Cantonese is the traditional prestige variety of Yue Chinese, a Sinitic language belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family. It originated in the city of Guangzhou and its surrounding Pearl River Delta. Although Cantonese specifically refers to the prestige variety in linguistics, the term is often used more broadly to describe the entire Yue subgroup of Chinese, including varieties such as Taishanese, which have limited mutual intelligibility with Cantonese.