Taishanese Phrases: 30 Things to Say to Your Wuyi Relatives

Why These Taishanese Phrases Aren’t Pinyin

For roughly a century, Taishanese (台山话, Táishān huà — the diaspora spells it Hoisan or Toisan) was the working language of North American Chinatown: not Mandarin, and not the Cantonese of the phrasebooks. It was the speech of laundries and restaurants from the mid-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth, holding a dominant position in many Chinatowns into the 1980s and 1990s, with the decline varying by city and community. What was said in a Taishan village became what was said in Chinatown. On 22 June 2006, Canada’s prime minister closed the head-tax apology in the House of Commons with a halting line in Cantonese — 加拿大道歉, “Canada apologizes” — the language, not Mandarin, that the elders in the gallery had waited decades to hear.

Their descendants now plan trips home with phrasebooks in the wrong language. Taishanese is 四邑片 (Sìyì piàn, the Siyi branch), a first-level division within Yue parallel to the 粤海片 that contains Guangzhou Cantonese; an untrained 广州人 understands about two to three tenths of a conversation with a 台山人. The shared layer is real — 唔该-type courtesies, the whole -m/-p/-t/-k coda system — but the sounds that place you are not shared.

Thirty well-chosen phrases, each transcribed with its sounds attached, are enough to be recognised at a relative’s table. The transcription column is the whole argument, because it is not Mandarin pinyin. It follows 邓钧’s 《台山方音字典（普通话对照）》 (A Dictionary of Taishan Pronunciation, 2016 revision; 8,933 character entries, 640-plus surname readings); 《台山话概要》 (2020; 4,850 entries) is checked against it, and 《台山方言词典》 (2018; 5,000-plus phrases in IPA) stands behind both. The three are not averaged: where the two 邓钧 books disagree, the tables print one form and flag the other, and any reading that could not be checked against a published page is tagged book-derived. The marks carry tone class — – 阴平 and 阴去, which fall together in 台城; > 阴上; * 阳平; ‘ 阳上; + 阳去 — and 入声 syllables keep their -p/-t/-k endings beside those same marks.

What this speech has meant — and why it is now being recorded by the people who inherited it — is already written on this site. This guide teaches sound first, phrases second.

Five Sounds That Place You

Placement, not vocabulary, is the engine here: a learner gets thirty attempts to be heard as a Taishanese speaker rather than a Cantonese speaker, a Mandarin speaker or a tourist.

[ɬ] is one salient marker among several, not the loudest. 邓钧 himself demotes it — 不是最主要的特点, its cause being 台开’s insistence on keeping 庄组’s 山母 apart from 精组’s 心母 — and points instead at the t/d-erosion in row 3. The safest worked example is 心 [ɬim]; 三, 四 and 死 circulate as examples but had no independent attestation here.

Tones, stated once: Taishanese has five distinct 舒声 tones — nine if the four 入声 are counted; a published count of ten comes from 王力 and 钱淞生’s 《台山方音》, which counts 阴平 and 阴去 as two classes though they sit at one pitch. This guide prints 邓钧’s letter-tone marks and no pitch numerals of its own — the one numeral set it quotes, in the 变调 table below, is his published data. One printable fact: 北, 白, 伯 and 百 are four distinct tones where Cantonese merges 百 and 伯.

Two numbers are worth printing, and one is not. 台城 has 19 onsets, published independently twice; the 韵母 count is left out entirely, since 39 and 41 both circulate from one lineage. Then the county split, named here and paid off in the last section: [ɬ] belongs to 台山 and 开平 only. 广海 and 海宴 run 17 onsets and 7 tones, without it.

What You Say at the Door

Greeting here is food-based, not weather-based or clock-based. 「食饭未?」 functions as hello, not as an enquiry about eating — three independent local sources say so, one calling it 台山人最常用的一句问候语, “the greeting Taishan people use most,” the equivalent of 你好 and of Hello. Hence the rule: 问候, 致谢 and 告别 arrive as fixed pairs, so the answer is printed with the question.

Two aids are not authorities: web write-ups spell 食 as hie, one Weibo list as 恰. Use them as aids only — the column above wins.

Two label corrections. 食朝 (breakfast), 食昼 (lunch) and 食晚 (dinner) are shared with Cantonese and other southern speech and are labelled 粤语通用; only the greeting use of 食饭未 is Siyi-marked. Substitutions that cannot be guessed from Cantonese keep 台山特有: 落水 [lok’ sui>] for rain, where Cantonese says 落雨; 该 [khoi-] for “this” and 恁 [ning] for “that”; 到乃 [dau- nai’] for “where”, which one encyclopedia table instead prints 哪定; 几浩 [gi- hau+] for “how”, printed 几何 there; and 丐时 [goi- si] for “now”, also written 个时. Two character sets circulate for one word; a guide that hid the second would be teaching a spelling as a fact.

The gazetteer’s 词汇 tables are weakest on greeting and courtesy, so this block is dictionary-led: unattested items are dropped, not filled in from Mandarin. The meals themselves are the food guide’s subject.

Calling People by the Right Name

This is an address system, not a kinship glossary, and its failure mode is wrong-generation address — a sibling term for a parent’s sibling, or a title where the family uses a name. So the instruction comes first: ask a relative what they are called; do not look up a title.

Two structural rules carry the block. 阿- is more active in Siyi than in Cantonese and attaches to given names, not title-plus-surname. And 变调 is the sound of address; 邓钧’s own published set is the most checkable table in this article.

The general rule is 33→35, 11→15, 21→215, 32→325, with 入声 syllables adding an e55; the low-falling change functions as a noun marker — 本质上为一种名词标记, per a 华南师范大学 thesis on the 变调 of 三合, 斗山, 端芬 and 下川 — and it is receding among the young.

The 父系 / 外家 distinction (paternal line against the mother’s family) decides which term is correct, and the sibling set follows the same prefix logic: 大佬, 细佬, 家姐, 细妹. One bridging sentence applies to every family: kin readings vary by household, so listen for your family’s own form before correcting it.

The Politeness Floor

This block is short because the sources are thin: 问候, 致谢 and 告别 are the gazetteer’s thinnest coverage, so authority sits with the dictionaries and unattested items are dropped, not invented. Most of what survives is honestly 粤语通用.

Two frames carry more than any single phrase. Negation is 唔 before the verb, as in the 1962 lesson text’s 我学台山话，唔学美国话, and questions can end in 未, as 食饭未 shows. One mandatory variant: where this guide prints 唔, one encyclopedia’s examples print 毋 for the same [m] morpheme — same word, two characters, neither wrong.

One item this block leaves out: 返去. It is 粤语通用 and means “go back” — 新华网 glosses it 回去 — so it is not a Taishanese-distinctive verb. One published 四邑 description glosses it differently again, for 开平 only and with a tone of reproach, in an entry that circulates in two places and is defective, its own example pointing at “always” rather than “one day”; neither sense is printed here. For “go home”, the forms you are likelier to hear in the Wuyi are 返企 and 返K; this guide will not pretend those are settled either.

Which Village, Which Branch

This is the block a reader rehearses on the plane: 「你系边条村嘅?」 is the sentence that converts a tourist into a returning relative.

Three names for one place: 新宁, founded 1499; renamed 台山 in 民国三年, 1914; with 宁阳 surviving on overseas associations. Emigrant letters and genealogies address it the old way, and the address units shifted too — 都, 图 and 甲 in those documents against today’s 镇 and 自然村 — so expect both systems in one conversation. Readings to rehearse: 台城 (the seat, and this guide’s variety), 广海 (which the county’s own record calls a departure point for clandestine emigration; the claim that it was the earliest embarkation point is book-only and is not printed), 海口埠, 汀江墟, and the island townships 上川 and 下川.

If the trip is the point rather than the conversation, start with how to find your ancestral village, then the 10-day Wuyi roots itinerary. For the buildings themselves — the towers, the halls, the arcaded streets — see Taishan’s village and heritage record and Chonglou, a village and its diaspora.

The Words Your Family Uses About Leaving

A reader half-knows this vocabulary in English — Gold Mountain, the letter-and-money man, the passage paid down a credit-ticket ladder. Here it is as speakable speech, anchored to the county’s 华侨 record.

The money words are the ones a relative will use at a table: 银 (ngan, silver, meaning money) and 寄钱 (gi- chin, to send money home). The mechanism behind them, and the women who received them, is already published.

The words that came back with them. One part of this language a reader has already half-heard. 台山市博物馆’s deputy curator 林淑莉 defines it on the record: 半唐番, “half Tang, half foreign,” is what happened when emigrants came home and spoke Taishan with English falling into it, and the family learned some back — 唐 meaning Taishan speech, 番 meaning English. An encyclopedia taxonomy divides it four ways (half-Taishan half-English, half-transliteration, borrowed outright, coined in America), and the exemplars at least two sources agree on include 波 (ball), 骨波 (good ball), 市担 (stamp), 好反 or 好fun (fun), 好泥 (how nice) and 趴士钵 (passport). Much of it is court vocabulary, since 台山 is the country’s 排球之乡, with 九人排球 a provincial intangible heritage item — the honest frame is things and sport, not address. It is loan nouns, not greeting or kinship speech, and it stays out of the tables above. Two cautions: 沙尘 and 架势 are southern slang, not English loans, and 好颈疼 was found in no source and is not printed.

Reading the Letter Out Loud

银信 (yínxìn, the silver letter) is Taishan’s name for what the qiaopi world calls 侨批 (qiáopī) — in 潮汕 speech, 信 is 批. The archive 侨批档案·海外华侨银信 entered UNESCO’s Memory of the World register in June 2013, Guangdong’s first. These letters were written in a colloquial register — exactly the register this guide teaches, which is why the section sits here and not at the top.

A required caution. 呆 for 我, 乃 for 哪 and 丐时 for 现在 are local written forms attested in the dialect dictionaries, with the variants shown — not a verified 侨批 letter-register. 丐 is independently web-attested only as the determiner in 丐好泥; the published qiaopi dialect lexicon is overwhelmingly 闽南 and 潮汕 (厝, house; 唐山, the homeland; 批, letter); and no source examined here showed 呆 or 乃 inside a letter. This guide will not claim an archive reading it cannot show.

Reading letters aloud is documented in the wider qiaopi museum network — the 少年中国说 programme’s 朗读华侨家书, the 福建省档案馆’s immersive recitals — each attributed to its own programme, not to Taishan. At 海口埠 in 端芬, the 银信 museum complex includes a recreated 侨眷读写家书 scene, holds 1,000-plus 银信 across six 展陈板块, and fronts a 银信纪念广场 with 20 银信柱 built from 648 瓷片. Its build-out ran from May 2017, and no single opening year is printed here: a provincial government construction notice projected one date, 中国新闻网 described the museum as already standing in 2019, and the sources do not agree. The claim that actors read the letters aloud in Taishanese there could not be confirmed, and is not printed.

For your family’s own letters, see the hands-on qiaopi guide, the Haikou Port museum story and the town that built the schools those letters paid for.

Your Surname, the Way a Relative Says It

A surname romanised in Taishanese looks wrong in Cantonese and Mandarin alike: read a Taishanese-transcribed name with Mandarin or Cantonese habits and you get a joke instead of a person (如果使用普通话和粤语的拼读习惯来解读台山话音译的姓名，往往容易闹出笑话). So the surname is your own check on whether this guide is working. 《台山方音字典》 carries 640-plus surname readings because a name’s reading can differ from ordinary speech.

Beyond those two, common dialect-based forms include 余 → Yee and 谭 → Tom, both PROBABLE rather than settled, and 司徒 → Seto or Seeto; treat Soo carefully, because the surname lists map it to 苏, 宿 and 舒, and conflating two families is the error this block exists to prevent. The onset predictions are attributable, not certain: 古心母 surnames (苏, 宋, 孙, 萧, 薛) take [ɬ]-, and 古日母 and 疑母 surnames (伍, 吴, 严, 颜) take [ng]-, with 颜 [ngan] attested as an exemplar. The specific surname readings are book-only and PROBABLE. No single English spelling is the only correct one, and family variation is normal.

One self-test, from the county’s own record: the 1985 surname census in 《台山县志》 lists 159 names, among them 司徒, 欧阳, 上官 and 甄 — characters rare or absent in Cantonese-proper regions. If one of those is yours, the romanisation you inherited is evidence. The print channel is the 族刊: 《风采月刊》, founded in 1925 at 台山台城, among the Wuyi’s largest-circulation clan magazines, with a US edition. The full method is the surname-to-village blueprint.

When It Doesn’t Match

The phrases above are 台城腔 (Táichéng qiāng) — the county-seat variety, as recorded in sources published between roughly 1988 and 2020. Said once more as premise, then shown where it stops being true.

The county’s gazetteer divides its speech into 北区腔, 东南腔, 西南腔 and 川岛腔, plus a 客家话 population; the 川岛腔 label is the gazetteer’s, so it is attributed rather than asserted, and an encyclopedia instead describes three zones, 台北, 东南 and 西南 — a variant noted rather than silently chosen. What the label points at is real: the 变调 survey’s points are 三合, 斗山, 端芬 and 下川, and the high-falling change exists only at the 下川 point. The island families sit furthest from 台城.

Six townships sit one town off the printed reading — 四九, 三合, 白沙, 三八, 水步 and 大江 — and 端芬话别有特色 is the encyclopedia’s own phrase. The counts vary with them: 台城 19 onsets and 9 tones; 广海 17 and 7, without [ɬ]; 海宴 17 and 7; across the county, 7 to 9 tones. The rule holds in the same shape: [h] travels across Siyi, t-deletion is 台开 only. Do not extend a 台城 rule to “the Wuyi,” and do not over-extend the plural-by-tone description — in 台城 the plural is a coda change plus a tone change, not a tone alone.

Then the triage, before anything is memorised. A family that says 赤溪 may inherit Hakka, not Taishanese. 赤溪厅 was constituted in 同治六年 (1867) after roughly twelve years of the 土客 conflicts, out of parts of 潮居都 and 矬峒都, directly under the Guangdong provincial administration (a minority source says Guangzhou prefecture instead; the provincial version is printed). In 1912 the 厅 became 赤溪县; in 1953 the county was abolished and merged into 台山县; in December 1986 it became 赤溪镇. It is 台山唯一的纯客家人聚居地; the Hakka arrived before the split — 1668 by one local history, 雍正–乾隆 by the town government’s account — from 嘉应州, 惠州 and 潮州. Remember 1867; the ending date is 1953.

The register has a date, and it is worth stating plainly: this is 老派 (older-generation) 台城 speech from sources published roughly 1988–2020, and younger 台山 residents’ pronunciation has already shifted — one thesis notes the low-falling change receding among the young, with a newer high-level change borrowed along with loanwords. Expect a generational gap; that is not a wrong book. Which is the practical close, and the way the guide ends as it began: ask a relative to correct you. Say the phrase, take the correction, say it again.

Thirty phrases is not much. It is enough to be recognised — the next sentence at the table, said well enough that somebody answers you in their own voice. If the trip itself is next, the Duhu roots guide covers the ground between the airport and the village.

Sources and Verification Notes

Authorities. 邓钧 (ed.), 《台山方音字典（普通话对照）》 (2016 revision; 8,933 character entries, 640-plus surname readings) — the default column. 邓钧 (ed.), 《台山话概要》 (2020; 4,850 entries) — checked against it. 黄剑云, 《台山方言词典》 (2018; 5,000-plus phrases in IPA) — the third system behind it. Items tagged book-derived are this guide’s system reading, not page-verified entries; the phrase romanisations are therefore PROBABLE pending a page-level check.

External sources.

• 百度百科《四邑话》 — the 台城话 19-onset and 韵母 tables, 广海话 (17 onsets, 7 tones), 海宴话, and 端芬话.
• 百度百科《台山话》 — tone count, 变音 inflection of the pronouns, the four 半唐番 word classes, and the Chinatown lingua franca record.
• 邓钧《台山(台城)话的语音基本特点》(2021) — the 变调 table in “Calling People by the Right Name” (阿意 a33 ji35, 阿愉 a33 ji15, 阿羽 a33 ji215, 阿裕 a33 ji325).
• 邓钧《台山(台城)话的语音基本特点》收录本 — the same 舒声升变调 set, independently posted.
• U.S. Army Language School / Defense Language Institute, Chinese–Cantonese (Toishan) Basic Course, 1962 (LC PL1733 U5) — the lesson text quoted in “The Politeness Floor.”
• 华南师范大学学位论文库 —《台山方言词汇变调比较研究》(2019) — the 三合/斗山/端芬/下川 survey points and the low-falling noun marker; the library record requires an institutional login.
• 75one.net《四邑話正字·第一期：安人》 — the 阿人 / 安人 discussion.
• 《【南粤古驿道·台山】来自古驿道方言问候：hie饭未？》(2023) — the greeting and its fixed answer, 你hie饭未 / hie了，你捏.
• 腾讯新闻《”侨乡”台山话：部分词保留英语发音》(2021) — 半唐番 exemplars (市担, 波, 骨波, 好fun, 好泥, 趴士钵).
• 凤凰卫视《发现大湾区》报道（腾讯新闻，2025） — 台山市博物馆 deputy curator 林淑莉 on 半唐番.
• 台山市人民政府门户网站 · 赤溪镇人民政府 — 赤溪厅 1867, 赤溪县 1912, the 1953 merger, 1986 赤溪镇, and 台山唯一的纯客家人聚居地.
• 中新网《广东侨乡台山中秋”银信”传情送祝福》(2019) — 端芬海口埠 银信纪念地 and museum.
• 澎湃新闻《一封”信”，一段台山故事》 — the June 2013 Memory of the World inscription and 海口埠’s position at the 大同河 / 端芬河 confluence.
• 澎湃新闻《央视重磅播出！看台山”侨批中的党史”》(2023) — 银信 as Taishan’s name for 侨批.
• 台山市人民政府门户网站《海丝记忆·侨乡印记——银信传情，侨乡存根》(2026) — the 海口埠 museum’s 1,000-plus 侨批 and the 世界记忆 listing.
• 新华社《广东话百科：返去》(搜狐转载) — 返去 glossed 回去, the reason it is not printed as a Siyi verb.

Web-attested items (sources named in the tables): 百度百科《台山话》 and 《四邑话》, 新华网《广东话百科》, 南方网《台山人亲戚称呼大全》, 75one.net《四邑話正字·第一期：安人》, 豆瓣《台山话实用教程》, 微信·南粤古驿道·台山《hie饭未？》, 台山市人民政府网 赤溪镇 record, 广东省人民政府《出洋第一港 侨批念乡情》, 澎湃新闻, 华南师范大学《台山方言词汇变调比较研究》, and the U.S. Army Language School / Defense Language Institute Chinese–Cantonese (Toishan) Basic Course, Monterey, 1962 (LC PL1733 U5).

Held back, with reasons. 返去 as “go home” (contested, not Siyi-marked); 慢慢讲 and repeat-request forms (no attestation beyond a category); 好颈疼 (unverified); 沙尘 and 架势 (southern slang, not English loans); 到乃 and 几浩 printed without their variants; 三, 四 and 死 as [ɬ] exemplars; the museum’s read-aloud claim and its single opening year.

Continue Reading

• The Siyi Dialect: A Heartbeat of Identity Calling Across Generations
• Reading Qiaopi: What Remittance Letters Reveal About Wuyi Families
• Wuyi Roots Trip Itinerary: A 10-Day Plan for Descendants
• What to Eat in Wuyi: A Food Guide for Returning Diaspora

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