Teochew Min

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. Additionally, there are many Teochew-speakers among Chinese communities in Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. 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, 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:
* Teochew dialect, spoken in urban Chaozhou ; a similar dialect is spoken in Chenghai
* Jieyang dialect, spoken in urban Jieyang ; related dialects are spoken in adjacent areas in Jiedong, Jiexi, as well as in northern parts of Puning and Chaoyang
* Swatow dialect, spoken in urban Shantou
* Raoping dialect, spoken in Raoping County
Southern Teochew, or Chaoyang-Puning division, including:
* Chaoyang dialect, spoken in the historical Teoyeo 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, 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. Hai Lok Hong and Eastern Namoa dialects have or instead, depending on the etymology of the word, similarly to the Chiangchew Hokkien. Southern Teochew may be further divided into Huilai—Puning dialects and Teoyeo 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 is perceived as "soft", "cute", and "high-pitched"; the Teoyeo 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" by Zhang Shizhen, "Ji Mu Zhi Yin" by Jiangxia Maotingshi and "Fifteen consonants of Teochew language" 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.

Romanization

There are two principal romanization systems for Teochew:

Pe̍h-ūe-jī, originally invented for Hokkien in the 19th century and adapted for Teochew
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.

IPA	Pe̍h-ūe-jī	Peng'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

IPA	Pe̍h-ūe-jī	Peng'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

IPA	Pe̍h-ūe-jī	Peng'im
	-ng	-ng
	-k	-g
	-h	-h
	-ⁿ	-n
	-m	-m
	-p	-b
	-n	—
	-t	—