Taishanese is also spoken throughout Sze Yup (or Siyi in the pinyin romanization of Standard Mandarin Chinese), located on the western fringe of the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong, China.
[1] Thus, up to the mid-20th century, Taishanese was the dominant variety of the Chinese language spoken in Chinatowns in Canada and the United States.
[12] The terms Toishan, Toisan, and Toisaan are all based on Cantonese pronunciation and are also frequently found in linguistic and non-linguistic literature.
[21][22] Another term used is Sìyì (Sze Yup or Seiyap in Cantonese romanization; Chinese: 四邑; lit.
Sìyì or Sze Yup refers to a previous administrative division in the Pearl River Delta consisting of the four counties of Taishan, Kaiping, Enping and Xinhui.
Taishanese can also be seen as a group of very closely related, mutually intelligible dialects spoken in the various towns and villages in and around Siyi (the four counties of Toishan, Hoiping, Yanping, Sunwui, transcribed from Cantonese; the names "Taishan, Kaiping, Enping and Xinhui", as above, are romanized from Standard Mandarin using Pinyin).
The Taishan region was a major source of Chinese immigrants through continental Americas from the late-19th to mid-20th centuries.
Taishanese was the predominant dialect spoken by the 19th-century Chinese builders of railroads in North America.
[20] As of 2015[update] Taishanese is still spoken in many Chinatowns throughout North America, including those of San Francisco,[26] Oakland, Los Angeles, New York City, Boston, Vancouver, Toronto, Chicago, and Montreal by older generations of Chinese immigrants and their children, but is today being supplanted by mainstream Cantonese and increasingly by Mandarin in both older and newer Chinese communities alike, across the continent.
[citation needed] There are 19 to 23 initials consonants (or onsets) in Taishanese, which is shown in the chart below in IPA: There are about seven different vowels in Taishanese: The final consonant (or rime) occurs after the initial sound, which consists of a medial, a nucleus, and a coda.
Historically, the common written language of Classical Literary Chinese united and facilitated cross-dialect exchange in dynastic China, as opposed to the spoken dialects which were too different to be mutually intelligible.
The sound represented by the IPA symbol ⟨ɬ⟩ (the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative) is particularly challenging, as it has no standard romanization.