Not Mandarin. Not Cantonese.
Teochew is its own language with its own history, and the odds are that if you're reading this, someone in your family speaks it and you don't. Here's what it is, a few words to start with, and where to go to actually learn it.
What it is
Teochew (潮州話, Dio-ziu-uê in its own romanization) is a Southern Min language, the same family as Hokkien and Taiwanese, spoken by roughly 14 million people in Chaoshan and several million more abroad. It is not a dialect of Mandarin any more than Portuguese is a dialect of Spanish. A Mandarin speaker understands none of it. A Cantonese speaker understands none of it. A Hokkien speaker gets maybe half, because the two split from the same root in Fujian a thousand years ago and have been drifting since.
It came to Guangdong with settlers from Fujian during the Song dynasty, which is why a Min language ended up surrounded by Cantonese and Hakka. It preserves sounds and words from Middle Chinese that Mandarin dropped, which is why classical Tang poems often rhyme better in Teochew than in Beijing speech.
Eight tones and a spelling problem
Teochew has eight tones, four historical categories each split into a high and low register, plus a heavy system of tone sandhi where a syllable's tone changes depending on what follows it. Compared to Hokkien, it has merged the -n and -t endings into -ng and -k, and it keeps a low-rising tone that other Min Nan varieties lost.
Writing it down is the hard part. Even the name is spelled two ways: 潮州 starts with an unaspirated t, the t in "stop" rather than "top," which English speakers heard as a t and Peng'im writes as a d. So "Teochew" and "dio-ziu" are the same word. Peng'im, the official romanization published by Guangdong's education department in 1960, is based on Shantou pronunciation and modeled on Hanyu Pinyin, with tone numbers 1 to 8. An older missionary system also survives, and the diaspora mostly just spells things however they sound in the local language, which is why you'll see the same word written five ways. Pronunciation also varies noticeably between Chaozhou, Shantou, Jieyang and the diaspora, so if your grandmother says it differently from a chart, your grandmother is right.
A starter phrasebook
Rough, diaspora-style spellings. Peng'im in the third column where it helps.
| Characters | Sounds like | Peng'im | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| 家己人 | ga-gi-nang | ga1 gi7 nang5 | Our own people. The phrase Teochew use to recognize each other anywhere on earth. |
| 潮州人 | teo-chew-nang | dio5 ziu1 nang5 | Teochew person. Same sound as the Peng'im; "Teochew" is just the older English spelling of dio-ziu. |
| 潮州話 | teo-chew-ueh | dio5 ziu1 uê7 | The Teochew language |
| 食飯 | jiak-bung | ziah8 bng7 | Eat, literally "eat rice." The final -h in Peng'im is a swallowed stop, so it sounds like a clipped k: jiak, or jik at speed. |
| 食未 | jiak-bue | ziah8 bhuê7 | "Eaten yet?" The actual greeting. |
| 多謝 | doi-sia | do1 sia7 | Thank you |
| 阿媽 | a-ma | a1 ma2 | Grandma, father's side. Also written 阿嬤, as in the film's Chinese title. |
| 阿公 | a-gong | a1 gong1 | Grandpa, father's side |
| 外公 / 外媽 | gua-gong / gua-ma | ghua7 gong1 / ghua7 ma2 | Grandpa / grandma, mother's side |
| 毋知 | m-zai | m6 zai1 | Don't know. Often written 唔知 in the diaspora. |
| 好 | ho | ho2 | Good, okay |
| 無 | bo | bho5 | No, none, don't have |
| 好食 | ho-jiak | ho2 ziah8 | Delicious |
| 來 | lai | lai5 | Come |
| 拜老爺 | bai-lao-ia | bai3 lao6 ia5 | Worship the deities (see Traditions) |
| 粿 | gue / kueh | guê2 | Rice-flour cake, the whole family of them (see Food) |
The "sounds like" column is approximate diaspora spelling. The Peng'im column has been checked against the open Teochew Dictionary, where every phrase above is a reviewed entry except 家己人 itself, which that project still marks as awaiting a native speaker. We're working on a recording. Please tell us if your family says it differently.
Why it's fading
Teochew isn't on UNESCO's endangered list, because with over ten million speakers in Chaoshan it's safe there for now. Outside China it's a different story. In Singapore, the government's Speak Mandarin Campaign from 1979 pushed dialects out of schools and broadcasting; Chinese dialects as the main home language dropped from about half of Chinese households in 1990 to under nine percent in 2020, and among children under fifteen it's close to zero. In Thailand the Teochew assimilated into Thai over three generations. In the refugee diaspora, families that arrived in Long Beach or Paris in 1980 raised kids who learned English or French at school, Khmer or Vietnamese from the neighborhood, and Teochew only from grandparents who are now gone.
The result is a generation that understands the language when their parents speak it, can say "eat rice" and "thank you," and can't hold a conversation. That's most of us. It's fixable, but only if someone bothers.
Where to actually learn it
- Learn Teochew, a free online guide written for heritage speakers, with pronunciation, grammar and reading texts. The best starting point in English.
- Our dictionary, 11,000 reviewed entries searchable by English, characters or Peng'im, built on the open-source Teochew Dictionary project.
- learn-teochew on GitHub, open tools that convert between romanization systems and annotate Chinese text with Teochew readings.
- The Teochew Store, a Singapore-based blog and shop with long-running writing on the language and history.