Preface

“Learning dialects will add to our children’s burden, and take away time and energy from English and Mandarin. Dialects also cause negative interferences on the learning of English and Mandarin, due to differences in their vocabulary, phonetics and syntax. With Mandarin, we can connect with the whole of China and its 1.3 billion people. Dialects will confine us to our original village or town or at the most, the province of our ancestors.”

– From Appendix to Speech by Mr Lee Kuan Yew, Minister Mentor, at Speak Mandarin Campaign’s 30th Anniversary Launch, 17 March 2009 (Source)

Aims

Many heritage speakers of Teochew would like to study the language seriously, but lack suitable learning materials. Many phrasebooks teach useful vocabulary and phrases, but do not provide longer examples nor teach the grammar that is needed for expressing complex thoughts. The prospective learner is further hampered by the following difficulties:

Many dictionaries focus on Chinese characters 字 rather than words 詞. Many older dictionaries were primarily intended to aid in reciting written texts, rather than documenting the spoken vernacular.
Many Teochew words, including some very common ones, are represented with different Chinese characters by different authors. Setting aside etymology and the question of “original” characters for the moment, this makes it hard to learn, as the written language is not standardized to the extent that even Cantonese is.
There are different romanization schemes in use. Although there is a standard one published by the Guangdong regional government, it is not universally adopted and has several features that are distracting to English speakers.
There are few romanized texts in Teochew that can be studied by language learners. Without phonetic spelling, if you don’t already know how a character is supposed to be pronounced, you cannot learn how to by reading.
Many useful reference works are out of print or otherwise difficult to find.

To address these difficulties, this study guide has the following basic aims:

Prioritize pronunciation, colloquial language, and the romanized orthography over using the “correct” Chinese characters. Chinese characters used in the text are intended as a rough guide for those who can read them, but do not follow or suggest any standard.
Use the standard Guangdong Peng’im, alongside the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), to depict pronunciation accurately.
Outline grammatical points and colloquial usage, especially those that differ from Mandarin, which is the variety of Chinese used for most formal education.
Transcribe examples of vernacular speech in phonetic spelling, as examples of how the language is used in real life.

Audience

This guide was originally written for my own self-study. As such it is most suitable for other heritage speakers like myself, who have already had some exposure to the sounds of Teochew but who have never studied it formally or in written form. It also assumes that one has already learned Mandarin or another Chinese language, as it uses Mandarin as the starting point for comparing differences in vocabulary and grammar. This guide does not attempt to distinguish between the different dialects of Teochew (e.g. Teochew City vs. Swatow).

Why learn Teochew?

There are several reasons to learn Teochew, apart from its intrinsic interest as a language. Fundamentally, the use of a language is to communicate with other people. Both heritage speakers and people with no family or ethnic ties to Teochew may have a variety of motivations for wanting to learn Teochew:

Linguistic or scholarly interest in learning a Chinese language other than Mandarin.
Reconnecting with one’s cultural heritage.
Communicating with elderly relatives who only speak Teochew.
Religious ministry, preaching to Teochew-speaking congregants.
Communicating with Teochew speakers for professional reasons, e.g. with patients in a medical setting, or taking statements for legal or notarial purposes.
Research involving Teochew language sources, e.g. oral history recordings.

How to learn Teochew

This study guide should be used in conjunction with other resources and learning guides. It is primarily a guide to grammar and usage, but it is not a set of lessons nor is it for absolute beginners.

Teochew language lessons

The best way to learn a language is by direct personal contact with an experienced language teacher. In Singapore, Chinese dialect lessons are sometimes offered at community centers or clan associations, or by private individuals and companies. The Teochew Poit Ip Huay Kuan offers Teochew lessons on a regular basis. Upcoming lessons are advertised on its website (in Mandarin).

Teochew language textbooks

Language textbooks can be used for self-study, but require some prior knowledge of phonetics in order to lean the proper pronunciation. There are a number of textbooks, in varying degrees of comprehensiveness, both in print and online:

Spoken Swatow by Alvin and Barbara Koons (2016) was originally prepared in 1967 by a husband-and-wife team of American church workers who were working with the Teochew-speaking Baptist church in Hong Kong. This book is entirely in phonetic transcription, and is structured as a series of lessons for absolute beginners. The original edition published by the American Baptist Mission is out of print, but it is available from the print-on-demand service Lulu.com
Let’s Speak Teochew by Wu Yingjun (2018) is written by a Singaporean Teochew, and is aimed at heritage speakers. The dictionary by the same author is also useful, although its one drawback is that pronunciation is only given for the headwords. It is available from the Teochew Store online, and from the Maha Yu Yi Bookstore in Bras Basah Complex, Singapore.
Online lessons from the Teo-Swa Cultural Association in Hong Kong (in Chinese).

Teochew language multimedia

The Teochew Store is an online shop selling books and media on Teochew language and culture, which also has a regularly-updated blog, resources for free download, and many useful links.

Videos and audio recordings are also important for hearing the sounds of the language. There are several YouTube tutorials on Teochew language, of varying levels of difficulty. Films, TV shows, and video clips show how the language is used in a more natural, colloquial setting.

A large number of YouTube videos are linked on the website Teochew in English by Allan Tan.
News bulletins in Teochew and other Chinese dialects are broadcast in Singapore on the radio station Capital 95.8 FM.
Shantou Television broadcasts in China in both Mandarin and Teochew, and some video clips are available online.
The National Archives of Singapore has made a large part of its oral history recordings available online. The Advanced Search interface allows searches by recording language, so one can specifically search for Teochew-language interviews. Transcripts are also provided for most recordings, although they are usually translated into Mandarin and so do not match the recordings word-for-word.

Teochew language books

There are few printed books in vernacular Teochew. Even the Christian Bible, which is the most widely translated book in the world, is hard to come by in Teochew. The Kwun Tong Swatow Baptist Church in Hong Kong has re-issued an 1898 Swatow vernacular Bible in a parallel edition with the Chinese Union Version. This edition uses Chinese characters, but an audio recording of the entire text is also available.

Sources

This guide relies heavily on previous works on the Teochew language, especially the pioneering studies by Li (1959) and Xu (2007). Lim (1886), while dated, is also valuable and unique for documenting Teochew as spoken in Singapore in the 19th century. The choice of example phrases is also unintentionally amusing, as they reflect the author’s occupation as a criminal court interpreter. Other sources on Teochew grammar consulted were dissertations by Veniranda (2015) and Yeo (2011). Grammars of other Chinese languages were also useful, especially Chappell’s (2017) outline grammar of Southern Min, mostly based on Taiwanese Hokkien, and Matthews and Yip’s (2011) grammar of Cantonese, and these served as models for organizing this text. For topics that were not well-covered by published works, I have relied on my own judgement, but have quoted authentic usage examples as much as possible.

Example sentences in the guide were made up by me unless a source has been cited. Some of the sources cited have also been transcribed in the Texts section.

Online dictionaries consulted were: mogher.com, Wiktionary, the Taiwan Ministry of Education’s dictionary of Taiwanese Southern Min《臺灣閩南語常用詞辭典》via moedict.tw, and the ctext.org dictionary for character lookup. As my own knowledge of the language is incomplete, the examples given may not always be idiomatic or elegant, and I would be grateful for any corrections or suggestions for improvement.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Mr Simon Wong for permission to reproduce his Teochew version of the Lord’s Prayer, Mr Low Thia Khiang for permission to publish a transcript of his speech, Ms Pamela Yeo for permission to use an excerpt from her thesis, and the National Archives of Singapore for permission to publish an excerpt from the Oral History Centre’s interview with Chua Hong Kee. I also wish to thank Prof Lee Chee Hiang for the gift of several books on Teochew history when I was a student, Dr Catherine Churchman for sharing difficult-to-find materials, and members of the Gaginang online community for generously sharing resources, especially Ty Lim, Fish_bowl, KaraageTimer, Justin R Leung, Antoine Srun, Arnaud, webble, and Thai.