Taishanese

language
name=Taishanese
nativename= _zh. 台山話
familycolor=Sino-Tibetan
states=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
speakers=~1-2 million
rank=
fam2=Chinese
fam3=Yue (Cantonese)
fam4=Siyi
iso1=zh|iso2b=chi|iso2t=zho|iso3=

Taishanese ( _zh. 台山話; Taishanese: [IPA|hɔi˨ san˧ wa˧˨˥] ) is a dialect of Cantonese, which is mainly spoken in and around Taishan, a coastal county of the Guangdong province, located southwest of Guangzhou.

Names

The earliest linguistic studies refer to the dialect of Llin-nen or Xinning ( _zh. 新寧).Harv|Don|1882] 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.Harv|Chen|2000] Harv|Yiu|1946] Harv|Anderson|1978] 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.Harv|Lee|1987] Harv|Defense Language Institute|1964] [United States Census, 2000 [http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/census2/sf3td/sf3tdg5.pdf language code list] ] The terms "Toishan", "Toisan" and "Toisaan" are all based on Standard Cantonese pronunciation, and are also frequently found in linguistic and non-linguistic literature.Harv|Hom|1983] Harv|Light|1986] Harv|McCoy|1966] Harv|Hom|1987] Lastly, Hoisan is a term based on the local pronunciation, although it is generally not used in published literature.Harv|Grimes|1996]

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".Harv|Him|1980] Harv|Hsu|2000] The term Hoisanese is not used in print literature, although it appears on the internet. [http://asianworld.pftq.com/]

Another term used is Siyi (also "Seiyap", "Szeyap" or "Szeyup", _zh. 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 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. [ [http://www.taishan.com/english/ Taishan International Web] ] 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.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 Harv|Hsu|2000] 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 country.

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.Cantonese speakers have been shown to understand only about 30% of what they hear in Taishanese Harv|Szeto|2000] 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 CantoneseFact|date=July 2007. 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.Fact|date=June 2007

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.

Tones

Taishanese is a tone language. There are five contrastive lexical tones inherited from earlier stages of Chinese. The tones are high, mid, low, mid falling, and low falling;Harv|Cheng|1973] in at least one Taishanese dialect, the falling tones have merged into a low falling tone.Harv|Wong|1982] There is no tone sandhi.

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.Harv|Wong|1982] [Harv|Bauer and Benedict|1997] [Harv|Yip|2002] Harv|Yu|2007] 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.Harv|Cheng|1973] 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. An example of a changed tone contrast is IPA|/tʃat˨˩/ (to brush) and IPA|/tʃat˨˩˥/ (a brush).

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 [http://asianworld.pftq.com 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 IPA|<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

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.Fact|date=July 2007

Notes

References

* Citation
last = Anderson
first = Stephen R.
year = 1978
chapter = Tone features
title = Tone: A Linguistic Survey
editor-last = Fromkin
editor-first = Victoria A.
publisher = Academic Press
place = New York, NY
* Citation
last = Bauer
first = Robert S.
last2 = Benedict
first2 = Paul K.
year = 1997
title = Modern Cantonese Phonology
publisher = Walter de Gruyter
place = Berlin
* Citation
last = Chao
first = Yuen-Ren
year = 1951
title = Taishan Yuliao
journal = Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Philology (Academia Sinica)
volume = 23
pages = 25-76
* Citation
last = Chen
first = Matthew Y.
year = 2000
title = Tone Sandhi: Patterns Across Chinese Dialects
publisher = Cambridge University Press
place = Cambridge, UK
* Citation
last = Cheng
first = Teresa M.
year = 1973
title = The Phonology of Taishan
journal = Journal of Chinese Linguistics
volume = 1
issue = 2
pages = 256-322
* Citation
last = Defense Language Institute
year = 1964
title = Chinese-Cantonese (Toishan) Basic Course
publisher = Defense Language Institute
place = Washington, DC
* Citation
last = Don
first = Alexander
year = 1882
title = The Lin-nen variation of Chinese
journal = China Review
pages = 236–247
* Citation
last = Him
first = Kam Tak
year = 1980
title = Semantic-Tonal Processes in Cantonese, Taishanese, Bobai and Siamese
journal = Journal of Chinese Linguistics
volume = 8
issue = 2
pages = 205–240
* Citation
last = Hom
first = Marlon Kau
year = 1983
title = Some Cantonese Folksongs on the American Experience
journal = Western Folklore
volume = 42
issue = 2
pages = 126–139
* Citation
last = Hom
first = Marlon Kau
year = 1987
title = Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco
publisher = University of California Press
place = Berkeley, CA

* Citation
last = Hsu
first = Madeline Y.
year = 2000
title = Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and China, 1882-1943
publisher = Stanford University Press
place = Palo Alto, CA
* Citation
last = Lee
first = Gina
year = 1987
title = A Study of Toishan F0
journal = Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics
volume = 36
pages = 16-30
* Citation
last = Light
first = Timothy
year = 1986
chapter = Toishan Affixal Aspects
editor1-last = McCoy
editor1-first = John
editor2-last = Light
editor2-first = Timothy
title = Contributions to Sino-Tibetan Studies
place = Leiden, Netherlands
publisher = Brill
pages = 415-425
* Citation
last = McCoy
first = John
year = 1966
title = Szeyap Data for a First Approximation of Proto-Cantonese
place = Ithaca, NY
publisher = Cornell University (Ph.D. Dissertation)
* Citation
last = Szeto
first = Cecilia
year = 2000
title = Testing intelligibility among Sinitic dialects
journal = Proceedings of ALS2K, the 2000 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society
url = http://www.als.asn.au/proceedings/als2000/szeto.pdf
accessdate = 2008-09-06
* Citation
last = Wong
first = Maurice Kuen-shing
year = 1982
title = Tone Change in Cantonese
publisher = University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
place = Champaign, IL
* Citation
last = Yip
first = Moira
year = 2002
title = Tone
publisher = Cambridge University Press
place = Cambridge, UK
* Citation
last = Yiu
first = T'ung
year = 1946
title = "The T'ai-Shan Dialect"
publisher = Princeton University
place = Princeton, NJ (Ph.D. Dissertation)
* Citation
last = Yu
first = Alan
year = 2007
title = Understanding near mergers: The case of morphological tone in Cantonese
journal = Phonology
volume = 24
issue = 1
pages = 187-214

See also

* List of Chinese dialects

External links

* cite web
url=http://asianworld.pftq.com
title=Hoisanese Sanctuary
accessdate=2006-09-17 Includes short grammatical overview of Hoisanese. Dictionary currently has several entries and expanding.
* cite web
url=http://membres.lycos.fr/cahrlie/
title=Toisan
author=Aaron Lee
accessdate=2006-09-07