The Swatow dialect, or in Mandarin the Shantou dialect, is a
Chinese dialect
Chinese, also known as Sinitic, is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of hundreds of local varieties, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast of main ...
mostly spoken in
Shantou
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 ...
in
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) ...
,
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...
. It is a dialect of
Chaoshan Min
Chaoshan or Teo-Swa (, Teochew dialect: ''Diê5suan3 uê7'', Shantou dialect: ''Dio5suan3 uê7'') is a Southern Min language spoken by the Teochew people of the Chaoshan region of eastern Guangdong province, China, and by their diaspora around ...
language.
Shantou Dialect entry in Glossika
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Phonology
Shantou dialect has 18 initials, 61 rimes and 8 tones.
Initials
Rimes
Tones
Tone sandhi
Shantou dialect has extremely extensive tone sandhi
Tone sandhi is a phonological change occurring in tonal languages, in which the tones assigned to individual words or morphemes change based on the pronunciation of adjacent words or morphemes.
It usually simplifies a bidirectional tone into a ...
rules: in an utterance, only the last syllable pronounced is not affected by the rules. The two-syllable tonal sandhi rules are shown in the table below:
References
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Further reading
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External links
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{{Chinese language
Guangdong
Southern Min
Shantou
Teochew dialect