Teochew vs Hokkien vs Cantonese

Four languages, not four accents

The Chinese language family is more like the Romance family (Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian) than like English with accents. The branches split over a thousand years ago and kept drifting. Speakers can read the same characters, which is why people call them "dialects," but they can't talk to each other without a shared second language, which is what Mandarin has become.

Teochew and Hokkien sit on the same branch, Southern Min, which comes from coastal Fujian. Teochew is what happened when Fujian settlers moved south into Chaoshan during the Song dynasty and kept talking for a thousand years without the rest of Fujian. Cantonese is a different branch, Yue, from the Pearl River Delta around Guangzhou and Hong Kong. Mandarin is the northern branch, from Beijing and the North China Plain, and became the national standard in the twentieth century.

Who understands whom

Teochew and Hokkien: partly. Estimates run around 50 to 60 percent. A Teochew grandmother and a Hokkien grandmother in a Singapore market can get through a transaction, slowly, and will each think the other has a strange accent. Numbers, food words and basic verbs overlap a lot; tones and vowels have drifted; some everyday words are just different.

Teochew and Cantonese: no. Both are spoken in Guangdong, which is why outsiders assume they're related, but a Teochew speaker understands Cantonese about as well as an English speaker understands Dutch: the odd word, not the sentence. Many Teochew in Hong Kong are bilingual, which hides this.

Teochew and Mandarin: no. Teochew keeps sounds Mandarin lost a thousand years ago, and its vocabulary for everyday things (eat, house, pretty, look) uses different words entirely. Young people in Chaoshan learn Mandarin at school and speak Teochew at home; the two don't blur.

Side by side

Same characters, four pronunciations. Teochew in Peng'im, Hokkien in POJ, Cantonese in Jyutping, Mandarin in Pinyin.

Notice the pattern: Teochew and Hokkien are usually the same word with different vowels (ua2 / guá, cu3 / chhù, ngia2 / súi is the exception). Cantonese and Mandarin are often a different word altogether.

Counting to ten

Which one does my family speak?

If nobody's around to ask, your surname spelling is a fingerprint. The same character was romanized by whoever filled in the colonial paperwork, in whatever language the family spoke. Teochew and Hokkien spellings overlap (same branch), but a few give it away.

Other clues. Family from Thailand, Cambodia or the Mekong Delta: probably Teochew. From Fujian, Taiwan, Penang or the Philippines: probably Hokkien. From Hong Kong, Guangzhou, or a Chinatown founded before 1950 in the US, Canada, UK or Australia: probably Cantonese. Grandma calls rice porridge "mue" and the family eats it with salted egg: Teochew. She calls it "muê" too but with different side dishes: could be Hokkien. She calls it "juk": Cantonese.

And the giveaway word: if anyone in the family has ever said 家己人 gaginang to explain why they trust someone, you're Teochew. Start with the phrasebook.