Taishan dialect
Hoisanese or the
Taishan dialect (台山話: Hoi6 saan3 wa6, Cantonese: toi4 saan1 wa4), or
Siyi (四邑), 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. Hoisanese is grouped within
Cantonese, one of the major branches of
spoken Chinese.
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.
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.
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 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, one of 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 Hoisanese, mainstream Cantonese, and Mandarin.
>| English | Toisanese | Cantonese | Mandarin |
|---|
| we/us | ngoik (IPA: ŋ"ɪk) | ngo5 dei6 (我") | w'men (我們) |
| you (plural) | neik (IPA: neɪk) | nei5 dei6 (你") | nǐmen (你們) |
| they/them | keik (IPA: keɪk) | keoi5 dei6 (佢") | tāmen (他們) |
*
List of Chinese dialects*
China Taishan Web*
Hoisanese to English Dictionaryzh-yue:台山話
