i speak toisan...i just want to know is it a cousin lang of canto because whenever i am around someone speaking canto i 95% of the time understand them but for the more part they have a difficult time understanding me...so weird to me...do i have an accent?? And how many people in here speak Toisan?? So far I have not found anyone that speaks toisan

What I know is that there are two types of Cantonese!

My Cantonese teacher said that The ones spoken by HK celebrities are different form the cantonese that she knew!

She said that there is the Island and Mainland type?

I speak a little toisan buts thats from listening to my grandparents alot but my parents usually just speak regular cantonese... Toisan is a little harder to hear sometimes. I think its like the missing link between how manadrin evolved into cantonese or vice versa...

toisan???? i thought it was hoiwan. cause hoiwan is taiwanese right???? idk, i'm confused....

So where is Toisan spoken?

I have to admit that I'd never heard of the term toisan

i've heard it! its a language that is spoken in a section of china...
i dunnoe where

Its ini forgot hmm well yeah its part of chinese anywayz

yep, my grandparenst speak it... its a language from the middle of china..its accented cantonese...

yes and it sounds c0ool

So is this the older ones?

oooo nvm, i asked my mom the other day and she said toisan and hoiwan is both the same thing!!! they taiwanese people lol

yeah it is cool

i've herd of it. is it the language that the people in the mountains speak? where they hike all day and sing in that traditional chinese songs? i think its a dialect of cantonese right?

dont laugh at me but.. i 1st tought that this topic was about taoism

people from taiwan speak toisan!! didn't i already say that???

i thought toisan was like slang chinese....that's what one of my friends told me anyways...

yea thats what i thought. not really slang but country grammar for chinese. YA HERD.

Toisan (or Taishan in pinyin) is a dialect of Yue, which is more commonly known as Cantonese. It is not spoken in Taiwan (except by people who may have moved there from Toisan). Here is a website about Toisan and the region (1st link in English, 2nd link in Chinese).

http://www.taishan.com/english/

http://www.taishan.com/index.asp

You can also find out about Toisan on Ethnologue's website...they have info on languages all over the world.

www.ethnologue.com

Here are some relevant links:

http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=872

This one is for the Sino-Tibetan family

http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=YUH

This one is specifically on Yue (ie, Cantonese).

I hope this clears up some stuff

Toisan is accented cantonese

That's where all these overseas Chinese came from.

You are indeed a cunning linguist. I've been meaning to use that for awhile. But seriously, welcome to the AF forums.

Yes, if you speak Toisan, then you have an accent to me. I'm straight Canto, and I can't understand a word of Toisan. I did when I was a little kid and I had a babysitter who spoke it, but I can't understand it any more. It's all just gibberish to me, though it's more understandable than some other dialects. If a Toison person with some basic understanding of Canto talks to me very slowly, then I can probably understand most of it, but I still can't speak it.

Nah, more like redneck Chinese. The Cantonese you hear in movies and shows is the standard dialect taught in schools and spoken in urban areas like Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Macau, Dongguan, Zhongshan, and by Canto speakers abroad. A lot of speakers of other dialects in Guangzhou are usually at least semi-fluent in this dialect because of its popularity in both every speech and mass media (partially due to Hong Kong). Toisan (台山) is a dialect spoken in the Toisan region, a rural area maybe 50 kilometers west of Guangzhou and maybe 20 kilometers north of Zhuhai.

Toisan is Taishan.. If it's the one spoken in Chinatowns then it shuld be replaced with Guangzhou Cantonese.

I'm fluent in toisanese. all my relatives are toisanese

my parents speak both, whats the difference? i wanna know if i speak it too.

Taishan (台山 pinyin: Táishān; Cantonese: Toisan; local: Hoisan ) is a coastal city in Guangdong Province, China. The city is located southwest of Jiangmen, 140 kilometers west of Hong Kong, in the Pearl River delta, and it is home to 1 million people. It also contains 95 islands and islets, including the largest island in Guangdong, the 98 km² Xiachuan Island (下川岛).

Contents [showhide]
1 History

2 Administration

3 Demographics

4 External links

[edit]
History
Taishan was founded as Xinning District (新寧縣) in the 12th year of the Hongzhi reign during the Ming Dynasty. In 1914, Xinning was renamed Taishan to avoid confusion with the Xinnings of Hunan and Sichuan. On April 17, 1992, Taishan's status was changed from county to city.

[edit]
Administration
Taishan is under the juridiction of Jiangmen. In a jurisdiction of 3,286 km², Taishan contains twenty townships (镇), which are subdivided into 503 village residential committees (村居委会) and 3655 natural villages (自然村).

Baisha (白沙镇)
Beidou (北陡镇): separated from the other townships by Zhenhai Bay (镇海湾) inlet
Chixi (赤溪镇)
Dajiang (大江镇)
Doushan (斗山镇)
Duhu (都斛镇)
Guanghai (广海镇)
Haiyan (海宴镇): contains an overseas Chinese farm (华侨农场)
Nafu (那扶镇)
Duanfen (端芬镇)
Sanba (三八镇)
Sanhe (三合镇)
Shangchuan (上川镇): islands; Tourism Open Integrated Experimental Zone (旅游开发综合试验区)
Shenjing (深井镇)
Shuibu (水步镇)
Sijiu (四九镇)
Taicheng (台城镇): contains downtown and the city seat
Wencun (汶村镇)
Xiachuan (下川镇): islands; Tourism Open Integrated Experimental Zone (旅游开发综合试验区)
Zhonglou (冲蒌镇)
[edit]
Demographics
Since 1774, 1.3 million people living overseas trace their ancestry to Taishan, outnumbering those who live in Taishan. Among these are:

Governor Gary Locke of Washington (ancestry in Shuibu Township)
Governor General Adrienne Clarkson of Canada (in Sijiu)
Former Prime Minister Julius Chan of Papua New Guinea (in Annanjiangchao Village(安南江潮村) of Duoshan)
Magazine publisher Jack Yan of New Zealand (central Chinese heritage, but Taishanese from c. 1600)
In addition, many people from Taishan moved to the nearby Hong Kong, such as:

Actor Tony Leung
The locals natively speak Taishanese, or sei yap (four counties), usually considered to be similar to Cantonese Chinese. Most locals can speak the nearby Hong Kong Cantonese as well. For many years, Taishanese was the dialect spoken North America's Chinatowns

im from Duhu (都斛镇) . my first language was taishanese.. it's kinda hard for other people , but im 100% in love with it. taishanese what is it??? lolzzzzz

yeah toisan is a dialect in china..i dunno, but i heard it was spoken mostly in farm areas. But there are a lot of other people who speak it in other parts of China. I have lots of frds who's toisan..I dun have a toisan accent tho..haha

HAHHA! you fu-kin joking me right.

I feel as though the Toisan dialect is more similar to Min Nan hua then it is to Cantonese. Many of the pronounciations are similar when speaking Toisanese and Min Nan hua.

台山 is one of 4 farming counties in the Pearl Delta, NE of Hong Kong, in southeast Guangtung province.

Cantonese is the standard dialect spoken in the Guantung province. In the countryside, such as 台山, a variation of the Cantonese dialect is spoken. Hoi San Wa (in Toisanese) is spoken in 台山. For the most parrt, Cantonese and Toishanese speakers understand each other without much difficulty.

When I was a kid pre-kindergarten, I had a Toishanese babysitter and I could understand it perfectly, but now I can barely make it out at all. When I see my Toishanese-speaking relatives, they have to speak Cantonese to me, and meeting my ex-girlfriend's Toishanese parents was really bad. I had a hard time understanding some of it, and I had to keep asking for them to repeat themselves. Toishanese isn't that different, and I'm sure I would be able to pick it up in a few weeks if I had enough exposure, but it's not true that Cantonese and Toishanese automatically understand each other. My Cantonese-speaking Hakka in-laws and my Hong Kong-raised cousins don't understand it either.

Not trying to insult anyone, but there is quite a bit of inaccuracy here.

Yes, Taishanese is a dialect of Cantonese. They are, to some very little extent, mutually intelligible. The thing is that Taishanese is radically different from Cantonese in tone, flow and sound (anyone ever heard that special "thl-" sound the Taishanese make?).

Taishanese (台山話) and Taiwanese (台灣話/台語) are very, very far apart. The first is a Yue dialect, the second a Min dialect. That's about as far as Mandarin from Cantonese. Absolutely no intelligibility.

Lots of people speak Taishanese across SE Asia, maybe HK, and America, but it's been largely buried by the common language in that area. Most of them speak Cantonese, too. My grandma speaks both, and my dad speaks a little HK Cantonese (just a little).

I'm half-Toisaan, by the way.

Hope this clears out some misconceptions.

I speak Toisan... Yeah, I can really relate to your problem... Most Cantonese people don't understand Toisan... They think it's kind of funny and weird... So I have to switch over to Cantonese... It's the pronouciation problem...

It's still pretty strong in SF Chinatown among the old people, and some of the young people...

My family is from there, even though my parents were born in Guangdong (Guangzhou)...

I speak HK Cantonese and heard people from mainland speak it, it's not very different. But Toisan... hrm... I dunno.

Im 100% Toisan / Taishan

it's from southern China

people from the province of Taishan speak it

some people call it villagers talk, since they tend to use it in the old village

most people in the city speak canto

For those who doesn't know, there's more than 40 chinese dialects. Languages are different depending on the parts of china u live in. For the most part, toisan is mostly speaken near the farmlands. I speak toisan perfectly and so can i speak and understand cantonese perfectly. The problem with you is that because cantonese is used most of the time as a language, toisan is disregarded. It's more like a family language in the US because toisanese ppl dont speak to other toisanese in toisan. they usually speak cantonese. If you get a chance and visit china [ which i did last year] everyone speak toisan in a part of china. Even ppl in stores, malls, shops, etc. so everyone speaks it in that area instead of cantonese. In the beginning it felt so weird......
Well i hope this helps ;]

my dad speaks toisanese. it sounds fu-king retarded (in a cool way)

like half the words start with a 'tl' sound wtf

i don't understand one bit of it u__u;

in toi-san...

wut do u guys mean by TL sound?
i speak it but i don't think there's a TL sound

hmm. i looked on wikipedia and i think it's this sound:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alv...teral_fricative

it sounds like a 'tl' to me most of the time.

lol. I and my friends speak it too. There is no TL sound. Maybe we are so natural with it that we won't heard it from the other tongue perspectives, but I know many Chinese dialects. Toisan/Taishan is a Chinese dialect that still retains a lot of ancient Middle Kingdom sound characteristics. According to some historians, Toisan people are actually people migrated from the Hubei province of central China near Shanghai to the coastal areas in the Guangdong province many many years ago because of wars and droughts in the ancient China. A lot of people in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, etc…are actually the descendants of Toisan.

The languages of China is very simple.

Just remember, China is a huge country that for the past several thousand years has been relatively isolated from each other. While some have traveled far and wide, the majority of the people until recently (in the past couple of decades only) lived and died within a five mile radius and never travel outside that area. As a result, while there is one official written language, there are as many local dialects as there are localities. Probably tens of thousands. The farther you go, the more different the speech patterns.

Mandarian is merely one such dialect. When modern China was developed they had to settle on one "official" dialect, so they chose Beijing dialect as the official one (which is Mandarin). The reality, is that prior to that, Mandarin was no more "Chinese" than Toishan is.

Specifically of Toishan, it is not a slang. It is merely the form of speech that is spoken in the Toishan region of Canton. Like Mandarin, "standard" Cantonese is the dialect spoken in the Canton capitol (Guangzhou) and as such became the defacto standard dialect in Hong Kong as well. Toishan is no more or less Cantonese than "standard" Cantonese until recently.

Historically, probably because of poverty, the vast majority of immigrants prior to the 1960's were from the Toishan region thus the majority of the older generations of Chinese in America speak Toishan. The newer arrivals, even those who were of Toishan ancestry were from a more mobile generation and have learn the "official" language of Guangzhou Cantonese and Beijingnese (note I did not say Mandarin). Many people from the Fujian province immigrated but not as much as the Toishan.

By the way, Toishan is only one small city/county in China but have some of the world's best volleyball players around. I hear that the there is a large number of Toishan in the Chinese National team, which is of course, one of the world's best.

if its the same taishan near the city i live in, nothing special about it, just a typical communistic small city...
theres nothing to glorify such cities in main land china except shanghai and beijing...if a foreigner visits these small cities, having a good time will be hard...

Yeah, it's the same city. Been to it myself. But then, the greatness of a city is not what it has or what bars there are, it's the people there. And it is as great as Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Been to those cities too. Don't get me wrong, it's nice with alot more bars and all, but if I to choose a place to live, Toishan would be just as good as Beijing or Shanghai. As for a place to visit, Beijing then Qingdoa. Shanghai is too modernized...it's not much different than many American cities except the traditional parts of it...which is not it's draw in the first place.

lol. So True! Toishan people actually the first Chinese group migrated to USA and Canada in the 1800s century. They were responsible to build up the infrastructures of USA and Canada, e.g. railroads, gold mines (gold rushes), plantations, factories, etc... Both USA and Canada owe them a great deal. Today famous Toishan people including the labor secretary of USA, the governor of Washington State, Danny Chen, Beyond (the H.K. rock band), etc... lol