Languages

Guangdong Province and Taishan County in particular

20 February 2006

Introduction

Language is an important defining feature of all human civilizations, which it both enables and limits, so it needs to be considered in order to understand the people, and here the people of Guangdong Province, and Taishan County in particular.

The following account has been drawn from several sources, and, as I am no linguist, it is undoubtedly cursory and may contain errors which are probably mine.

Cantonese

Cantonese, also known as Yue, is one of several major languages in China, and today has some 64 million speakers. Of these, more than 46 million live in southern China and over 5 million in Hong Kong. Large numbers of Cantonese speakers are also found in Malaysia, Vietnam and Macau.

The various Chinese languages are often referred to as dialects, because they have the Chinese writing system in common. Consequently an educated speaker of any of these languages can recognise written Chinese, but will pronounce it in their own "dialect". As they are not mutually intelligible, they are not really proper dialects but rather separate languages. Hence the term "language" will be used to refer to the major distinctions within Chinese (eg. Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Wu, and Min), and the term "dialect" reserved for more detailed distinctions (eg. Toishan as a dialect of Cantonese).

The term "Cantonese" comes from the city of Canton, now known as Guangzhou, which is the capital of Kwangtung Province, now known as Guangdong. However, Cantonese is today used exclusively in less than half of that province. It is the only or major language in forty counties and cities, and is spoken in sixteen other counties together with other Chinese languages. In the neighbouring Guangxi Province, it is used in twenty three counties together with a varieties of other Chinese languages.

As one of the Chinese languages, Cantonese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family of languages, which also includes Tibetan and Lolo Burmese and Karen, both spoken in Burma. The major linguistic distinctions within Chinese are Mandarin, Wu, Min, Yue and Hakka. Cantonese is more closely related to Min and Hakka than it is to Mandarin and Wu.

Given all the dialects that exist within Cantonese, the language is sometimes referred to as a group of Cantonese dialects, and not just Cantonese. Oral communication is virtually impossible among speakers of some Cantonese dialects. For instance, there is as much of a difference between the dialects of Taishan and Nanning, as there is between Italian and French.

These dialects can be distinguished according to their linguistic characteristics and geographical distribution:

Yuehai or Sam Yap - The standard form of the dialect comes from Canton City, but it is also spoken in Zhongshan (aka. Chungshan), Tungkuan, Hong Kong and Macau.
Siyi or See Yap - The standard form of the dialect comes from Taishan City (aka. Toishan and Hoishan). It has been regarded with distain by the more urbane, as the speech of country yokels.
Gaoyang - The standard form of the dialect comes from Yangjiang City.
Guinan - The standard form of the dialect comes from Nanning City, but it is also widely used in Guangxi Province.

As the basis of the Chinese writing system is pictographic and not phonetic in nature, little connects the written and spoken languages. Thus speakers of all Chinese languages or dialects, regardless of their mutual intelligibility, can read and understand standard Chinese writing and literature.

However many characters have been created to represent spoken Cantonese, and some of them can be traced as far back as the Ming Dynasty. These are not often used in formal writing, and only sometimes for stylistic purposes in newspapers or magazines, as readers are often confused by them.

Several transliteration or Romanisation systems have been used to represent spoken Cantonese. Among those systems most widely used are the Meyer-Wempe, Chao-Barnett, Yale and Pin-Yin. The latter was created in 1958 and is the official system in use in China today. However this creates some difficulties, as it was designed for use with Mandarin and not Cantonese. The major differences among these systems are found in their ways of representing the vowels and marking the tones of Cantonese.

Cantonese is very similar to other Chinese languages in its syntax. Its grammar is not modified by inflection as in English, rather words are immutable and not modified by subject, tense, gender, number or case. Cantonese is a tonal language where the meaning of words and sentences is affected by the pitch with which they are spoken. It has either six or nine or twelve tones, depending on the method of classification, interacting in complex ways. There are seven vowels that may be either short or long, contrasting voiceless aspirates and unaspirated stops and a lack of palatalised consonants. Words are generally monosyllabic and can be ended by consonants.

Observations on the Taishan Dialect

There some significant differences between Taishanese and standard Cantonese.

"For example, the initial consonant sound that appears in Cantonese as 't' (as in the surname 'Tam') appears in the Taishan dialect as 'h', so the same surname is pronounced 'Ham' (as in your own Ham Hoy Ling). This might be helpful for people encountering strange Romanisations of names which don't seem to fit a standard Cantonese rendering." - Kate Bagnall 20 August 2001.

Your own observations would be helpful here.

Other Languages

Hakka is a minor language in Guangdong Province.

In the past there were also secret languages, associated with "secret societies" and women.

Nu Shu or "Women's Language" was developed in secret by the women of Jiangyong County in Hunan Province, and is of an indeterminate age. It consisted of 700 to 1,000 characters, and was primarily used at weddings and births, though there are Nu Shu essays criticising foot-binding. The language was extremely difficult for outsiders to learn, as it was a violent mixture of local Chinese dialects and languages, and is now almost extinct.