Teochew, also known as Swatow or Teo-Swa after its two best-known dialects, is a Southern Min language spoken by the Teochew people in the Chaoshan region of eastern Guangdong and by their diaspora around the world. It is sometimes referred to as Chiuchow, its Cantonese rendering, due to English romanization by colonial officials and explorers. It is closely related to Hokkien, as it shares some cognates and phonology with Hokkien.
Teochew preserves many Old Chinese pronunciations and vocabulary that have been lost in some of the other modern varieties of Chinese. As such, Teochew is described as one of the most conservative Chinese languages.
Historically, the Teochew prefecture included modern prefecture-level cities of Chaozhou, Jieyang and Shantou. In China, this region is now known as Teoswa. Parts of the Hakka-speaking Meizhou city, such as Dabu County and Fengshun, were also parts of the Teochew prefecture and contain pocket communities of Teochew speakers.
As the Teochew region was one of the major sources of Chinese emigration to Southeast Asia during the 18th to 20th centuries, a considerable Overseas Chinese community in that region is Teochew-speaking. In particular, the Teochew people settled in significant numbers in Thailand, Cambodia and Laos, where they form the largest Chinese sub-language group. Additionally, there are many Teochew-speakers among Chinese communities in Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia (especially in the states of Johor, Malacca, Penang, Kedah and Selangor with significant minorities in Sarawak) and Indonesia (especially in West Kalimantan). Waves of migration from Teochew region to Hong Kong, especially after the communist victory of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, has also resulted in the formation of a community there, although most descendants now primarily speak Cantonese and English as a result of colonialism and assimilation to the dominant Cantonese culture.
Teochew speakers are also found among overseas Chinese communities in Japan and the Western world (notably in the United States, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, France and Italy), a result of both direct emigration from the Chaoshan region to these nations and also secondary emigration from Southeast Asia.
In Singapore, Teochew remains the ancestral language of many Chinese Singaporeans, with Chinese of Teochew descent making up the second largest Chinese group in Singapore, after the Hoklo. Despite this, many Teochew people, particularly the younger generations, are shifting towards English and Mandarin as their main spoken language. This is due to the Singapore government's stringent bilingual policy that promotes English as the official language of education, government and commerce and promotes Mandarin at the expense of other Chinese languages. Some Teochew assimilated with the larger Hokkien community and speak Hokkien rather than Teochew due to Hokkien's prominent role as a lingua franca previously among the Singaporean Chinese community.
Teochew is a Southern Min language. As with other Sinitic languages, it is not mutually intelligible with Mandarin, Cantonese or Shanghainese. It has only limited intelligibility with Hokkien. Even within the Teochew dialects, there is substantial variation in phonology between different regions and between different Teochew communities overseas.
The dialects of Teochew Min include:
Language Atlas of China consider the Hai Lok Hong dialect a part of Chaoshan Min (as the third branch(æµ·é¸çÂÂ)), while others consider it a part of Hokkien or an independent Southern Min variety.
In the Nan'ao island, there are two dialects, both distinct from the mainland Teochew, with Western Nan'ao dialect inclining towards the Northern Teochew, and Eastern Nan'ao dialect showing Hokkien influence, as this part of the island was included in Zhangzhou prefecture in 16âÂÂ19 centuries.
Chawan dialect, spoken in Fujian along the Guangdong border, is quite different from other southern dialects of Hokkien. It has some lexical influence from Teochew and relatively higher mutual intelligibility with it, yet in other aspects it clusters more with Hokkien than Teochew.
The main criterion in the classification of Teochew dialects is the presence or absence of the vowel . It is found in Northern Teochew in words like hṳàé "fish" and sṳà亠"thing; matter". Southern Teochew has instead (hû é , sà « 亠). Hai Lok Hong and Eastern Namoa dialects have or instead, depending on the etymology of the word (hî é , but sà « 亠), similarly to the Chiangchew Hokkien. Southern Teochew may be further divided into HuilaiâÂÂPuning dialects and Teoyeo dialects, based on their tone contours.
The prestige dialects of Teochew all belong to the Northern branch. The Northern Teochew dialects are mutually intelligible between each other, but less so with the Southern branch.
Various stereotypes and cultural traits are associated with different Teochew dialects. For instance, within the Shantou city, the urban Swatow dialect is perceived as "energetic", "gentle", but also "snobbish" or "pretentious" by speakers of other dialects; the Chenghai dialect (similar to urban Chaozhou dialect) is perceived as "soft", "cute", and "high-pitched"; the Teoyeo dialect is perceived as "harsh", "aggressive" and "countrified".
Written Southern Min is known since at least the 16th century. The earliest known work is a 1566 edition of the Tale of the Lychee Mirror, a folk drama written in a mixture of Teochew and Chinchew Hokkien.
Teochew writing is neither standardized nor is widely used. In Imperial China, most writing was conducted in Classical Chinese, while vernacular writing was only used in novels, songbooks and opera scripts. After the Xinhai revolution, only written Mandarin was supported by the government, while speakers of other Sinitic languages, including Teochew, remaining largely illiterate in their own tongues.
Teochew rime dictionaries appeared relatively late, the earliest of them being "Fifteen consonants of Teochew sound" (, 1913) by Zhang Shizhen (), "Ji Mu Zhi Yin"(, 1915) by Jiangxia Maotingshi () and "Fifteen consonants of Teochew language" (, 1921) by Jiang Rulin ().
Most of the Teochew vocabulary can be traced back to Old Chinese, and thus can be written using Chinese characters. There are different ways to write words that do not have a clearly associated etymological character, including:
Teochew shares characters with Hokkien for cognate words, but it is also influenced by the Cantonese written tradition.
There are two principal romanization systems for Teochew:
While Peng'im has some presence in academic works published in PRC, many publications on Teochew use their custom IPA-based romanizations.
Teochew, like other Southern Min varieties, is one of the few modern Sinitic languages which have voiced obstruents (stops, fricatives and affricates); however, unlike Wu and Xiang Chinese, the Teochew voiced stops and fricatives did not evolve from Middle Chinese voiced obstruents, but from nasals.
The voiced stops and and also are voicelessly prenasalized , , , respectively.
The voiced affricate , initial in such words as jë (/dzié/), jà(/dziçÃÂ¥/), jiâng (/dziaà ÂÃÂ¥/), jiaÃÂk (/dziakæ/) loses its affricate property with some younger speakers abroad, and is relaxed to [z].
Unlike in Hokkien, nasal initials in Teochew are not generally considered allophones of the voiced plosives, as nasals are relatively more common in Teochew and have less usage restrictions. For example, Teochew allows for syllables like ngeÃÂk é , which are impossible in Hokkien.
In Southern dialects of Teochew, labial initials (/p/, /pð/, /b/, /m/) have labiodental allophones ([pf], [pfð], [bv], [mv~ñ]) before /-u-/.
Syllables in Teochew contain an onset consonant, a medial glide, a nucleus, usually in the form of a vowel, but can also be occupied by a syllabic consonant like [Ã Â], and a final consonant. All the elements of the syllable except for the nucleus are optional, which means a vowel or a syllabic consonant alone can stand as a fully-fledged syllable.
All the consonants except for the glottal stop ÃÂ shown in the consonants chart above can act as the onset of a syllable; however, the onset position is not obligatorily occupied.
Teochew finals consist maximally of a medial, nucleus and coda. The medial can be /i-/ or /u-/, the nucleus can be a monophthong or diphthong, and the coda can be a nasal or a stop. A syllable must consist minimally of a vowel nucleus or syllabic nasal.
Apart from the aforementioned rhymes, there are a few limitedly used finals with both glottal stop and nasalization, usually found in ideophones and interjections, e.g. heÃÂhâ¿ /hẽÃÂÃ¥æ/ "agitated; confused", hauhâ¿ /hÃ£à ©ÃÂçè/ "to eat in large bites", khuàhâ¿-uaÃÂhâ¿ /kÃ°à ©Ã£ÃÂèéèêÂÂêÂÂ.à ©Ã£ÃÂÃ¥æ/ "comfortable".
In most dialects of Teochew, historical codas and are merged with and . They were still present in mainstream Teochew in the 19th century, but now they are found only in certain peripheral dialects of Teochew, as well as in Hai Lok Hong Min.
The rime /ï/ is only found in Northern Teochew. In Southern Teochew (the Teoyeo dialect), this rime is merged with /u/. Chaozhou and Swatow rimes /ïà Â/ (as in /à Âïà ÂÃÂ¥/) and /ïk/ (as in /à Âïkçè/), derived from historical /ïn/ and /ït/, are merged with /ià Â/ and /ik/ in Southern Teochew (as well as in Kekyeo dialect, where /eà Â/ and /ek/ are used for /ïà Â, ià Â/ and /ïk, ik/).
The rime /à ÂÃÂ/, used in vernacular readings, is preserved in all dialects, yet in Northern Teochew it is usually analyzed as identical to /ïà Â/ (e.g. in /kïà Âç~kà ÂÃÂç/, /tïà ÂÃÂ¥~kà ÂÃÂç/). In Teochew proper and Swatow dialects, this vernacular rime /ïà Â~à ÂÃÂ/ is merged with /uà Â/ after labial initials (e.g. general Teochew (including Kekyeo and Teoyeo) /mïà ÂÃÂ¥~mà ÂÃÂÃÂ¥/ and /pïà Âèé~pà ÂÃÂèé/ are pronounced /muà ÂÃÂ¥/ and /puà Âèé/ in Chaozhou and Shantou).
Chaozhou /ieng/ and /iek/ are used in syllables that historically had /ien/ and /iet/, e.g. is different from in Chaozhou (as /hieà ÂÃ¥ç/ and /hiaà ÂÃ¥ç/) and Hokkien (as /hienÃ¥ç/ and /hiaà ÂÃ¥ç/), but not Swatow (both are /hiaà ÂÃ¥ç/).
Similarly, Chaozhou /ueà Â/ (as in /lueà ÂçÃÂ¥/) and /uek/ (as in /huekçè/), historically derived from /uan/ and /uat/, are merged with /uaà Â/ and /uak/ in other dialects (including Swatow, Kekyeo, and Teoyeo). There are few cases with the rimes /ueà Â/ and /uek/ in Kekyeo and Teoyeo, not derived from /uan/ and /uat/ and corresponding to Teochew proper and Swatow /uaà Â/ and /uak/, e.g. and are pronounced /kðuaà Âç/ and /uakÃ¥æ/ in Chaozhou and Shantou, but /kðueà Âç/ and /uekÃ¥æ/ in Kekyeo and Southern Teochew.
Teochew, like other Chinese varieties, is a tonal language. Like other Southern Min varieties, Teochew has split the Middle Chinese four tone into two registers (four "dark tones" and four "light tones"). The tones are numbered from 1 through 8, either in the "darkâÂÂlight" order (the checked tones are 7 and 8) or in the "levelâÂÂrisingâÂÂdepartingâÂÂentering" order (the checked tones are 4 and 8). This section follows the second order, as used in Peng'im.
Depending on the position of a word in a phrase, the tones can change and adopt extensive tone sandhi.
Northern Teochew dialects are not too different from each other in their tones. There are small differences in pronunciation of the tone â¦, which can vary between low falling (21 èé) and low level (22 è) among different dialects and individual speakers.
There are minor differences in tone sandhi among the Northern Teochew dialects:
The light departing tone (â¦) after sandhi is usually merged with the post-sandhi tone ⤠or âÂÂ¥, depending on the dialect. For convenience, since the difference between them is still not large, all three light tones after sandhi may be described as identical and equal to pre-sandhi tone â¦. The sandhi rules for Northern Teochew may be simplified as follows:
Southern Teochew tones are noticeably diverse. Based on their tones, the Southern Teochew dialects can be divided into two broad areas: Teoyeo and Hui-Pou.
Currently, a tone shift is ongoing in the Teoyeo dialect. There is a continuum between the "old accent" and "new accent". This shift is more advanced in urban dialects in Eastern Chaoyang (incl. Haojiang, especially the Dahao dialect), among female speakers, and in the younger generations (born after the 1980s). The principal features of this shift are as follows:
"Old" Teoyeo accent is notable for the fact that out of its five non-checked tones, four tones have falling contour.
Hui-Pou dialects are more homogeneous in their tones than Teoyeo dialects. Puning and Eastern Huilai dialects have 8 tones, while Central and Western Huilai have 7 tones (tone ⦠is merged with other tones). Some of the Huilai dialects undergo tone shift similar to that in Teoyeo dialects, but to a lesser extent (particularly, tone ⡠becomes high level 55 rather than high falling 53).
Like Hokkien, Teochew has the neutral tone. In pronunciation, the neutral tone is considered to be identical to the light departing tone (â¦) in the respective dialect, but when the original tone of the syllable was dark rising (â¡), the neutral tone is identical to the dark departing tone (â¢), and when the original tone was an entering tone (⣠or â§), the neutral tone is identical to the dark entering tone (â£).
Some works refer to the neutral tone as "left-dominant tone sandhi". However, unlike the general ("right-dominant") Teochew tone sandhi, which is a regular phonetic change, the neutral tone is lexical and its occurrence cannot be predicted. Compare the following examples with the morpheme nî "year", where some words have the neutral tone, while others preserve the original tone.
but:
The grammar of Teochew is similar to other Min languages, as well as some southern varieties of Chinese, especially with Hakka, Yue and Wu. The sequence 'subjectâÂÂverbâÂÂobject' is typical, like Standard Mandarin, although the 'subjectâÂÂobjectâÂÂverb' form is also possible using particles.
The personal pronouns in Teochew, like in other Chinese languages, do not show case marking, therefore uá means both I and me and i-nâng means they and them. The Southern Min languages, like some Mandarin dialects, have a distinction between an inclusive and exclusive we, meaning that when the addressee is being included, the inclusive pronoun náng would be used, otherwise uáng is employed. Outside Southern Min varieties like Teochew, no other southern Chinese variety has this distinction.
Teochew does not distinguish the possessive pronouns from the possessive adjectives. As a general rule, the possessive pronouns or adjectives are formed by adding the genitive or possessive marker kâi to their respective personal pronouns, as summarized below:
As kâi is the generic measure word, it may be replaced by other more appropriate classifiers:
Teochew has the typical two-way distinction between the demonstratives, namely the proximals and the distals. The basic determiners are tsà"this" and hṳà"that", and they require at least a classifier (generic kâi , collective tshoh , or another), which can be optionally preceded by a numeral.
Some numerals in Teochew have a literary and vernacular variant.
Generally, vernacular variants are used, and literary readings are limited to certain set compounds and idioms, e.g.: Sam-kok , ngóu-kim , kiú-siau , ngóu-tsháiâ¿-phiang-hung , sam-sá¹³-já¹³ÃÂ-kiââ¿ , kiú-liû-sam-kàu , etc.
However, literary forms of and are more commonly used, particularly in the following cases:
In Teochew passive construction, the agent phrase by somebody always has to be present, and is introduced by the preposition khṳh or pung , both literally meaning "to give". If the agent is not explicitly named, its position is taken by nâng ().
While in Mandarin one can have the agent introducer or alone without the agent itself, in Teochew it is not grammatical to omit this dummy agent nâng .
The agent phrase pung nâng always comes immediately after the subject, not at the end of the sentence or between the auxiliary and the past participle like in some European languages (e.g. German, Dutch).
Teochew, like Cantonese but unlike Hokkien, uses the construction "X ADJ kuè Y", to express the comparison:
However, due to modern influences from Mandarin, the Mandarin structure "X Y ADJ" has also gained popularity over the years. Therefore, the same sentence can be re-structured and becomes:
The - or -construction must involve two or more nouns to be compared; an ill-formed sentence will be yielded when only one is being mentioned:
Teochew is different from English, where the second noun being compared can be left out ("Tatyana is more beautiful (than Lisa)". In cases like this, the -construction must be used instead:
The same holds true for Mandarin and Cantonese in that another structure needs to be used when only one of the nouns being compared is mentioned. Teochew and Mandarin both use a pre-modifier (before the adjective) while Cantonese uses a post-modifier (after the adjective).
There are two words which are intrinsically comparative in meaning, i.e. iââ¿ "to win" and su "to lose". They can be used alone or in conjunction with the -structure:
Note the use of the adverbial hoh tsà Âi at the end of the sentence to express a higher degree.
In Teochew, the idea of equality is expressed with the word pêâ¿ or pêâ¿-ià Ââ¿ :
To express the superlative, Teochew uses the adverb siÃÂng or siÃÂng-téng . The latter variant is usually used with a complimentary connotation.
Teochew vocabulary consists of several layers, including:
Most of the Teochew vocabulary (around 70-80%) consists of the pan-Sinitic words. However, their proportion is much lower among the most basic words used in daily speech, as they tend to belong to the last three categories. This pattern is also seen in other languages of the Sinosphere, e.g. in Japanese, where the Sino-Japanese words constitute around 60-70% of total vocabulary, but only around 20% of words used in common speech.
In Teochew, like in other Min languages, it is common for a character to have at least two readings, called "literary" and "vernacular". The number of such doublets in Teochew is somewhat smaller than in Hokkien, due to Teochew being prone to use only vernacular readings and lose their literary counterparts.
Teochew and Hokkien are both Southern Min languages. Hokkien, which is spoken in southern Fujian, shares many phonetic similarities with Teochew, but they have low lexical similarity. Although Teochew and Hokkien share some cognates, there are pronounced differences in most vowels with some consonant and tone shifts.
Teochew has only 51% intelligibility with the Tong'an Xiamen dialect of Hokkien, approximately the same as the percentage of intelligibility as between Russian and Ukrainian languages, while it has even lower mutual intelligibility language with other dialects of the Hokkien language.
Most Teochew people do not speak Hokkien and the majority of Hokkien and Teochew people both see themselves as a distinct ethnic groups / nation. There are a minority of Teochew people who speak Hokkien as their mother tongue, most of whom have close contact or relatives in the neighbouring three originally-Teochew counties of what is now South Fujian, which were ceded to Fujian during the early Tang dynasty and subsequently assimilated into the Hokkien population. These Hokkien-speaking Teochews are more likely to treat Teochew simply as accented dialect of Hokkien. These people usually have a strong sense of Hokkien identity.
In Hokkien, denasalization of initial consonants is extensive, and sounds [m], [n], [Ã Â] are usually viewed as allophones of /b/, /l~d/, /g/ used with nasalized rhymes. In Teochew and Hai Lok Hong, denasalization is less common.
Hokkien and Hai Lok Hong have three pairs of codas: -ng/-k, -m/-p and -n/-t. Most dialects of Teochew have merged -n/-t with -ng/-k. On the other hand, many Teochew dialects, except urban Swatow and Chenghai, do not dissimilate the Middle Chinese rhyme -jom, e.g. they have huÃÂ m , huÃÂm , huap , while Hokkien has huÃÂ n , huÃÂn , huat .
Teochew (except some Southern Teochew dialects) and Hai Lok Hong have 8 citation tones, while most dialects of Hokkien have 7 tones.
In individual rhymes, the differences between Hokkien and Teochew are comparable to differences between the dialects of each language. For example, both Northern Hokkien and Northern Teochew have the /ï/ sound, which is not found in Southern Teochew and Southern Hokkien. Northern Hokkien and Teochew both have -ng (in Hokkien and Southern Teochew) or -ung (in Northern Teochew) rhyme in words like pnÃÂg/pà «ng, mnÃÂg/mûng, while Southern Hokkien and Hai Lok Hong have -uiâ¿ instead ( pà «iâ¿, mûi).
Teochew grammar shows some Cantonese or Hakka influence. For example,
Teochew differs from Hokkien in function words:
Teochew has many differences with Hokkien in its basic vocabulary. Some of the differences are due to influence from Cantonese, while others are alternative yet still native Min words.
Teochew tends to use more vernacular readings where Hokkien prefers the literary readings. For instance, Hokkien uses to-siàfor "Thank you", with literary reading for the first character, while Teochew reads it with the vernacular reading as tsà Âi-siÃÂ. The character has both literary reading (Teochew ang, Hokkien an) and vernacular reading (both uaâ¿), the latter more commonly used in Teochew ( uaâ¿-tshuâng, uaâ¿-sim, uaâ¿-úng, të-uaâ¿, etc.), while being rare in Hokkien (used in a few place names: Tâng-uaâ¿, Lâm-uaâ¿, Hà «i-uaâ¿).
For some characters, literary readings only exist in Hokkien (even if used exclusively for declamation of Classical Chinese texts), while many vernacular readings are used only in Teochew.