under construction.
Q: Is Cantonese a dialect of Mandarin?
A: No! Cantonese (especially spoken Cantonese) and Mandarin are mostly not mutual intelligible. People say Cantonese *dialect* as if Mandarin is the one "proper" Chinese; this is very wrong. A much more accurate (and the only one that has any kind of accuracy) comparison would be Romance languages. In the same vein, Hakka and Teochew are also separate languages.
Cantonese has its own grammar, its own culture, its own history, anything you can think of. It's weird to say French or Spanish are dialects of Latin; it would also be weird to call Cantonese & others "dialects" of the old Chinese.
The whole "Cantonese is a dialect" thing is nothing more than propaganda from the party, which has been actively trying to wipe out local languages for decades.
The Cantonese romanization system I use