Taishan dialect
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Taishan dialect | |||||||||||||
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| Traditional Chinese: | 台山話 | ||||||||||||
| Simplified Chinese: | 台山话 | ||||||||||||
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| Taishanese 台山話 |
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|---|---|---|
| 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: | Over 5 million[citation needed] | |
| Language family: | Sino-Tibetan Chinese Yue (Cantonese) Siyi Taishanese |
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| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | zh | |
| ISO 639-2: | chi (B) | zho (T) |
| ISO 639-3: | yue-toi | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Taishanese, Toishanese 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. Taishanese is an anglicization of the language's name in Mandarin, whereas Hoisanese is derived from the name of the language in the language itself. Taishanese is also called Toishanese in English, from the anglicized name of the language in Cantonese. In linguistics literature written in English, the language is usually referred to as Taishanese, the name used here.
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[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). It is said one can tell the speaker's village or town from his or her accent and vocabulary.[citation needed]
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.[1] 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.[2] 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.
[edit] Relationship between Cantonese and Taishanese
Taishanese is often regarded as similar to mainstream Cantonese (Guangzhou dialect), although Cantonese speakers are generally unable to understand Taishanese.[3] 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.
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[citation needed]. 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.[citation needed]
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 Taishanese.
[edit] Tones
Taishanese is a tone language. There are five contrastive lexical tones inherited from earlier stages of Chinese (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[5]).
| Tone | Tone contour[6] | Example | Changed tone | Chao Number | Example |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| high | ˥ (55) | hau˥ 口 (mouth) | (none) | - | - |
| mid | ˧ (33) | hau˧ 偷 (to steal) | mid rising | ˧˥ (35) | |
| low | ˨ or ˩ (22 or 11) | hau˨ 頭 (head) | low rising | ˨˥ (25) | |
| mid falling | ˧˩ (31) | hau˧˩ 皓 (bright) | mid dipping | ˧˨˥ (325) | |
| low falling | ˨˩ (21) | hau˨˩ 厚 (thick) | low dipping | ˨˩˥ (215) |
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.[5][7][8][9] 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.[10] 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, but 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 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.
| Glossary | Taishanese | Mainstream Cantonese |
Mandarin | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| transliteration | IPA | |||
| we/us | ngoi | [ŋɔɪ] | ngo5 dei6 (我哋) | wǒmen (我們) |
| you (plural) | neik | [neɪk] | nei5 dei6 (你哋) | nǐmen (你們) |
| they/them | keik | [keɪk] | keoi5 dei6 (佢哋) | tāmen (他們) |
[edit] 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.[citation needed]
[edit] Notes
- ^ 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)
- ^ Cantonese speakers have been shown to understand only about 30% of what they hear in Taishanese (Szeto 2000)
- ^ a b (Cheng 1973)
- ^ 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 and Benedict 1997)
- ^ (Yip 2002)
- ^ (Yu 2007)
- ^ (Chen 2000)
[edit] References
- Bauer, Robert S. & Benedict, Paul K. (1997), Modern Cantonese Phonology, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter
- Chao, Yuen-Ren (1951), “Taishan Yuliao”, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Philology (Academia Sinica) 23: 25-76
- Chen, Matthew Y. (2000), Tone Sandhi: Patterns Across Chinese Dialects, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
- Cheng, Teresa M. (1973), “The Phonology of Taishan”, Journal of Chinese Linguistics 1 (2): 256-322
- Defense Language Institute (1964), Chinese-Cantonese (Toishan) Basic Course, Washington, DC: Defense Language Institute
- Don, Alexander (1882), “The Lin-nen variation of Chinese”, China Review: 236-247
- Hsu, Madeline Y. (2000), Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and China, 1882-1943, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press
- Lee, Gina (1987), “A Study of Toishan F0”, Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics 36: 16-30
- Light, Timothy (1986), “Toishan Affixal Aspects”, in McCoy, John & Light, Timothy, Contributions to Sino-Tibetan Studies, Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, pp. 415-425
- McCoy, John (1966), Szeyap Data for a First Approximation of Proto-Cantonese, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University (Ph.D. Dissertation)
- Szeto, Cecilia (2000), “Testing intelligibility among Sinitic dialects”, Proceedings of ALS2K, the 2000 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, <http://au.geocities.com/austlingsoc/proceedings/als2000/szeto.pdf>. Retrieved on 16 June 2007
- Wong, Maurice Kuen-shing (1982), Tone Change in Cantonese, Champaign, IL: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Yip, Moira (2002), Tone, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
- Yiu, T'ung (1946), "The T'ai-Shan Dialect", Princeton, NJ: Princeton University (Ph.D. Dissertation)
- Yu, Alan (2007), “Understanding near mergers: The case of morphological tone in Cantonese”, Phonology 24 (1): 187-214
