Taishan dialect

Taishanese (Chinese: 台山話; Taishanese: [hɔi˨san˧wa˧˨˥]) is a Cantonese variety mainly spoken in and around Taishan, a coastal county of the Guangdong province, located southwest of Guangzhou. At one time, it was the lingua franca of the overseas Chinese residing in the United States.

Names

The earliest linguistic studies refer to the dialect of Llin-nen or Xinning (Chinese: 新寧).^[1] Xinning was renamed Taishan in 1914, and linguistic literature has since generally referred to the local dialect as the Taishan dialect, a term based on Standard Mandarin pronunciation.^{[2][3][4][5][6][7]} Alternative names have also been used. The term Toishan is a convention used by the United States Postal Service, the Defense Language Institute and the United States Census.^[8][9][10] The terms Toishan, Toisan and Toisaan are all based on Standard Cantonese pronunciation, and are also frequently found in linguistic and non-linguistic literature.^{[11][12][13][14]} Lastly, Hoisan is a term based on the local pronunciation, although it is generally not used in published literature.^[15]

These terms have also been anglicized with the suffix -ese: Taishanese, Toishanese, and Toisanese. Of the previous three terms, Taishanese is most commonly used in academic literature, to about the same extent as the term Taishan dialect.^[16][17] The term Hoisanese is not used in print literature, although it appears on the internet.[1]

Another term used is Siyi (also Seiyap, Szeyap or Szeyup, Chinese: 四邑), which refers to a previous administrative division comprised of the four counties of Taishan, Kaiping, Enping and Xinhui. In 1983, a fifth county (Heshan) was added to the Jiangmen prefecture, and so the term Siyi, which literally means "four counties", has become an anachronism.

History

Taishanese originates from the Taishan region, where it is spoken. Often regarded as a single language, Taishanese can also be seen as a group of very closely related, mutually intelligible subdialects spoken in the various towns and villages in and around Siyi (the four counties of Taishan, Enping, Kaiping, Xinhui).

Taishanese is one of the major branch of the Cantonese diaspora. The Taishan region was a major source of Chinese Cantonese immigrants in the Americas in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Approximately 1.3 million people are estimated to have origins in Taishan.^[18] Prior to the signing of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, which allowed new waves of Chinese immigrants, Taishanese was the dominant dialect spoken in Chinatowns across North America.^[19] It is also spoken in Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City Cholon neighborhood.

Taishanese is still spoken in many Chinatowns, including those of Oakland and San Francisco, by older generations of Chinese Cantonese immigrants and their children, but is today being supplanted by mainstream Cantonese and increasingly by Mandarin in newer Chinese communities across the country.^{[citation needed]}

Relationship between Cantonese and Taishanese

As a kind of non-mainstream Cantonese, Taishanese is often regarded as similar to mainstream Cantonese (Guangzhou dialect, de facto standard-by-use of the whole Cantonese language), although mainstream Cantonese speakers are generally unable to understand Taishanese^[4] or only with great difficulty^[20]. The phonology of Taishanese bears some resemblance to mainstream Cantonese, but pronunciation and vocabulary differ, sometimes greatly. Because mainstream Cantonese is one of the lingua francas of Guangdong, virtually all Taishanese-speakers also understand mainstream Cantonese, to the extent that people often regard their own tongue as merely differently accented mainstream Cantonese.

In Guangdong, mainstream Cantonese functions as a lingua franca, and speakers of other languages/dialects (such as Chaozhou Minnan, Hakka) more often than not also speak mainstream Cantonese^{[citation needed]}. Today, since Mandarin Putonghua is the standardized language and the only legally-allowed language taught in schools throughout most part of People's Republic of China (except minority areas), residents of Taishan can speak Mandarin as well. Although Chinese government have been making great effort to popularize Putonghua by administration means, there are nearly no local Taishan people who speak Mandarin in their daily life.^{[citation needed]} Most people take Mandarin as a foreign language, while Guangzhou dialect as the standard-by-use of their native language.^{[citation needed]}

One distinction between Taishanese and mainstream Cantonese is the use of the voiceless lateral fricative(IPA ɬ)^[21][22], e.g., in the word meaning "three", pronounced saam1 in Cantonese and lhaam2 in Taishanese. Voiceless lateral fricatives can also be found in many other western dialects of Cantonese, such as the Gaoyang and Guinan dialects.

Tones

Taishanese is tonal. There are five contrastive lexical tones inherited from ancient Chinese. The tones are high, mid, low, mid falling, and low falling;^[3] in at least one Taishanese dialect, the falling tones have merged into a low falling tone.^[23] There is no tone sandhi.^[8]

Taishanese has four changed tones: mid rising, low rising, mid dipping and low dipping. These tones are called changed tones because they are based on four of the lexical tones. These tones have been analyzed as the addition of a high floating tone to the end of the mid, low, mid falling and low falling tones.^{[23][25][26][6]} The high endpoint of the changed tone often reaches an even higher pitch than the level high tone; this fact has led to the proposal of an expanded number of pitch levels for Taishanese tones.^[3] The changed tone can change the meaning of a word, and this distinguishes the changed tones from tone sandhi, which does not change a word's meaning.^[2] An example of a changed tone contrast is /tʃat˨˩/ (to brush) and /tʃat˨˩˥/ (a brush).

Writing system

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No official standardized form of written Taishanese exists. Writing is done using Chinese characters and Mandarin vocabulary and grammar, and many common words used in spoken Taishanese have no corresponding Chinese characters. No standard romanization system for Taishanese exists either; the ones given on this page are ad hoc. The Hoisanese-English Dictionary at the bottom of this page contains a standard Taishanese romanization, used in its dictionary.

The sound represented by the IPA symbol <ɬ> is particularly challenging, as it has no standard romanization. The digraph "lh" used above to represent this sound is used in Totonac, Chickasaw and Choctaw, which are among several written representations in the handful of languages that include the sound. The alternative "hl" is used in Xhosa and Zulu, while "ll" is used in Welsh.

The following chart compares the plural pronouns among Taishanese, mainstream Cantonese, and Mandarin.

Official and current status

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Taishanese has no official status in any country. It was originally the secondary language of Ho Chi Minh City's Cholon, after Cantonese, but in recent years the number of Taishanese speakers in Vietnam has declined, giving way to Cantonese and Hakka.^{[citation needed]}

Notes

References

See also

• List of Chinese dialects

External links

• "Hoisanese Sanctuary". Retrieved on 2006-09-17. Includes short grammatical overview of Hoisanese. Dictionary currently has several entries and expanding.
• Aaron Lee. "Toisan". Retrieved on 2006-09-07.