TAISHAN DIALECT

'Taishanese' or 'Hoisanese' (台山話) , or 'Siyi' (四邑; after the area of the same name), is a Chinese dialect (or group of very similar dialects) spoken in and around Taishan, a coastal county of the Guangdong province, located southwest of Guangzhou. Taishanese is grouped within Cantonese (Yue), one of the major branches of spoken Chinese.

Contents

History

Relationship between Cantonese and Taishanese

Writing System

Official and current status

Notes

References

See also

External links

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). It is said one can tell the speaker's village or town from his or her accent and vocabulary.
Taishanese is one of the major languages of the Chinese diaspora. The Taishan region was a major source of Chinese immigrants in the Americas in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Approximately 1.3 million people are estimated to have origins in Taishan. 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.^[1] 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 immigrants and their children, but is today being supplanted by Cantonese and increasingly by Mandarin in newer Chinese communities across the county.

Relationship between Cantonese and Taishanese

Taishanese is often mistakenly regarded as similar to mainstream Cantonese (Guangzhou dialect), but the two are largely mutually unintelligible. The phonology of Taishanese bears some resemblance to mainstream Cantonese, but pronunciation and vocabulary differ, sometimes greatly. Because Cantonese is one of the ''lingua francas'' of Guangdong, virtually all Taishanese-speakers also understand Cantonese, to the extent that some even regard their own tongue as merely differently accented mainstream Cantonese. But Cantonese-speakers understand Taishanese only with great difficulty.^[2]
In Guangdong, Cantonese functions as a ''lingua franca'', and speakers of other languages/dialects (such as Chaozhou Minnan, Hakka, Taishanese) more often than not also speak Cantonese. Today, since Mandarin Putonghua is the standardized language taught in schools throughout the People's Republic of China, residents of Taishan speak Mandarin as well. As a result, in this region, Taishanese-speakers often freely code-switch in conversation, among Taishanese, Cantonese, and Mandarin.
One distinction between Taishanese and Cantonese is the use of the voiceless lateral fricative (IPA ɬ), e.g. in the word meaning "three", pronounced ''saam1'' in Cantonese and ''lhaam2'' in Toisanese.

Writing System

No standardized form of written Taishanese exists. Writing is done using Chinese characters and Mandarin vocabulary and grammar, but many common words used in spoken Hoisanese 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 Dictionaryat the bottom of this page contains a standard Taishanese romanization, used in its dictionary.
The sound represented by the IPA symbol 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 romanizations in the handful of languages that include the sound. The alternative "hl" is used in Xhosa and Zulu.
The following chart compares the plural pronouns among Taishanese, mainstream Cantonese, and Mandarin.

Gloss	Taishanese		Mainstream Cantonese	Mandarin
	transliteration	IPA
we/us	ngoi		ngo5 dei6 (我哋)	wǒmen (我們)
you (plural)	neik		nei5 dei6 (你哋)	nǐmen (你們)
they/them	keik		keoi5 dei6 (佢哋)	tāmen (他們)

Official and current status

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.

Notes

1. Although the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed by the signing of the Magnuson Act in 1943, immigration from China was sitll limited to only 2% of the number of Chinese already living in the United States
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References

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★ (Ph.D. Dissertation)

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See also

★ List of Chinese dialects

External links

★ Hoisanese Sanctuary Includes short grammatical overview of Hoisanese. Dictionary currently has several entries and expanding.

★ Toisan Aaron Lee