Similarities in Vietnamese and Cantonese can be traced back to antiquity

I took my parents on their first trip to Vietnam recently and they were intrigued by what they heard on the streets of Hanoi. My father thought Vietnamese sounded similar to Cantonese while my mother said it reminded her of her own native Sze Yap, a dialect related to “standard” Cantonese but which is spoken in the area west of the Pearl River Delta.

They’re not widely off the mark; some 60 per cent of Vietnamese vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the parts of China that are closest to Vietnam are the Cantonese-speaking regions of Guangxi and Guangdong. A person who knows Cantonese will be struck by the many Vietnamese words that sound similar, such as nguyen lieu (“raw materials”, yuen liu in Cantonese) and dac biet (“special”, dac beet in Cantonese).

In ancient times, the coastal areas south of the Yangtze all the way down to present-day northern Vietnam were home to the Bai Yue or “100 Yue” peoples, who were ethnically and linguistically separate from the Han Chinese to the north. Following millennia of Han colonisation and cultural domination, as well as intermarriages, the Yue people practically disappeared from China.

It’s possible that some remnants of the Yue and their culture can be found in the minority ethnic groups of present-day southern China and northern Vietnam.