To follow up on my post on the Taishanese spoken by my parents (the 端芬 Duanfen dialect), here’s a look into the initials and finals of this dialect.

I decided to write a bit about Taishanese tones, or at least, those of the Taishanese dialect my father speaks. The reason for writing this is mostly because I wanted to elaborate on Stephen Li’s article on the subject but with more detail, and because I felt his article didn’t properly account for the many situations where Taishanese tones don’t cleanly map to Cantonese.

As you may have figured, this blog will mainly be about Taishanese. With this in mind, here are some other resources that (in my opinion) are useful for the Taishanese learners and enthusiasts out there.

In a blog post I made a long time ago, I mentioned a paper that detailed the various dialects of Taishanese (namely 台城 Taicheng、端芬 Duanfen、荻海 Dihai、新昌 Xinchang). It’s likely the most thorough comparison of the dialects of Taishanese I’ve ever seen, but I’ve noticed that a few of the sounds have changed since when it was published (in 1950!). This post will list some of the changes the Taicheng (台城) dialect has experienced since this paper was published.

(Note: Wiktionary’s Taishanese romanisation will be used in this post.)

My parents were born and grew up in a village in Duanfen, Guangdong. They speak a mutually intelligible dialect of Taishanese that, irritatingly enough, is very difficult to find information on. Taishanese dictionaries, themselves few and far between, document the pronunciation in the capital of Taishan: Taicheng.