Baisha (;

Taishanese Taishanese (), alternatively romanized in Cantonese as Toishanese or Toisanese, in local dialect as Hoisanese or Hoisan-wa, is a dialect of Yue Chinese native to Taishan, Guangdong. Although it is related to Cantonese, Taishanese has little ...

: Bak-sa) is a town of

Taishan __NOTOC__ Taishan may refer to: *Mount Tai or Taishan (), Shandong, China *Taishan District, Tai'an (), named after the Mount Tai, a district in Tai'an, Shandong, China *Taishan, Guangdong (), a county-level city of Jiangmen, Guangdong, China **Gre ...

Guangdong Guangdong (, ), alternatively romanized as Canton or Kwangtung, is a coastal province in South China on the north shore of the South China Sea. The capital of the province is Guangzhou. With a population of 126.01 million (as of 2020) ...

province. , it has two residential communities and 18 villages under its administration. It has a population of 140,000 residing in an area of .

History

Baisha town was the ancestral home of many of the first

Chinese Canadian , native_name = , native_name_lang = , image = Chinese Canadian population by province.svg , image_caption = Chinese Canadians as percent of population by province / territory , pop = 1,715,7704.63% of the ...

s. Their descendants live all over Canada, and used to predominate before the 1980s in the Chinatowns of Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary, Banff and Edmonton, and US

West Coast West Coast or west coast may refer to: Geography Australia * Western Australia *Regions of South Australia#Weather forecasting, West Coast of South Australia * West Coast, Tasmania **West Coast Range, mountain range in the region Canada * Britis ...

cities such as

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

and

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...

. Citation: https://asian.library.ubc.ca/files/2011/08/Head-Tax-brochure2-1.pdf

Economy

Baisha Town is one of the few regions in northern

province where illegal rare earth mines were operating. Baisha Town is rich in rare earth minerals such as

dysprosium Dysprosium is the chemical element with the symbol Dy and atomic number 66. It is a rare-earth element in the lanthanide series with a metallic silver luster. Dysprosium is never found in nature as a free element, though, like other lanthanides, it ...

Dialect

The Baisha variant of

is fading amongst the descendants of Canadian-Chinese, as

Cantonese Cantonese ( zh, t=廣東話, s=广东话, first=t, cy=Gwóngdūng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding are ...

and

Mandarin Mandarin or The Mandarin may refer to: Language * Mandarin Chinese, branch of Chinese originally spoken in northern parts of the country ** Standard Chinese or Modern Standard Mandarin, the official language of China ** Taiwanese Mandarin, Stand ...

become more dominant. Based on observations of Chinese-Canadian elders living in Edmonton between 1980 and 2005, it would seem that the Taishan language spoken in Baisha in the mid-20th century differed somewhat from that spoken in Taicheng (Hoiseng in the Hoisan language, 台城), the county seat of Taishan (Hoisan, 台山县). Indeed, the pronunciation was more or less the same as that of people living across the river in the next county,

Kaiping Kaiping (), postal map romanization, alternately romanization of Chinese, romanized in Cantonese as Hoiping, is a county-level city in Guangdong provinces of China, Province, China. It is located ín the western section of the Pearl River Delt ...

(Hoiping in the Toisanese language, 开平). One notable difference can be seen in the shift of certain vowel sounds, as follows: Besides the differences in some vowel sounds, the consonant of

is usually realized as , and as .

References

Taishan, Guangdong Towns in Guangdong {{Guangdong-geo-stub