(: ( Teochew) (

Swatow Shantou, alternately romanized as Swatow and sometimes known as Santow, is a prefecture-level city on the eastern coast of Guangdong, China, with a total population of 5,502,031 as of the 2020 census (5,391,028 in 2010) and an administrative ...

), : or , : or ) is a

Teochew dialect Teochew or Chaozhou (, , , Teochew endonym: , Shantou dialect: ) is a dialect of Chaoshan Min, a Southern Min language, that is spoken by the Teochew people in the Chaoshan region of eastern Guangdong and by their diaspora around the world. ...

romanisation Romanization or romanisation, in linguistics, is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and ...

system as a part of Guangdong Romanisation published by Guangdong Provincial Education Department in 1960. Tone of this system is based on Swatow dialect. The system uses

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the ...

to transcript pronunciation and numbers to note tones. Before that, another system called , which was introduced by the missionaries in 1875, had been widely used. Since Teochew has high phonetic similarity with

Hokkien The Hokkien () variety of Chinese is a Southern Min language native to and originating from the Minnan region, where it is widely spoken in the south-eastern part of Fujian in southeastern mainland China. It is one of the national languages ...

, another

Southern Min Southern Min (), Minnan ( Mandarin pronunciation: ) or Banlam (), is a group of linguistically similar and historically related Sinitic languages that form a branch of Min Chinese spoken in Fujian (especially the Minnan region), most of Taiwa ...

variety, and can also be used to transcribe Teochew. The name is a transcription of "" using this system.

Alphabet

This system uses the

, but does not include f, j, q, v, w, x, or y. ê is the letter e with

circumflex The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from la, circumflexus "bent around"a ...

Initials

There are 18

initials In a written or published work, an initial capital, also referred to as a drop capital or simply an initial cap, initial, initcapital, initcap or init or a drop cap or drop, is a letter at the beginning of a word, a chapter, or a paragraph that ...

. Syllables not starting with consonants are called zero initials. b and g can also be used as ending consonants.

Finals

There are 59 finals :

Tones

Symbols of tones are notated at the top right of consonants or vowels which have top

loudness In acoustics, loudness is the subjectivity, subjective perception of sound pressure. More formally, it is defined as, "That attribute of auditory sensation in terms of which sounds can be ordered on a scale extending from quiet to loud". The rel ...

. For example: * 詩 - si¹ * 死 - si² * 世 - si³ * 薛 - sih⁴

Differences in rime

This is a list of differences in rime in Teochew dialect by regions. Tone in

Raoping Raoping County ( postal: Jaoping; ) is a county in eastern Guangdong Province, bordering Fujian Province to the east, and facing the South China Sea to the south. The city with the same name has 135,600 inhabitants (1990). It is under the jurisdic ...

is almost same as in

.潮州話拼音方案（2003年），根據“潮汕方言韻母內部差異表”章節。 Only general differences are listed, some certain distinctions of certain words are not listed.

References