Taishanese or Hoisanese (台山話: hoi6 saan3 waa2, Cantonese: toi4 saan1 waa2), 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. Official language(s) English Capital Sacramento Largest city Los Angeles Area  Ranked 3rd  - Total 158,302 sq mi (410,000 km²)  - Width 250 miles (400 km)  - Length 770 miles (1,240 km)  - % water 4. ... Guangdong, often spelt as Kwangtung, is a province on the south coast of the Peoples Republic of China. ... Map of Pearl River Delta (details) The Pearl River Delta Region (PRD) in China occupies the low-lying areas alongside the Pearl River estuary where the Pearl river flows into the South China Sea. ... This article does not cite its references or sources. ... Current distribution of Human Language Families A language family is a group of related languages said to have descended from a common proto-language. ... The Sino-Tibetan languages form a putative language family composed of Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman languages, including some 250 languages of East Asia. ... Cantonese is a major dialect group or language of the Chinese language, a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. ... Geographic distribution of Sinitic language families within the Peoples Republic of China and the Republic of China The following is a list of Chinese dialects and languages. ... ISO 639-1 is the first part of the ISO 639 international-standard language-code family. ... ISO 639-2 is the second part of the ISO 639 standard, which lists codes for the representation of the names of languages. ... ISO 639-3 is an international standard for language codes. ... Articles with similar titles include the NATO phonetic alphabet, which has also informally been called the “International Phonetic Alphabet”. For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words, see IPA chart for English. ... Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone meaning sound, voice) is the study of the sounds of human speech. ... Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ... Sze Yup, Sze Yap, Seiyap or Siyi (Chinese characters: ; Cantonese Yale: Sei3 yap1; Mandarin pinyin: Sìyì) are the four counties of Sun Wui, Toi Shan, Hoi Ping and Yan Ping in the Pearl River Delta, in southern Kwangtung Province, China. ... Geographic distribution of Sinitic language families within the Peoples Republic of China and the Republic of China The following is a list of Chinese dialects and languages. ... A dialect (from the Greek word διάλεκτος, dialektos) is a variety of a language characteristic of a particular group of the languages speakers. ... Taishan (台山; Mandarin: Táishān; Cantonese: Toisan; Taishanese: Hoisan, Other: Toishan, Toisaan) is a coastal county-level city in Guangdong Province, China. ... Guangdong, often spelt as Kwangtung, is a province on the south coast of the Peoples Republic of China. ... Guangzhou is the capital and the sub-provincial city of Guangdong Province in the southern part of the Peoples Republic of China. ... Cantonese is a major dialect group or language of the Chinese language, a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. ... Spoken Chinese Spoken Chinese comprises many regional variants. ...

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]} Taishan (台山; Mandarin: Táishān; Cantonese: Toisan; Taishanese: Hoisan, Other: Toishan, Toisaan) is a coastal county-level city in Guangdong Province, China. ... Taishan (台山; Mandarin: Táishān; Cantonese: Toisan; Taishanese: Hoisan, Other: Toishan, Toisaan) is a coastal county-level city in Guangdong Province, China. ... Enping City (red) within Guangdong Enping (恩平; Cantonese: Yun Ping) is a city in Guangdong Province, China. ... Kaiping (开平) is a county-level city in the Guangdong province of southern China. ... Image:Location of Xinhui within Guangdong (China). ...

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]} Though Taishanese is often regarded as a Cantonese dialect, many Cantonese speakers are in fact Hoisanese.^{[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. The Immigration and Nationality Act amendments of 1965 (Hart-Celler Act, INS Act of 1965, Pub. ... City skyline Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnamese: Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh  ) is the largest city in Vietnam and is located near the Mekong Delta. ... Cholon (Vietnamese: quoc ngu ; chu nom ) is the name of the Chinese district of Ho Chi Minh City (the former Saigon), the largest such Chinatown district in Vietnam. ...

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. Alternative meanings: Chinatown (disambiguation) The second_largest Chinatown in North America is in San Francisco, California, where signs, storefronts, proprietors, and even lamp posts bring the culture of China to the United States. ... Legendary Palace restaurant at the corner of Franklin and 7th st in Oakland. ... An interesection of Chinatown in San Francisco. ...

Relationship between Cantonese and Taishanese

Taishanese is often mistakenly regarded as similar to mainstream Cantonese (Guangzhou dialect), but the two are largely mutually unintelligible. 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 speak Cantonese^{[citation needed]}, to the extent that some even regard their own tongue as merely differently accented mainstream Cantonese. But Cantonese-speakers understand Taishanese only with great difficulty.^[2] Standard Cantonese is a variant, and is generally considered the prestige dialect of Cantonese Chinese. ... Lingua franca, literally Frankish language in Italian, was originally a mixed language consisting largely of Italian plus a vocabulary drawn from Turkish, Persian, French, Greek and Arabic and used for communication throughout the Middle East. ... Guangdong, often spelt as Kwangtung, is a province on the south coast of the Peoples Republic of China. ...

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]} The Teochew dialect (Diō-jiu-oē, Chinese:潮州话, Hanyu Pinyin: Cháozhōuhuà, Teochiu or Tiuchiu), is a Chinese language and dialect of Minnan spoken in a region of eastern Guangdong refered to as Chaoshan. ... Hakka is one language in the family of languages known as Chinese. ... Standard Mandarin – also known as Standard Chinese or Standard spoken Chinese – is the official Chinese spoken language used by the Peoples Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan), and Singapore. ... Code-switching is a term in linguistics referring to alternation between one or more languages, dialects, or language registers in the course of discourse between people who have more than one language in common. ... Mandarin (Traditional Chinese: ; Simplified Chinese: ; Hanyu Pinyin: ; literally speech of officials), or Beifanghua (Simplified Chinese: ; Traditional Chinese: ; Hanyu Pinyin: ; literally Northern Dialect(s)), is a category of related Chinese dialects spoken across most of northern and south-western China. ...

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 lhaam3 in Toisanese. The voiceless alveolar lateral fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. ... Articles with similar titles include the NATO phonetic alphabet, which has also informally been called the “International Phonetic Alphabet”. For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words, see IPA chart for English. ...

Writing

No 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. Languages can be romanized in a variety of ways, as shown here with Mandarin Chinese In linguistics, romanization (or Latinization, also spelled romanisation or Latinisation) is the representation of a word or language with the Roman (Latin) alphabet, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language...

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. Articles with similar titles include the NATO phonetic alphabet, which has also informally been called the “International Phonetic Alphabet”. For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words, see IPA chart for English. ... The voiceless alveolar lateral fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. ... The Totonac people resided in the eastern coastal and mountainous regions of Mexico at the time of the Spanish arrival in 1519. ... The Chickasaws are a Native American people of the United States, originally from present-day Mississippi, now mostly living in Oklahoma. ... For other uses, see Choctaw (disambiguation). ... The Xhosa (IPA ( )) people are peoples of Bantu origin living in south-east South Africa, and in the last two centuries throughout the southern and central-southern parts of the country. ... Languages Zulu Religions Christian, African Traditional Religion Related ethnic groups Bantu Nguni Basotho Xhosa Swazi Matabele Khoisan The Zulu (South African English and isiZulu: amaZulu) are a South African ethnic group of an estimated 17-22 million people who live mainly in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. ...

The following chart compares the plural pronouns among Taishanese, mainstream Cantonese, and Mandarin.

Articles with similar titles include the NATO phonetic alphabet, which has also informally been called the “International Phonetic Alphabet”. For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words, see IPA chart for English. ... Articles with similar titles include the NATO phonetic alphabet, which has also informally been called the “International Phonetic Alphabet”. For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words, see IPA chart for English. ... Articles with similar titles include the NATO phonetic alphabet, which has also informally been called the “International Phonetic Alphabet”. For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words, see IPA chart for English. ...

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]} City skyline Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnamese: Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh  ) is the largest city in Vietnam and is located near the Mekong Delta. ... Cholon (Vietnamese: quoc ngu ; chu nom ) is the name of the Chinese district of Ho Chi Minh City (the former Saigon), the largest such Chinatown district in Vietnam. ... Hakka (Simplified Chinese: 客家话, Traditional Chinese: 客家話, Pronunciation in Hakka: Hak-ka-fa/-va, Pinyin: Kèjiāhuà) is a spoken variation of the Chinese language spoken predominantly in southern China by the Hakka ethnic group and descendants in diaspora throughout East and Southeast Asia and around the world. ...

Notes

The Chinese Exclusion Act may be: The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 passed in the United States in 1882 banning Chinese from entering American soil. ... The Magnuson Act was an immigration law signed December 17, 1943 in the United States. ...

References

See also

• List of Chinese dialects

Geographic distribution of Sinitic language families within the Peoples Republic of China and the Republic of China The following is a list of Chinese dialects and languages. ...

External links

• Hoisanese Sanctuary. Retrieved on 2006-09-17. Includes short grammatical overview of Hoisanese. Dictionary currently has several entries and expanding.
• Aaron Lee. Toisan. Retrieved on 2006-09-07.