Taishan dialect
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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.
HistoryTaishanese 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.[citation needed] 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 TaishaneseTaishanese is often regarded as similar to mainstream Cantonese (Guangzhou dialect), although Cantonese speakers are generally unable to understand Taishanese.[2] 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 Toisanese. TonesTaishanese is a tone language. There are five contrastive lexical tones inherited from earlier stages of Chinese (high, mid, low, mid falling, and low falling;[3] in at least one Toishanese dialect, the falling tones have merged into a low falling tone[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.[4][6][7][8] 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 Toishanese tones.[3] 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.[9] An example of a changed tone contrast is /tʃat˨˩/ (to brush) and /tʃat˨˩˥/ (a brush). Writing systemNo 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 <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.
Official and current statusTaishanese 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] Notes
References
|2007-06-16 |15 June 2007}}
See alsoExternal links
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