Writing System: Chaoshan Min is written with Chinese characters, but its writing has never been standardized and is not widely used. Most of its vocabulary can be written with established characters, while words with no agreed character are written by borrowing a character for its meaning or its sound, or by inventing a new one. The earliest known text is a 1566 edition of the folk drama Tale of the Lychee Mirror. There are two main romanization systems: Pe̍h-ūe-jī, adapted by missionaries in the 19th century, and Peng’im, introduced by the Guangdong education authorities in 1960 and modeled on Mandarin pinyin.
Grammar: Chaoshan Min is an analytic language with no inflection for case, tense or number. The usual word order is subject-verb-object, although subject-object-verb is also possible with the help of particles. Like other Southern Min languages, it has two words for “we”: náng includes the listener and uáng excludes them. Possession is marked with the particle kâi or with a classifier, so “my book” can use either kâi or the classifier for books. Comparisons use the verb kuè “to exceed”, as in Cantonese, and passive sentences must always name an agent, introduced by a word meaning “to give”.
Phonology: Chaoshan Min has 17 initial consonants, including the voiced sounds /b/, /g/ and /dz/, which are rare among Chinese languages and developed historically from nasals. It has plain and nasalized vowels, and syllables can end in -m, -ng, -p, -k or a glottal stop; most dialects have merged the older endings -n and -t into -ng and -k. There are eight tones, and tones change extensively depending on a word’s position in a phrase (tone sandhi). The main division is between Northern dialects (Chaozhou, Shantou, Jieyang), which have the vowel /ɯ/, and Southern dialects (Chaoyang, Puning, Huilai), which do not.
Lexicon: Around 70 to 80 percent of the vocabulary consists of words shared across the Chinese-speaking world, but the most common everyday words are older: many come directly from Old Chinese, some are shared only with other Min languages, and some are unique to Chaoshan Min, such as tàⁿ “to say” and ĭⁿ “to sleep”. Many characters have two readings, a literary one and a vernacular one, and Chaoshan Min tends to favor the vernacular. Some everyday words show Cantonese influence, and varieties spoken in Southeast Asia have borrowed words from Malay.
