Teochew, also known as Swatow or Teo-Swa after its two best-known dialects, is a Southern Min language spoken by the Teochew people in the Chaoshan region of eastern Guangdong and by their diaspora around the world. It is sometimes referred to as Chiuchow, its Cantonese rendering, due to English romanization by colonial officials and explorers. It is closely related to Hokkien, as it shares some cognates and phonology with Hokkien.
Teochew preserves many Old Chinese pronunciations and vocabulary that have been lost in some of the other modern varieties of Chinese. As such, Teochew is described as one of the most conservative Chinese languages.
History and geography Historically, the Teochew prefecture included modern prefecture-level cities of Chaozhou, Jieyang and Shantou. In China, this region is now known as Teoswa. Parts of the Hakka-speaking Meizhou city, such as Dabu County and Fengshun, were also parts of the Teochew prefecture and contain pocket communities of Teochew speakers.
As the Teochew region was one of the major sources of Chinese emigration to Southeast Asia during the 18th to 20th centuries, a considerable Overseas Chinese community in that region is Teochew-speaking. In particular, the Teochew people settled in significant numbers in Thailand, Cambodia and Laos, where they form the largest Chinese sub-language group.Szklarz, Z. (2024). Chinese Economic Behavior in Southeast Asia: A Historical and Cultural Overview of the Migration Patterns, Culture, and Business Practices of the Chinese Diaspora in Southeast Asia. Additionally, there are many Teochew-speakers among Chinese communities in Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia (especially in the states of Johor, Malacca, Penang, Kedah and Selangor with significant minorities in Sarawak) and Indonesia (especially in West Kalimantan). Waves of migration from Teochew region to Hong Kong, especially after the communist victory of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, has also resulted in the formation of a community there, although most descendants now primarily speak Cantonese and English as a result of colonialism and assimilation to the dominant Cantonese culture.
Teochew speakers are also found among overseas Chinese communities in Japan and the Western world (notably in the United States, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, France and Italy), a result of both direct emigration from the Chaoshan region to these nations and also secondary emigration from Southeast Asia.
In Singapore, Teochew remains the ancestral language of many Chinese Singaporeans, with Chinese of Teochew descent making up the second largest Chinese group in Singapore, after the Hoklo. Despite this, many Teochew people, particularly the younger generations, are shifting towards English and Mandarin as their main spoken language. This is due to the Singapore government's stringent bilingual policy that promotes English as the official language of education, government and commerce and promotes Mandarin at the expense of other Chinese languages. Some Teochew assimilated with the larger Hokkien community and speak Hokkien rather than Teochew due to Hokkien's prominent role as a lingua franca previously among the Singaporean Chinese community.
Classification Teochew is a Southern Min language. As with other Sinitic languages, it is not mutually intelligible with Mandarin, Cantonese or Shanghainese. It has only limited intelligibility with Hokkien. Even within the Teochew dialects, there is substantial variation in phonology between different regions and between different Teochew communities overseas.
The dialects of Teochew Min include: Northern Teochew, or Chaozhou division (), including: Chaozhou / Teochew dialect (), spoken in urban Chaozhou (Xiangqiao District); a similar dialect is spoken in Chenghai Jieyang / Kekyeo dialect (), spoken in urban Jieyang (Rongcheng District); related dialects are spoken in adjacent areas in Jiedong, Jiexi, as well as in northern parts of Puning and Chaoyang Shantou / Swatow dialect (), spoken in urban Shantou (Jinping and Longhu) Raoping dialect (), spoken in Raoping County Southern Teochew, or Chaoyang-Puning division (), including: Chaoyang / Teoyeo dialect (), spoken in the historical Teoyeo (Chaoyang) county, which includes modern Chaoyang, Chaonan, and Haojiang Puning dialect (), spoken in urban Puning Huilai dialect (), spoken in Huilai County
Language Atlas of China consider the Hai Lok Hong dialect a part of Chaoshan Min (as the third branch(海陸片)), while others consider it a part of Hokkien or an independent Southern Min variety.
In the Nan'ao island, there are two dialects, both distinct from the mainland Teochew, with Western Nan'ao dialect inclining towards the Northern Teochew, and Eastern Nan'ao dialect showing Hokkien influence, as this part of the island was included in Zhangzhou prefecture in 16—19 centuries.
Chawan dialect, spoken in Fujian along the Guangdong border, is quite different from other southern dialects of Hokkien. It has some lexical influence from Teochew and relatively higher mutual intelligibility with it, yet in other aspects it clusters more with Hokkien than Teochew.
The main criterion in the classification of Teochew dialects is the presence or absence of the vowel . It is found in Northern Teochew in words like hṳ̂ 魚 "fish" and sṳ̄ 事 "thing; matter". Southern Teochew has instead (hû 魚 , sū 事 ). Hai Lok Hong and Eastern Namoa dialects have or instead, depending on the etymology of the word (hî 魚 , but sū 事 ), similarly to the Ciangciu Hokkien. Southern Teochew may be further divided into Huilai—Puning dialects and Chaoyang dialects, based on their tone contours.
The prestige dialects of Teochew all belong to the Northern branch. The Northern Teochew dialects are mutually intelligible between each other, but less so with the Southern branch.
Various stereotypes and cultural traits are associated with different Teochew dialects. For instance, within the Shantou city, the urban Swatow dialect is perceived as "energetic", "gentle", but also "snobbish" or "pretentious" by speakers of other dialects; the Chenghai dialect (similar to urban Chaozhou dialect) is perceived as "soft", "cute", and "high-pitched"; the Chaoyang dialect is perceived as "harsh", "aggressive" and "countrified".
Writing system Written Southern Min is known since at least the 16th century. The earliest known work is a 1566 edition of the Tale of the Lychee Mirror, a folk drama written in a mixture of Teochew and Chinchew Hokkien.
Teochew writing is neither standardized nor is widely used. In Imperial China, most writing was conducted in Classical Chinese, while vernacular writing was only used in novels, songbooks and opera scripts. After the Xinhai revolution, only written Mandarin was supported by the government, while speakers of other Sinitic languages, including Teochew, remaining largely illiterate in their own tongues.
Teochew rime dictionaries appeared relatively late, the earliest of them being "Fifteen consonants of Teochew sound" (, 1913) by Zhang Shizhen (), "Ji Mu Zhi Yin"(, 1915) by Jiangxia Maotingshi () and "Fifteen consonants of Teochew language" (, 1921) by Jiang Rulin ().
Chinese characters Most of the Teochew vocabulary can be traced back to Old Chinese, and thus can be written using Chinese characters. There are different ways to write words that do not have a clearly associated etymological character, including: using a character with the same meaning regardless of its reading borrowing a phonetically close character regardless of its meaning inventing a new character attempting to find an original character
Teochew shares characters with Hokkien for cognate words, but it is also influenced by the Cantonese written tradition.
+WordPossible spellingsSemanticPhoneticInventedcharacterPresumedoriginal characterpak / "to know", tiâng / "who", []tsōi / "many", , thâi / "to kill"m̆ / "not"tse̍k / "one", kûiⁿ / "tall; high"tshâng / "field",
Romanization
There are two principal romanization systems for Teochew: Pe̍h-ūe-jī, originally invented for Hokkien in the 19th century and adapted for Teochew (particularly the Swatow dialect) Peng'im, invented in the 1960s and based on the Hanyu Pinyin romanization for Mandarin
While Peng'im has some presence in academic works published in PRC, many publications on Teochew use their custom IPA-based romanizations.
+ ConsonantsIPAPe̍h-ūe-jīPeng'im p b ph p b bh m m t d th t l l n n h h k g kh k g gh ng ng ts z tsh c z r s s
+ VowelsIPAPe̍h-ūe-jīPeng'im a a ia ia ua ua ai ai au ao uai uai iau iao o o io io oi oi ou ou iou iou or e ê or ie iê or ue uê or ṳ e i i u u ui ui iu iu
+ CodasIPAPe̍h-ūe-jīPeng'im -ng -ng -k -g -h -h -ⁿ -n -m -m -p -b -n — -t —
Phonetics and phonology Consonants
Teochew, like other Southern Min varieties, is one of the few modern Sinitic languages which have voiced obstruents (stops, fricatives and affricates); however, unlike Wu and Xiang Chinese, the Teochew voiced stops and fricatives did not evolve from Middle Chinese voiced obstruents, but from nasals.
The voiced stops and and also are voicelessly prenasalized , , , respectively.
The voiced affricate , initial in such words as jī (/dzi˩/), jĭ (/dzi˧˥/), jiâng (/dziaŋ˥/), jia̍k (/dziak˦/) loses its affricate property with some younger speakers abroad, and is relaxed to [z].
+Teochew consonants Bilabial Alveolar Velar GlottalVoiced(no frictions)nasal 毛 年 雅 plosive or lateral 米 來/內 鵝/牙 Voiceless stopsaspirated 皮 台 可 plain 比 都 歌Voiceless affricates aspirated 菜/樹 plain 書/指/食Fricatives 士/速 海/系 爾/貳
Unlike in Hokkien, nasal initials in Teochew are not generally considered allophones of the voiced plosives, as nasals are relatively more common in Teochew and have less usage restrictions. For example, Teochew allows for syllables like nge̍k 逆 , which are impossible in Hokkien.
In Southern dialects of Teochew, labial initials (/p/, /pʰ/, /b/, /m/) have labiodental allophones ([pf], [pfʰ], [bv], [mv~ɱ]) before /-u-/. +CharacterPe̍h-ūe-jīPeng'imShantou dialectChaoyang dialectpùpuaⁿphuâphuèbúbuémuēmuá
Syllables
Syllables in Teochew contain an onset consonant, a medial glide, a nucleus, usually in the form of a vowel, but can also be occupied by a syllabic consonant like [ŋ], and a final consonant. All the elements of the syllable except for the nucleus are optional, which means a vowel or a syllabic consonant alone can stand as a fully-fledged syllable.
Onsets
All the consonants except for the glottal stop ʔ shown in the consonants chart above can act as the onset of a syllable; however, the onset position is not obligatorily occupied.
Finals Teochew finals consist maximally of a medial, nucleus and coda. The medial can be /i-/ or /u-/, the nucleus can be a monophthong or diphthong, and the coda can be a nasal or a stop. A syllable must consist minimally of a vowel nucleus or syllabic nasal. Nucleus -- -- -- -- -- -- -ai- -au- -oi- -ou- -ui- -iu- ∅- Medial ∅- i- u- ∅-i- u- ∅- i- ∅- ∅- ∅- ∅- u- ∅-i- ∅- ∅-i- ∅- ∅- Coda -∅ - - - - - -
Apart from the aforementioned rhymes, there are a few limitedly used finals with both glottal stop and nasalization, usually found in ideophones and interjections, e.g. he̍hⁿ /hẽʔ˥˦/ "agitated; confused", hauhⁿ /hãũʔ˧˨/ "to eat in large bites", khuàhⁿ-ua̍hⁿ /kʰũãʔ˨˩˨꜒꜔.ũãʔ˥˦/ "comfortable".
In most dialects of Teochew, historical codas and are merged with and . They were still present in mainstream Teochew in the 19th century, but now they are found only in certain peripheral dialects of Teochew, as well as in Hai Lok Hong Min.
The rime /ɯ/ is only found in Northern Teochew. In Southern Teochew (the Chaoyang dialect), this rime is merged with /u/. Chaozhou and Shantou rimes /ɯŋ/ (as in /ŋɯŋ˥/) and /ɯk/ (as in /ŋɯk˧˨/), derived from historical /ɯn/ and /ɯt/, are merged with /iŋ/ and /ik/ in Southern Teochew (as well as in Jieyang dialect, where /eŋ/ and /ek/ are used for /ɯŋ, iŋ/ and /ɯk, ik/).