Teochew phrasebook
Teochew (潮汕話/潮汕话 Diê5 suan3 uê7 or 潮州話/潮州话 Diê5 ziu1 uê7), also Romanized as Chiuchow, is the main language of the Chaoshan region in Eastern Guangdong, around the cities of Shantou, Chaozhou and Jieyang. It is also found in Hong Kong and among overseas Chinese, especially in Southeast Asia, with Bangkok, Phnom Penh, Pontianak and Johor Bahru being examples of Southeast Asian cities where Teochew speakers form the majority among the ethnic Chinese community.
Each of the three main Teochew-speaking cities in China, as well as each overseas region where it is spoken, has its own slightly different variant, though they are similar enough not to hinder mutual comprehension; the prestige dialect is that of Chaozhou, though the Shantou dialect is more commonly heard due to the city's economic dominance. The overseas variants are influenced by other local languages; the Teochew spoken in Singapore and Malaysia has loan words from Malay and Hokkien, while the Teochew spoken in Thailand has loan words from Thai.
All Chinese languages, in general, use the same set of characters in reading and writing in formal settings, based on standard Mandarin. This means that a Teochew speaker and a Mandarin speaker cannot talk to each other, but either can generally read what the other writes. However, when Teochew is written in a more colloquial form, there are significant differences with standard Mandarin, thus necessitating the use of some extra characters not commonly used in Mandarin, and meaning that a Mandarin speaker will not be able to understand everything. Use the Chinese phrasebook for reading most writing in Teochew-speaking areas.
Teochew is closely related to Minnan Hua and Hainanese, but only partly mutually intelligible with Minnan Hua and mutually unintelligible with Hainanese. Teochew is not mutually intelligible with Mandarin or Cantonese, but it is common for Teochew speakers to also know one or both of those. Foreigners in the region usually choose to learn Mandarin rather than Teochew because it is much more widely used.
Pronunciation guideLike other dialects of Chinese, Teochew is written using Chinese characters but employs its own unique pronunciation.
Phrase listTeochew pronouns are somewhat more complicated than in Mandarin. 我 ua2 is the standard first person pronoun, 汝 le2 is the standard second person pronoun, and 伊 i1 is the standard third person pronoun.
Sources and licences
- Guide text adapted from the Wikivoyage article "Teochew phrasebook" by its contributors, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read on Wikivoyage · Contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0