1. Introduction

This paper is a study of the sounds of Toisan, a dialect of Cantonese, which is a Sino-Tibetan language of Southern China. Toisan is primarily spoken by about a million people in and around Taishan county, one of the five counties in the Jiangmen prefecture of Guangdong province, China. More famously, Toisan is the historically dominant dialect of Chinatowns in North America and Australia.

My paper is based on the speech of Margaret Yu, a fourth-year undergraduate at UCLA. Margaret was born in a town on the border of Kaiping and Taishan counties, and she speaks the accepted dialect and accent of her hometown. Before coming to the United States, she also lived for six years in a Toisan community in northern Mexico.

I have used one main reference source for Toisan: Yiu (1946). At times, I consulted other material for geographic and comparative purposes. These materials were:

Margaret was most helpful in providing words beyond the limitations of my resource.

1.1 Organization

The material collected for this paper was recorded at two separate occasions. To facilitate listening to the recordings while reading this paper, I have formatted this document as a series of hypertext pages with links to the recordings. Examples from the recordings are interwoven in the course of the document, which causes the examples to be disordered.

The first recording begins at (1) and continues to (44). The second recording begins at (45) and continues to (54). (They are also of a regrettably poorer quality.) They are all in order, so if the reader chooses to use the hard-copy to grade this document, one may omit playing all numbers above (44) and the paper should read with the numbers proceeding in order.

1.2 A Note on Names

As mentioned above, Toisan is not considered a language – even by Toisan speakers themselves. It is a famous dialect of Cantonese, and socio-linguistically, it is considered a very rural and harsh accent. The majority of sources will call this accent ‘Taishan’ [tHaiÿ ßanä], which is the Mandarin name of the county it is spoken in (and also homophonic to a sacred mountain in China). Native-speakers will call it ‘Hoisan’ in their own tongue. Cantonese speakers call it ‘Toisan’ – and this name is the most widely recognized among Cantonese and Toisan speakers.

Many Chinese-Americans are familiar with another name: ‘Sei-yap’, which in Mandarin is called ‘Siyi’ [sµÜ iÜ] (‘Four Districts’). This is the old name for most of Jiangmen prefecture and refers collectively to Toisan and its neighboring dialects. These dialects tend to share common grammatical and lexical features, diverging only phonetically.