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Learning Taishanese Part 1

Posted by on Mar 25th, 2010 | no comments home title

In the first lesson, you'll be introduced in learning how to count from 1 to 10 in Taishanese. It is pronounced in the following manner: Yit, Ngi, Thlam, Thli, Ng, Luk, Tet, Bat, Giu, Sip. Background on Taishanese: Taishanese is a Cantonese dialect spoken in the western part of the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province of China in a region called siyi or szeyap in Standard Cantonese. siyi consists of the cities of Taishan, Kaiping, Enping and Xinhui(which includes Jiangmen). Recently it has included the city of Heshan. The variant of Taishanese spoken in this clip is mainly spoken in Taishan and Kaiping. The Enping and Xinhui (includes Jiangmen) variant is slightly different, but can be understood fairly well by Taishan and Kaiping speakers. History: Taishanese is the second most popular Cantonese dialect after the Guangzhou(廣州) variant, which is considered as the Standard or Putonghua of the Guangdong, Guangxi and Hainan area and to a lesser extent Fujian and Taiwan. Many Taishanese speakers who have lived in Hong Kong (who make up about 30%-40% of the total population) in the early to mid 1900s have chosen to speak Standard Cantonese over Taishanese Cantonese a few decades later. Taishanese was also the business language of many overseas chinatowns in the US, Canada, Australia and the UK since the mid 1800 through the 1980s. As a result there are many famous Hong Kongers, Canadians, Americans and Australians of Taishanese descent.