 1887, the ethnic Chinese population of the two territories largely originated from the 19th and 20th century immigration from Guangzhou and surrounding areas, making Cantonese the predominant Chinese language in the territories. On the mainland, Cantonese continued to serve as the lingua franca of Guangdong and Guangxi even after Mandarin was made the official language of the government by the Qing dynasty in the early 1900s. Cantonese remained a dominant and influential language in southeastern China until the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 and its promotion of Standard Mandarin Chinese as the sole official language of the nation throughout the last half of the 20th century, although its influence still remains strong within the region.

While the Chinese government encourages the use of Standard Mandarin rather than local varieties of Chinese in broadcasts, Cantonese enjoys a relatively higher standing than other Chinese languages, with its own media and usage in public transportation in Guangdong province. Furthermore, it is also a medium of instruction in select academic curricula, including some university elective courses and Chinese as a foreign language programs. The permitted usage of Cantonese in mainland China is largely a countermeasure against Hong Kong's influence, as the autonomous territory has the right to freedom of the press and speech and its Cantonese-language media have a substantial exposure and following in Guangdong.

Nevertheless, the place of local Cantonese language and culture remains contentious, as with other non-Mandarin Chinese languages. A 2010 proposal to switch some programming on Guangzhou television from Cantonese to Mandarin was abandoned following massive public protests, the largest since the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. As a major economic center of China, there have been concerns that the use of Cantonese in Guangzhou is diminishing in favour of Mandarin, both through the continual influx of Mandarin-speaking migrants from impoverished areas and strict government policies. As a result, Cantonese is being given a more important status by the natives than ever before as a common identity of the local people. This has led to initiatives to revive the language such as its introduction into school curricula and locally produced programs on broadcast media.

Southeast Asia
Cantonese has historically served as a lingua franca among overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, who speak a variety of other forms of Chinese including Hokkien, Teochew, and Hakka. Additionally, Cantonese media and popular culture such as cinema of Hong Kong is popular throughout the region.

Vietnam
In Vietnam, Cantonese is the dominant language of the main ethnic Chinese community, usually referred to as Hoa, which numbers about one million people and constitutes one of the largest minority groups in the country. Over half of the ethnic Chinese population in Vietnam speaks Cantonese as a native language and the variety also serves as a lingua franca between the different Chinese dialect groups. Many speakers reflect their exposure to Vietnamese with a Vietnamese accent or a tendency to code-switch between Cantonese and Vietnamese.

Malaysia
In Malaysia, Cantonese is widely spoken among the Malaysian Chinese community in the capital city of Kuala Lumpur and the surrounding areas in the Klang Valley (Petaling Jaya, Ampang, Cheras, Selayang, Sungai Buloh, Puchong, Shah Alam, Kajang, Bangi, and Subang Jaya). The language is also widely spoken as well in the town of Sekinchan in the district of Sabak Bernam located in the northern part of Selangor state and also in the state of Perak, especially in the state capital city of Ipoh and its surrounding towns of Gopeng, Batu Gajah, and Kampar of the Kinta Valley region plus the towns of Tapah and Bidor in the southern part of the Perak state, and also widely spoken in the eastern Sabahan town of Sandakan as well as the towns of Kuantan, Raub, Bentong, Temerloh, Pekan, Jerantut as well as Cameron Highlands in Pahang state, and they are also found in other areas like Sarikei, Sarawak, and Mersing, Johor.

Although Hokkien is the most natively spoken variety of Chinese and Mandarin is the medium of education at Chinese-language schools, Cantonese is largely influential in the local Chinese media and is used in commerce by Chinese Malaysians.

Due to the popularity of Hong Kong popular culture, especially through drama series and popular music, Cantonese is widely understood by the Chinese in all parts of Malaysia, even though a large proportion of the Chinese Malaysian population is non-Cantonese. Television networks in Malaysia regularly broadcast Hong Kong television programmes in their original Cantonese audio and soundtrack. Cantonese radio is also available in the nation and Cantonese is prevalent in locally produced Chinese television.

Cantonese spoken in Malaysia and Singapore often exhibits influences from Malay and other Chinese varieties spoken in the country, like Hokkien and Teochew.

Singapore
The Singapore government uses Mandarin as the official Chinese variety and has a Speak Mandarin Campaign (SMC) seeking to actively promote using Mandarin at the expense of other Chinese varieties. A little over 15% of Chinese households in Singapore speak Cantonese. Despite the government actively promoting SMC, the Cantonese-speaking Chinese community has been relatively successful in preserving its language from Mandarin compared with other dialect groups.

Notably, all nationally produced non-Mandarin Chinese TV and radio programs were stopped after 1979. The prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, then, also stopped giving speeches in Hokkien to prevent giving conflicting signals to the people. Hong Kong (Cantonese) and Taiwanese dramas are unavailable in their untranslated form on free-to-air television, though drama series in non-Chinese languages are available in their original languages. Cantonese drama series on terrestrial TV channels are instead dubbed in Mandarin and broadcast without the original Cantonese audio and soundtrack. However, originals may be available through other sources like cable television and online videos.

Furthermore, an offshoot of SMC is the translation to Hanyu Pinyin of certain terms which originated from southern Chinese varieties. For instance, dim sum is often known as diǎn xīn in Singapore's English-language media, though this is largely a matter of style, and most Singaporeans will still refer to it as dim sum when speaking English.

Nevertheless, since the government restriction on media in non-Mandarin varieties was relaxed in the mid-1990s and 2000s, presence of Cantonese in Singapore has grown substantially. Forms of popular culture from Hong Kong, like television series, cinema and pop music have become popular in Singaporean society, and non-dubbed original versions of the media became widely available. Consequently, the number of non-Cantonese Chinese Singaporeans being able to understand or speak Cantonese to some varying extent is growing, with a number of educational institutes offering Cantonese as an elective language course.

Cambodia
Cantonese is widely used as the inter-communal language among Chinese Cambodians, especially in Phnom Penh and other urban areas. While Teochew speakers form the majority of the Chinese population in Cambodia, Cantonese is often used as a vernacular in commerce and with other Chinese variant groups in the nation. Chinese-language schools in Cambodia are conducted in both Cantonese and Mandarin, but schools may be conducted exclusively in one Chinese variant or the other.

Thailand
While Thailand is home to the largest overseas Chinese community in the world, the vast majority of ethnic Chinese in the country speak Thai exclusively. Among Chinese-speaking Thai households, Cantonese is the fourth most-spoken Chinese variety after Teochew, Hakka and Hainanese. Nevertheless, within the Thai Chinese commercial sector, it serves as a common language alongside Teochew or Thai. Chinese-language schools in Thailand have also traditionally been conducted in Cantonese. Furthermore, Cantonese serves as the lingua franca with other Chinese communities in the region.

Indonesia
In Indonesia, Cantonese is locally known as Konghu and is one of the variants spoken by the Chinese Indonesian community, with speakers largely concentrated in major cities like Jakarta, Surabaya and Batam. However, it has a relatively minor presence compared to other Southeast Asian nations, being the fourth most spoken Chinese variety after Hokkien, Hakka and Teochew.

United States

Over a period of 150 years (from 1850 to the 2000s), Guangdong has been the place-of-origin for most Chinese emigrants to Western nations; one coastal county, Taishan (or Tóisàn, where the Sìyì or sei yap variety of Yue is spoken), alone may be the origin of the vast majority of Chinese immigrants to the U.S. before 1965. As a result, Yue languages such as Cantonese and the closely related variety of Taishanese have been the major Chinese varieties traditionally spoken in the United States. In 2009, 458,840 Americans spoke Cantonese at home according to an American Community Survey.

The Zhongshan variant of Cantonese, which originated from the western Pearl River Delta, is spoken by many Chinese immigrants in Hawaii, and some in San Francisco and the Sacramento River Delta (see Locke, California). It is a Yuehai variety much like Guangzhou Cantonese but has "flatter" tones. Chinese is the second most widely spoken non-English language in the United States when both Cantonese and Mandarin are combined, behind Spanish. Many institutes of higher education have traditionally had Chinese programs based on Cantonese, with some continuing to offer these programs despite the rise of Mandarin. The most popular romanization for learning Cantonese in the United States is Yale romanization.

The majority of Chinese emigrants have traditionally originated from Guangdong and Guangxi, as well as Hong Kong and Macau (beginning in the latter half of the 20th century and before the handover) and Southeast Asia, with Cantonese as their native language. However, more recent immigrants are arriving from the rest of mainland China and Taiwan and most often speak Standard Mandarin (Putonghua) as their native language, although some may also speak their native local variety, such as Shanghainese, Hokkien, Fuzhounese, Hakka, etc. As a result, Mandarin is becoming more common among the Chinese American community.

The increase of Mandarin-speaking communities has resulted in the rise of separate neighborhoods or enclaves segregated by the primary Chinese variety spoken. Socioeconomic statuses are also a factor. For example, in New York City, Cantonese still predominates in the city's older, traditional western portion of Chinatown in Manhattan and in Brooklyn's small new Chinatowns in Bensonhurst and Homecrest. The newly emerged Little Fuzhou eastern portion of Manhattan's Chinatown and Brooklyn's main large Chinatown in and around Sunset Park are mostly populated by Fuzhounese speakers, who often speak Mandarin as well. The Cantonese and Fuzhounese enclaves in New York City are more working class. However, due to the rapid gentrification of Manhattan's Chinatown and with NYC's Cantonese and Fuzhou populations now increasingly shifting to other Chinese enclaves in the Outer Boroughs of NYC, such as Brooklyn and Queens, but mainly in Brooklyn's newer Chinatowns, the Cantonese speaking population in NYC is now increasingly concentrated in Bensonhurst's Little Hong Kong/Guangdong and Homecrest's Little Hong Kong/Guangdong. The Fuzhou population of NYC is becoming increasingly concentrated in Brooklyn's Sunset Park, also known as Little Fuzhou, which is causing the city's growing Cantonese and Fuzhou enclaves to become increasingly distanced and isolated from both each other and other Chinese enclaves in Queens. Flushing's Chinatown, which is now the largest Chinatown in the city, and Elmhurst's smaller Chinatown in Queens are very diverse, with large numbers of Mandarin speakers from different regions of China and Taiwan. The Chinatowns of Queens comprise the primary cultural center for New York City's Chinese population and are more middle class.

In Northern California, especially the San Francisco Bay Area, Cantonese has historically and continues to dominate in the Chinatowns of San Francisco and Oakland, as well as the surrounding suburbs and metropolitan area, although since the late 2000s a concentration of Mandarin speakers has formed in Silicon Valley. In contrast, Southern California hosts a much larger Mandarin-speaking population, with Cantonese found in more historical Chinese communities such as that of Chinatown, Los Angeles, and older Chinese ethnoburbs such as San Gabriel, Rosemead, and Temple City. Mandarin predominates in much of the emergent Chinese American enclaves in eastern Los Angeles County and other areas of the metropolitan region.

While a number of more-established Taiwanese immigrants have learned Cantonese to foster relations with the traditional Cantonese-speaking Chinese American population, more recent arrivals and the larger number of mainland Chinese immigrants have largely continued to use Mandarin as the exclusive variety of Chinese. This has led to a linguistic discrimination that has also contributed to social conflicts between the two sides, with a growing number of Chinese Americans (including American-born Chinese) of Cantonese background defending the historic Chinese-American culture against the impacts of increasing Mandarin-speaking new arrivals.

Canada
Cantonese is the most common Chinese variety spoken among Chinese Canadians. According to the Canada 2016 census, there were 565,275 Canadian residents who reported Cantonese as their native language. Among the self-reported Cantonese speakers, 44% were born in Hong Kong, 27% were born in Guangdong Province in China, and 18% were Canadian-born. Cantonese-speakers can be found in every city with a Chinese community. The majority of Cantonese-speakers in Canada live in the Greater Toronto Area and Metro Vancouver. There are sufficient Cantonese-speakers in Canada that there exist locally produced Cantonese TV and radio programming, such as Fairchild TV.

As in the United States, the Chinese Canadian community traces its roots to early immigrants from Guangdong during the latter half of the 19th century. Later Chinese immigrants came from Hong Kong in two waves, first in the late 1960s to mid 1970s, and again in the 1980s to late 1990s on fears arising from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and impending handover to the People's Republic of China. Chinese-speaking immigrants from conflict zones in Southeast Asia, especially Vietnam, arrived as well, beginning in the mid-1970s and were also largely Cantonese-speaking.

United Kingdom
The overwhelming majority of Chinese speakers in the United Kingdom use Cantonese, with about 300,000 British people claiming it as their first language. This is largely due to the presence of British Hong Kongers and the fact that many British Chinese also have origins in the former British colonies in Southeast Asia of Singapore and Malaysia.

France
Among the Chinese community in France, Cantonese is spoken by immigrants who fled the former French Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos) following the conflicts and communist takeovers in the region during the 1970s. While a slight majority of ethnic Chinese from Indochina speak Teochew at home, knowledge of Cantonese is prevalent due to its historic prestige status in the region and is used for commercial and community purposes between the different Chinese variety groups. As in the United States, there is a divide between Cantonese-speakers and those speaking other mainland Chinese varieties.

Portugal
Cantonese is spoken by ethnic Chinese in Portugal who originate from Macau, the most established Chinese community in the nation with a presence dating back to the 16th century and Portuguese colonialism. Since the late-20th century, however, Mandarin- and Wu-speaking migrants from mainland China have outnumbered those from Macau, although Cantonese is still retained among mainstream Chinese community associations.

Australia
Cantonese has been the dominant Chinese language of the Chinese Australian community since the first ethnic Chinese settlers arrived in the 1850s. It maintained this status until the mid-2000s, when a heavy increase in immigration from Mandarin-speakers largely from mainland China led to Mandarin surpassing Cantonese as the dominant Chinese dialect spoken. Cantonese is the third most-spoken language in Australia. In the 2011 census, the Australian Bureau of Statistics listed 336,410 and 263,673 speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese, respectively. By 2016, those numbers became 596,711 and 280,943.

Cultural role
Spoken Chinese has numerous regional and local varieties, many of which are mutually unintelligible. Most of these are rare outside their native areas, though they may be spoken outside of China. Many varieties also have literary and colloquial readings of Chinese characters for newer standard reading sounds. Since a 1909 Qing dynasty decree, China has promoted Mandarin for use in education, the media, and official communications. The proclamation of Mandarin as the official national language, however, was not fully accepted by the Cantonese authorities in the early 20th century, who argued for the "regional uniqueness" of their own local language and commercial importance of the region. Unlike other non-Mandarin Chinese varieties, Cantonese persists in a few state television and radio broadcasts today.

Nevertheless, there have been recent attempts to minimize the use of Cantonese in China. The most notable has been the 2010 proposal that Guangzhou Television increase its broadcast in Mandarin at the expense of Cantonese programs. This however led to protests in Guangzhou, which eventually dissuaded authorities from going forward with the proposal. Additionally, there are reports of students being punished for speaking other Chinese languages at school, resulting in a reluctance of younger children to communicate in their native languages, including Cantonese. Such actions have further provoked Cantonese speakers to cherish their linguistic identity in contrast to migrants who have generally arrived from poorer areas of China and largely speak Mandarin or other Chinese languages.

Due to the linguistic history of Hong Kong and Macau, and the use of Cantonese in many established overseas Chinese communities, the use of Cantonese is quite widespread compared to the presence of its speakers residing in China. Cantonese is the predominant Chinese variety spoken in Hong Kong and Macau. In these areas, public discourse takes place almost exclusively in Cantonese, making it the only variety of Chinese other than Mandarin to be used as an official language in the world. Because of their dominance in Chinese diaspora overseas, standard Cantonese and its dialect Taishanese are among the most common Chinese languages that one may encounter in the West.

Increasingly since the 1997 handover, Cantonese has been used as a symbol of local identity in Hong Kong, largely through the development of democracy in the territory and desinicization practices to emphasise a separate Hong Kong identity.

A similar identity issue exists in the United States, where conflicts have arisen among Chinese-speakers due to a large recent influx of Mandarin-speakers. While older Taiwanese immigrants have learned Cantonese to foster integration within the traditional Chinese American populations, more recent arrivals from the mainland continue to use Mandarin exclusively. This has contributed to a segregation of communities based on linguistic cleavage. In particular, some Chinese Americans (including American-born Chinese) of Cantonese background emphasise their non-mainland origins (e.g. Hong Kong, Macau, Vietnam, etc.) to assert their identity in the face of new waves of immigration.

Along with Mandarin and Hokkien, Cantonese has its own popular music, Cantopop, which is the predominant genre in Hong Kong. Many artists from the mainland and Taiwan have learned Cantonese to break into the market. Popular native Mandarin-speaking singers, including Faye Wong, Eric Moo, and singers from Taiwan, have been trained in Cantonese to add "Hong Kong-ness" to their performances.

Cantonese films date to the early days of Chinese cinema, and the first Cantonese talkie, White Gold Dragon, was made in 1932 by the Tianyi Film Company. Despite a ban on Cantonese films by the Nanjing authority in the 1930s, Cantonese film production continued in Hong Kong which was then under British colonial rule. From the mid-1970s to the 1990s, Cantonese films made in Hong Kong were very popular in the Chinese speaking world.

Initials and finals
The de facto standard Cantonese pronunciation is that of Canton (Guangzhou). Hong Kong Cantonese has some minor phonology variations but is almost identical to standard Guangzhou Cantonese.

Hong Kong and Macau merge certain phoneme pairs. Although termed as "lazy sound/pronunciation" (懶音) and considered substandard to Guangzhou pronunciation, the phenomenon has been widespread in the territories since the early 20th century. The most notable difference between Hong Kong and Guangzhou pronunciation is substituting liquid nasal for nasal initial  in many words. An example is manifested in the word for you, pronounced as [nei˩˧] in Guangzhou and as [lei˩˧] in Hong Kong.

Another key feature of Hong Kong Cantonese is the two syllabic nasals and  merging. This can be exemplified in the elimination of the contrast of sounds between 吳 (Ng, a surname) ([ŋ̩˨˩] in Guangzhou pronunciation) and (not) ([m̩˨˩] in Guangzhou pronunciation). Hong Kong Cantonese pronounce both words as the latter.

Lastly, the initials and  are merging into  and  when followed by. An example is in the word for country (國), pronounced in standard Guangzhou as [kʷɔk] but as [kɔk] with the merge. Unlike the above two differences, this merge is alongside the standard pronunciation in Hong Kong rather than being replaced. Educated speakers often stick to the standard pronunciation but can exemplify the merged pronunciation in casual speech. In contrast, less educated speakers pronounce the merge more frequently.

Less prevalent, but still notable differences found among a number of Hong Kong speakers include:
 * Merging initial into null initial
 * Merging and  codas into  and  codas respectively, eliminating contrast between these pairs of finals (except after  and ): -, -, -, -, - and -.
 * Merging the rising tones (陰上 2nd and 陽上 5th).

Cantonese vowels tend to be traced further back to Middle Chinese than their Mandarin analogues, such as M. /aɪ/ vs. C. /ɔːi/; M. /i/ vs. C. /ɐi/; M. /ɤ/ vs. C. /ɔː/; M. /ɑʊ/ vs. C. /ou/ etc. For consonants, some differences include M. /ɕ, tɕ, tɕʰ/ vs. C. /h, k, kʰ/; M. /ʐ/ vs. C. /j/; and a greater syllable coda diversity in Cantonese (like syllables ending in -p, -t or -k).

Tones
Generally speaking, Cantonese is a tonal language with six phonetic tones, two more than the four in Standard Chinese Mandarin. This makes Cantonese in general harder to master due to required ability of users to readily be able to process two additional phonetic tones. People who grew up using Cantonese tones can usually hear the tonal differences with no problem, but adults who were brought up speaking non-tonal languages like English and most Western European languages may not be able to distinguish the tonal differences quick enough to optimally use the language. This difficulty also applies to tonal language speakers with fewer tones attempting to master languages with more tones such as Mandarin natives trying to learn spoken Cantonese as adults.

Historically, finals that end in a stop consonant were considered as "checked tones" and treated separately by diachronic convention, identifying Cantonese with nine tones (九声六调). However, these are seldom counted as phonemic tones in modern linguistics, which prefer to analyse them as conditioned by the following consonant.

Written Cantonese
As Cantonese is used primarily in Hong Kong, Macau, and other overseas Chinese communities, it is usually written with traditional Chinese characters. However, it has extra characters as well as characters with different meanings from written vernacular Chinese due to the presence of words that either are not in standard Chinese or correspond with spoken Cantonese. This written Cantonese system often appears in colloquial contexts like entertainment magazines, social media and advertisements.

In contrast, formal literature, professional and government documents, television and movie subtitles, and news media continue to use standard written Chinese. Nevertheless, colloquial characters may be present in formal written communications such as legal testimonies and newspapers when an individual is being quoted, rather than paraphrasing spoken Cantonese into standard written Chinese.

Romanization
Systems of Cantonese romanization are based on the accents of Canton and Hong Kong and have helped define the concept of Standard Cantonese. The major systems are (in order of their invention from newest to oldest): Jyutping, the Chinese government's Guangdong Romanization, Yale, Meyer–Wempe, and Standard Romanization. Jyutping and Yale are the two most used and taught systems today in the West, and they do not differ greatly from one another except in how they mark tones. Additionally, Hong Kong linguist Sidney Lau modified the Yale system for his popular Cantonese-as-a-second-language course, and his variant is another system in use today.

Hong Kong's and Macau's governments use systems of romanization for proper names and geographic locations, but they transcribe some sounds inconsistently. These systems are not taught in schools. Macau's system differs slightly from Hong Kong's in that the spellings are influenced by Portuguese language due to colonial history. For example, while many words in Macau's system are the same as Hong Kong's (e.g. surnames Lam 林, Chan 陳), instances of the letter $⟨u⟩$ under Hong Kong's system are often replaced by $⟨o⟩$ in Macau's (e.g. Chau vs. Chao 周, Leung vs Leong 梁). Neither the spellings of Hong Kong's system nor of Macau's look very similar to mainland China's system called pinyin, chiefly because it distinguishes between Mandarin's two series of stops while they, although the pronunciation of Standard Cantonese's two series is similar to the Mandarin, do not generally distinguish them, they thus rendering not only /pʰ/, /tʰ/, and so forth, but also /p/, /t/, and the remaining non-aspirates, by the simple spellings $⟨p⟩$, $⟨t⟩$, etc. vs. it rendering the latter series by $⟨b⟩$, $⟨d⟩$, and the like.

Early Western efforts
Systematic efforts to develop an alphabetic representation of Cantonese began with Protestant missionaries arriving in China early in the nineteenth century. Romanization was considered both a tool to help new missionaries learn the variety more easily and a quick route for the unlettered to achieve gospel-literacy. Earlier Catholic missionaries, mostly Portuguese, had developed romanization-schemes for the pronunciation current in the court and capital city of China but made few efforts to romanize other varieties.

Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary in China, published a Vocabulary of the Canton Dialect (1828) with a rather unsystematic romanized pronunciation. Elijah Coleman Bridgman and Samuel Wells Williams in their Chinese Chrestomathy in the Canton Dialect (1841) were the progenitors of a long-lived lineage of related romanizations that with minor variations are embodied in the works of James Dyer Ball, Ernst Johann Eitel, and Immanuel Gottlieb Genähr (1910). Bridgman and Williams based their system on the phonetic alphabet and diacritics proposed by Sir William Jones for South Asian languages.

Their system of romanization embodied the phonological system of a local-dialect rhyme-dictionary, the Fenyun cuoyao, which was widely used and easily obtainable at the time and is still available today. Samuel Wells Willams' Tonic Dictionary of the Chinese Language in the Canton Dialect (Yinghua fenyun cuoyao, 1856) is an alphabetic rearrangement, translation, and annotation of this Fenyun. To adapt the system to the needs of users in an era when there was no standard, but rather only a range of local variants—although the speech of the western suburbs (Xiguan 西關) of Guangzhou was the prestige variety—Williams suggested that users learn and follow their teacher's pronunciation of his chart of Cantonese syllables. It was apparently Bridgman's innovation to mark the tones with (for the upper-register ones) open circles vs. (for the lower-register tones) underlined open circles, in either case at the four corners of the romanized word in analogy with the traditional Chinese system of marking the tone of a character with a circle (lower left for "even", upper left for "rising", upper right for "going", and lower right for "entering" tones).

John Chalmers in his English and Cantonese Pocket-Dictionary (1859) simplified the tone-markings by using: a syllable-final acute accent to mark "rising" tones, a syllable-final grave one to mark the "going" tones, no diacritic for the "even" tones, and italics (or in hand-written work underlining) to mark tones as belonging to the upper register. "Entering" tones could be distinguished by the consonants with which they end (p/t/k). Nicholas Belfeld Dennys used Chalmers' romanization in his primer. This method of marking tones was in most of its details used later also by the Yale romanization, where however, importantly, instead of the upper-register tones being marked by italics, the lower-register ones are marked by an 'h' (which comes after whatever letter spells the last vocalic element in the syllable). Another innovation of Chalmers in this dictionary was to eliminate acute/grave accents on top of vowels by adding more distinctions of vowel-spelling (e.g. a/aa, o/oh), so that the presence vs. absence of an accent over the vowel was no longer needed to distinguish different pronunciations of it.

This new style of romanization still embodied the phonology of the Fenyun, and the name of Tipson is associated with its particular variety that then was fixed upon by his missionary peers to become Standard Romanization. This was the system used importantly: (with virtually no deviation) by Meyer-Wempe's dictionary, (even more faithfully) by Cowles' dictionaries (of 1917 & 1965), by O'Melia's textbook, and by many other works in the first two thirds of the twentieth century. It reigned without serious challenge as the standard spelling until Yale's system was devised and became an important rival to it.

The major linguist Y. R. Chao developed a Cantonese adaptation of his Gwoyeu Romatzyh system. It was first used in Chao's Cantonese Primer, published in 1947 by Harvard University Press (which then in 1948, changed by him very little beyond swapping in of Pekingese for the Cantonese, became his Mandarin Primer, published by the same Press). The system was then modified by K. M. A. Barnett in 1950 into the Barnett-Chao romanization system. The B–C system was used in a handful of texts, including textbooks published by the Hong Kong government, such as Cantonese Conversation Grammar, published in 1963.

Cantonese romanization in Hong Kong
An influential work on Cantonese, A Chinese Syllabary Pronounced According to the Dialect of Canton, written by Wong Shik Ling, was published in 1941. He devised an IPA-based system of transcription, the S. L. Wong system, used by many Chinese dictionaries later published in Hong Kong. Although Wong also devised a romanization-scheme, likewise known as the S. L. Wong system, the latter is not as widely used as his transcription. This system succeeded the Barnett–Chao system as being the one used by the Hong Kong Government Language School.

The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong (LSHK) has advocated the romanization it devised (and named Jyutping). An arguable advantage of it is that its particular use of J for instance (as at the beginning of its name) matches IPA in contrast to most other systems' using Y, resembling English. Some effort has been made to promote Jyutping, but it has yet to be examined how successfully this has caused use of it to proliferate in the region.

Another popular scheme is Cantonese Pinyin, the only system of romanization accepted by the Hong Kong Education and Manpower Bureau and Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority. Books and studies for teachers and students in primary and secondary schools usually use this scheme, but some teachers and students use S.L. Wong's system of transcription.

Those learning Cantonese may feel frustrated that, despite efforts to standardize Cantonese romanizations, most native Cantonese speakers, regardless of their level of education, are unfamiliar with any romanization beyond the conventional, Latin-letter spellings of Cantonese names. Because Cantonese is primarily a spoken language, meaning that its speakers do not in most genres of writing use its own writing-system (instead, in most of their writing, despite having some Chinese characters unique to Cantonese, primarily following modern standard Chinese, which is closely tied to Mandarin), therefore, it is not taught in schools. As a result, locals do not learn any of these systems. In contrast to the general use of romanization in Mandarin-speaking areas of China, systems of romanization for Cantonese are excluded from the educational systems of both Hong Kong and the Province of Guangdong. In practice, Hong Kong follows a loose, unnamed romanization-scheme used by the Government of Hong Kong.

Google's Cantonese input uses Yale, Jyutping, or Cantonese Pinyin, the Yale being the first standard.

Comparison
Differences between the three main standards are highlighted in bold. Jyutping and Cantonese Pinyin recognize certain sounds used in a few colloquial words (like 掉,  舔, and  夾) but have not been officially recognized in other systems like Yale.

Sample text
The following is a sample text in Cantonese of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with English.

title: Cantonese


text:
Trio Lescano

The Trio Lescano was a female vocal group singing in Italian from 1936 to 1950, originally consisting of Hungarian-Dutch sisters Alessandra Lescano (Alexandrina Eveline Leschan; 1910–1987), Giuditta Lescano (Judith Leschan; 1913–1976 ) and Caterina "Caterinetta" Lescano (Catherine Matje Leschan; 1919–1965). Caterinetta left the group in 1946 and Italian singer Maria Bria (born 1925) took her place.

Origins
The three Leschan sisters were the daughters of Alexander Leschan, a Hungarian acrobat born in 1877 in Budapest, and Eva de Leeuwe, a Dutch Jewish operetta singer  born in Amsterdam in 1892. In the Netherlands, where they were born and raised, they worked as circus acrobats. Though they were born in the Netherlands and Dutch native speakers, the three sisters were Hungarian citizens until they acquired the Italian citizenship.

Consequently to an accident, the father became disabled and the mother, a vaudevillian, decided to form an acrobatic dance group: however, only the elder sisters Alexandrina and Judith joined in under the management of Enrico Portino. They formed the Sunday Sisters and performed in Europe, Syria and Lebanon; Catherine was too young and stayed in a boarding school in Amsterdam. In 1935 they got to Turin, where maestro Carlo Prato, the artistic director of the local EIAR, noted them and decided to raise them as a vocal trio devoted to harmonic singing. Their first reference group was the American Boswell Sisters.

The three sisters signed with Parlophon, a record label at the time distributed by Cetra. Their name was Trio vocale sorelle Lescano ("Lescano Sisters vocal trio", shortened to Trio Lescano), their names and surname were Italianized due to Fascist language policies and their first song, "Guarany Guaranà", was recorded on February 22, 1936, with the EIAR orchestra directed by Cinico Angelini, and it was published in March.

Success
The years between 1937 and 1941 were fundamental for them: they joined the Orchestra Cetra as singers, directed by Pippo Barzizza. This event gave them a sudden and extraordinary popularity and they were chosen to open the experimental broadcasting of the "radiovision", the future Italian television. In 1940 they performed a musical number ("Oh! Ma-ma!") in the film Ecco la radio! ("Here Is the Radio!"), directed by Giacomo Gentilomo and dedicated to EIAR. They recorded a great number of songs under the direction of Pippo Barzizza. On March 30, 1942, on Benito Mussolini's proposal, King Victor Emmanuel III granted them Italian citizenship. The news – though at the time the population was concerned about the war – reached a large audience on daily newspapers, that proposed definitions for them as "the three Graces of the microphone", "the phenomenon of the century", "the sisters who fulfill the mystery of the Holy Trinity", as Sorelle Marinetti reported in their show Non ce ne importa niente.

In 1943 they performed in the revue Sognamo insieme by Nelli and Mangini, with Wanda Osiris (then known as Vanda Osiri), Carlo Dapporto, Letizia Gissi, Nino Gallizio and Gianna Giuffré, with original musical compositions by Giuseppe Anepeta and choreographies by Vera Petri, directed by Mario Mangini himself. During their career, they often sang alongside famous singers of the period such as Ernesto Bonino ("La famiglia canterina" by Bixio Cherubini), Enzo Aita ("Ma le gambe" by Bracchi and D'Anzi), Maria Jottini ("Maramao perché sei morto?" by Consiglio e Panzeri), Oscar Carboni ("Firenze sogna" by Cesare Cesarini, "Ti pi tin" and "Lungo il margine del fiume") and Silvana Fioresi ("Pippo non lo sa" by Kramer and "Il pinguino innamorato" by Casiroli, Consiglio and Rastelli).

They had however a very rich repertoire of their own, particularly swing songs such as "Tulipan" (cover of the song "Tulip Time" originally performed by the American Andrews Sisters, with music by María Grever and Italian lyrics by Riccardo Morbelli).

Rumors of their arrest in 1942
In a 1985 interview, Alexandrina Leschan claimed she had been arrested by Fascist police after a concert at the Teatro Grattacielo in Genoa. She reported that her sisters and she were taken to the Marassi jail under charges of espionage. She blamed upon the Codevilla sisters, members of the Trio Capinere who envied their popularity. Alexandrina also reported that her sisters and she were obliged to translate interrogations of the partisan prisoners because of their familiarity with the German language.

Twenty-five years later, a research published by Virgilio Zanolla contradicted what was reported by Alexandrina. Zanolla, after cross-checking Alexandrina's 1985 statements with the Genoese chronicles of the time, maintained that the Lescano sisters were never arrested in the considered period, nor earlier or later. In fact, in November 1942, the trio gave several successful concerts during a two-week period. Zanolla himself assumed that Alexandrina came up with the story forty-years later in order to erase any rumor that they were compromised with Fascism. The assumption was confirmed by Mrs. Maria Rosaria Epicureo who claimed that the Lescano sisters overstated their summons at the police station.

End of the trio
After the war, in June 1946, Catherine left the group, officially to get married. In fact, her resignment was due to economic disputes with her sisters and mother. 21-year-old singer Maria Bria took her place. After a two-year Italian concert tour, she left for South America with Alexandrina and Judith on a traveling show. They remained together until 1950, when the trio broke up in Caracas, Venezuela, after Maria Bria had quit. Their fans never realized that Catherine had been replaced, and Maria never received any payment for her job. Once she was back to Italy, Bria was employed at the Turin Municipality and went on to retire in 1977. It was only then that the general public knew about the 1946 replacement, when Paolo Limiti invited her to the TV show Ci vediamo su RAI 1 to tell her story. However, in a 2010 interview, Bria reported that the trio split up when Judith got married and left.

Alexandrina and Judith stayed in Venezuela and in 1955 Catherine, who was the younger sister, left Turin to join them back. She was the first of the three to die, of cancer at the age of 46 on October 3, 1965, in Caracas. Alexandrina, the eldest, went back to Italy and died in Fidenza in 1987. At the time, nothing was known about the third sister, who had presumably died in Venezuela in the Seventies, In the years 2010–2011, the Italian TV show Chi l'ha visto? even investigated on the possible time and place of her death. A 2013 resolution of the Turin Municipality, concerning the plaque-laying ceremony at the place where the trio had lived, reports 1976 as the year of Judith's death.

title: Trio Lescano


text: Category:American astrologers

title: Category:American astrologers


text:
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Proliferate

 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was no consensus.

Proliferate
Dictionary definition. Deb 16:22, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)

 * Moved to Wiktionary. [[User:Poccil|Peter O. (Talk)]] 18:07, Oct 22, 2004 (UTC)
 * delete. D AVODD  [[User_talk:Davodd|« TALK »]] 17:49, Oct 23, 2004 (UTC)
 * Keep how it is now, the template confirms for the reader that WIktionary has a definition. And discourages replacement of a dicdef  — siro  χ  o  00:27, Oct 27, 2004 (UTC)

 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.