Taishan dialect
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Hoisanese or the Taishan dialect (台山話: Hoi4 saan6 wa1, Cantonese: toi4 saan1 wa6), or Siyi (四邑), is a Chinese dialect (or group of very similar dialects) spoken in and around Taishan, in Guangdong province. Hoisanese is grouped within Cantonese, one of the major branches of spoken Chinese.
History of Hoisanese
Hoisanese originates from the Taishan region, where it is spoken. Often regarded as a single language, Hoisanese can also be seen as a group of very closely related, mutually intelligible subdialects spoken by 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.
Hoisanese 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. 1.3 million people are estimated to have origins in Taishan. Though Hoisanese is often regarded as a Cantonese dialect, many Cantonese speakers are in fact Hoisanese. Prior to the repealing of the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act, which allowed new waves of Chinese immigrants, Hoisanese was ubiquitous in Chinatowns across North America. Hoisanese 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. Standardization and prestige of Cantonese and Mandarin will continue this trend.
Relationship between Cantonese and Hoisanese
Hoisanese is often mistakenly regarded as similar to mainstream Cantonese, but the two are largely mutually unintelligible. The phonology of Hoisanese bears some resemblance to mainstream Cantonese, but pronunciation and vocabulary differ, sometimes greatly. Because Cantonese is the lingua franca of Guangdong, virtually all Hoisanese-speakers also speak Cantonese, to the extent that some even regard their own tongue as merely differently accented mainstream Cantonese. But Cantonese-speakers understand Hoisanese only with great difficulty.In Guangdong, Cantonese functions as the lingua franca, and speakers of other dialects (such as Chaozhou, Hakka, Hoisanese) more often than not speak also 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, Hoisanese-speakers in conversation often freely code-switch among Hoisanese, Cantonese, and Mandarin.
One distinction between Hoisanese and Cantonese is the use of the Voiceless alveolar lateral fricative (IPA ɬ), e.g. in the word meaning "three", pronounced saam1 in Cantonese and lhaam1 in Toisanese.
Writing
No standardized form of written Hoisanese 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 Hoisanese exists either; the ones given on this page are ad hoc. The following chart compares the plural pronouns among Hoisanese, mainstream Cantonese, and Mandarin.
| English | Toisanese | Cantonese | Mandarin |
|---|---|---|---|
| we/us | ngoi (IPA: ŋɔɪ) | ngo5 dei6 (我哋) | wǒmen (我們) |
| you (plural) | neik (IPA: neɪk) | nei5 dei6 (你哋) | nǐmen (你們) |
| they/them | keik (IPA: keɪk) | keoi5 dei6 (佢哋) | tāmen (他們) |
See also
External links
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