Taishanese
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| This article contains Chinese text and IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Chinese and Unicode characters. |
| Taishanese | |||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Traditional Chinese | 台山話 | ||||||||||
| Simplified Chinese | 台山话 | ||||||||||
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| Taishanese | ||
|---|---|---|
| 台山話 | ||
| Spoken in | Southern China, Hong Kong, United States (mostly California and New York City), Canada and Vietnam | |
| Region | western and southern Guangdong; the Pearl River Delta; parts of Hainan | |
| Total speakers | ~1-2 million[citation needed] | |
| Language family | Sino-Tibetan | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1 | zh | |
| ISO 639-2 | chi (B) | zho (T) |
| ISO 639-3 | – | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Taishanese (Chinese: 台山話; Taishanese: [hɔi˨san˧wa˧˨˥]; Hoisanese, Toisanese) is a dialect of Yue. It is mainly spoken in and around Taishan, a county-level city situated southwest of Guangzhou on the coast of Guangdong province. In the mid to late 19th century, a significant number of Chinese emigrating to North America originated from this area, making Taishanese the dominant variety of the Chinese language spoken in North American Chinatowns. It was formerly the lingua franca of the overseas Chinese residing in the United States.[1] It is not currently recognized as having official status in any country.
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[edit] Names
The earliest linguistic studies refer to the dialect of Llin-nen or Xinning (Chinese: 新寧).[2] 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.[3][4][5][6][7][8] Alternative names have also been used. The term Toishan is a convention used by the United States Postal Service[9], the Defense Language Institute[10] and the United States Census.[11] The terms Toishan, Toisan and Toisaan are all based on Standard Cantonese pronunciation, and are also frequently found in linguistic and non-linguistic literature.[12][13][14][15] Hoisan is a term based on the local pronunciation, although it is generally not used in published literature.[16]
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.[17][18] 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.
The term Wuyi (Chinese: 五邑), literally "five counties", refers to the modern administrative region. This term is not used to refer to Taishanese.
[edit] 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).
A vast number of Taishanese immigrants journeyed worldwide through the Taishan diaspora. The Taishan region was a major source of Chinese immigrants in the Americas from the mid-19th and late-20th centuries. Approximately 1.3 million people are estimated to have origins in Taishan.[19] 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.[20] 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 mainstream Cantonese and increasingly by Mandarin in both older and newer Chinese communities alike, across the country.[citation needed]
[edit] Relationship with Cantonese
Taishanese is a dialect of Yue branch of the Chinese language, which means that some consider it a dialect of Cantonese. However, due to ambiguities in the meaning of "Cantonese" in the English language, as it can refer to both the greater Yue dialect group or its prestige standard, "Taishanese" and "Cantonese" are commonly used in mutually exclusive contexts, i.e. Taishanese is treated separately from "Cantonese". Speakers of Standard Cantonese often feel it difficult to understand Taishanese without adapting[5][21]. The phonology of Taishanese bears a lot of resemblance to Standard Cantonese, since the both of them are dialects of Cantonese. Like other Cantonese dialects, such as the Goulou dialect, Taishanese pronunciation and vocabulary may sometimes differ greatly from Standard Cantonese. Despite the fact that Taishan stands only 60 miles from the city of Guangzhou, the dialect of Taishan is far removed from the Guangzhou dialect because of the numerous rivers that run between the two.[22] However, because Standard Cantonese is one of the lingua francas of Guangdong, virtually all Taishanese-speakers also understand it. In fact, most Siyi people in Guangdong regard their own tongue as merely differently accented Cantonese.
Standard Cantonese functions as a lingua franca in Guangdong, and speakers of other Sinitic languages (such as Chaozhou Minnan, Hakka) living in Guangdong may also speak Standard Cantonese. On the other hand, Standard Mandarin is the standardized language and the only legally-allowed language taught in schools throughout most of the People's Republic of China (except minority areas), residents of Taishan can speak Mandarin as well. Although the Chinese government has been making great effort to popularize Standard Mandarin by administrative means, Taishan residents do not speak Mandarin in their daily life at all. Most people take Mandarin as a foreign language, while the Standard Cantonese remains lingua franca of their native language.
One distinction between Taishanese and Standard Cantonese is the use of the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative (IPA ɬ)[23][24], e.g., in the word meaning "three", pronounced saam1 in Standard 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.
[edit] 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;[4] in at least one Taishanese dialect, the falling tones have merged into a low falling tone.[25] There is no tone sandhi.[9]
| Tone | Tone contour[26] | Example | Changed tone | Chao Number | Cantonese tone number |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| high | ˥ (55) | hau˥ 口 (mouth) | (none) | - | 1 |
| mid | ˧ (33) | hau˧ 偷 (to steal) | mid rising | ˧˥ (35) | 3 |
| low | ˨ or ˩ (22 or 11) | hau˨ 頭 (head) | low rising | ˨˥ (25) | 6 |
| mid falling | ˧˩ (31) | hau˧˩ 皓 (bright) | mid dipping | ˧˨˥ (325) | - |
| low falling | ˨˩ (21) | hau˨˩ 厚 (thick) | low dipping | ˨˩˥ (215) | 4 |
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.[7][25][27][28] 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.[4] 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.[3] An example of a changed tone contrast is /tʃat˨˩/ (to brush) and /tʃat˨˩˥/ (a brush).
[edit] Writing system
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 (which are formed by changing the tone[22]), Standard Cantonese, and Mandarin.
| Glossary | Taishanese | Standard Cantonese |
Mandarin | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| transliteration | IPA | |||
| we/us | ngoi | [ŋɔɪ] | ngo5 dei6 (我哋) | wǒmen (我們) |
| you (plural) | niek | [nɪɛk] | nei5 dei6 (你哋) | nǐmen (你們) |
| they/them | kiek | [kɪɛk] | keoi5 dei6 (佢哋) | tāmen (他們) |
[edit] Notes
- ^ (Yang 1999)
- ^ (Don 1882)
- ^ a b (Chen 2000)
- ^ a b c (Cheng 1973)
- ^ a b Cantonese speakers have been shown to understand only about 30% of what they hear in Taishanese (Szeto 2000)
- ^ (Yiu 1946)
- ^ a b (Yu 2007)
- ^ (Anderson 1978)
- ^ a b (Lee 1987)
- ^ (Defense Language Institute 1964)
- ^ United States Census, 2000 language code list
- ^ (Hom 1983)
- ^ (Light 1986)
- ^ (McCoy 1966)
- ^ (Hom 1987)
- ^ (Grimes 1996)
- ^ (Him 1980)
- ^ (Hsu 2000)
- ^ Taishan International Web
- ^ Although the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed by the signing of the Magnuson Act in 1943, immigration from China was still limited to only 2% of the number of Chinese already living in the United States (Hsu 2000)
- ^ (Ma & Cartier 2003)
- ^ a b (Ramsey 1987)
- ^ (Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996)
- ^ (Pulleyblank 1984)
- ^ a b (Wong 1982)
- ^ Chao's tone numbers are generally used in the literature. Each tone has two numbers, the first denotes the pitch level at the beginning of the tone, and the second denotes the pitch level at the end of the tone. Cheng modified the numerical range from 1 (lowest) to 7 (highest): high tone as 66, mid tone as 44, and low tone as 22. In this article Chao's tone letters are used, as they've been adopted by the IPA.
- ^ (Bauer & Benedict 1997)
- ^ (Yip 2002)
[edit] See also
[edit] References
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[edit] External links
- "Hoisanese Sanctuary". http://asianworld.pftq.com. Retrieved 2006-09-17. Includes short grammatical overview of Hoisanese. Dictionary currently has several entries and expanding.
- Aaron Lee. "Toisan". http://membres.lycos.fr/cahrlie/. Retrieved 2006-09-07.
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