Teochew dialect

Teochew (Chinese潮州 话/潮州 话, IPA: [ tiε5 tsiu1 uε7 ], Mandarin Chinese: Cháozhōuhuà ) is a Minnan dialect (Southern Min dialect), which is spoken in the eastern eight districts of Guangdong province and most likely with the Fujian dialect ( Hokkien ) and Taiwanese is related. It is spoken by the Han Chinese and after a census in 1984 there were over 25 million Teochew spokesman in China alone, there are about 47 million worldwide.

Teochew is a tonal language which has six cadences and a strong Tonsandhi, a tonal change in the meeting of two syllables. It differs both phonetically and grammatically greatly from standard Chinese ( Mandarin) and Cantonese, so that an oral understanding between the two idioms is not possible. Teochew is one of the most conservative idioms of the Han Chinese and has retained many of linguistic structures such as pronunciation and sentence structure from the ancient Middle Chinese, and is therefore just for sinologist who deal with the ancient Old and Middle Chinese literature, particularly interesting because it more closely the ancient Chinese used than the modern high standard Chinese language.

Language is more than a thousand years old and is spoken by many overseas Chinese. So are alone in Malaysia almost a million Teochew Chinese live. In Hong Kong, it is the second most spoken language, but it is due to many waves of emigration from Teochew Chinese in the 19th and 20th centuries spoken by the diaspora in the respective countries (Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia / Java / Bali, Vietnam, Cambodia, Brunei, Australia, New Zealand, USA and others). Most Teochew speakers grow up bilingual in China, where they speak Mandarin Chinese in public life and speak only in the family circle Teochew. Especially the younger generation forgotten the linguistic peculiarities due to the influence of Chinese standard media influences more and more characters used especially regionally are rarely taught. As the Chinese government is pursuing a common language and culture as ideology, dialects are hardly promoted as studying direction at universities and are thus in the long run to an endangered cultural heritage.