The Swatow dialect, also known as the Shantou dialect, is a

variety of Chinese There are hundreds of local Chinese language varieties forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast part of mainland Chi ...

mostly spoken in

Shantou Shantou, Chinese postal romanization, alternately romanization of Chinese, 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 20 ...

Guangdong ) means "wide" or "vast", and has been associated with the region since the creation of Guang Prefecture in AD 226. The name "''Guang''" ultimately came from Guangxin ( zh, labels=no, first=t, t= , s=广信), an outpost established in Han dynasty ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

. It is typically classified in the Teochew group of dialects.

Phonology

Swatow dialect has 18 initials, over 60 rimes, and 8 tones.

Initials

Rimes

Swatow dialect has at least the following rimes:

Tones

Tone sandhi

Swatow dialect has extremely extensive

tone sandhi Tone sandhi is a phonological change that occurs in tonal languages. It involves changes to the tones assigned to individual words or morphemes, based on the pronunciation of adjacent words or morphemes. This change typically simplifies a bidirec ...

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:

Notes

References

External links

* {{Chinese language Guangdong Southern Min Southern Min-language dialects Shantou Teochew dialect