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The eight tones of Chaoshan speech

Chaoshan speech has eight tone classes: the old four — level, rising, departing, entering — each split into a yin and a yang half. The classes are the same everywhere; the pitch values are not. To record a word, the initial and the final are not enough: you need to know which class it falls in, and what it comes out as in the mouth.

1. The eight classes, with examples

The old way is to take the eight tones of one and the same syllable and lay them out in a row. A literate man reads it through once and has the places of the eight; a man who cannot read follows along and can still tell which tone sits in which cell. The examples below are in the literary reading, all on the syllable hun.

The values use the five-level notation: the speaking pitch is divided into five steps, 1 the lowest, 5 the highest. 33 is mid level — the pitch neither rises nor falls; 213 is falling-rising — down first, then up. The numbers record only the outline, not an absolute pitch: a man and a woman saying the same sentence have the same values and different pitches.

2. Six places, side by side

The classes do not change; the values differ from place to place. The table runs in the order yin level, yin rising, yin departing, yin entering, yang level, yang rising, yang departing, yang entering:

Three things come out of this table. The steadiest is the yin level: all six places read 33, and a word in Chaozhou and in Chenghai is very nearly the same on that tone. The widest spread is in the entering tones: yin entering is 21 in Chaozhou and Raoping, 11 in Chaoyang, and only 2 in Shantou, Jieyang and Chenghai; yang entering is 55 in Chaoyang, 44 in Chaozhou and Raoping, and 5 in the other three. Then yang rising: Chaoyang reads 313, the other five read 35; Chaoyang also has yin departing at 31, with yang entering the same as yang level at 55, while Raoping has yin entering the same as yang departing at 21. Listening across counties and feeling the tune is different, this is mostly where it lies.

One place where the sources do not agree, recorded as it stands. In the same material, the main eight-tone table gives Shantou yin rising as 52 and yang entering as 4, while the six-place table gives 53 and 5. The second set is taken here, because it agrees with the notation already used on this site’s Chaoshan speech. The two sets differ by one step, which does not affect the ear, but a record has to settle on one set and not copy from both.

3. Tone sandhi

In two syllables read together, the first changes and the second does not; in three or more, only the last keeps its tone. That principle holds everywhere. What the tone changes to differs from place to place, and it is not one cell to one cell.

The hardest places for sandhi are Chaozhou, Jieyang and Chenghai: yin rising, yin departing and yin entering each have two sandhi forms, and the second is taken when the following syllable is yin rising, yang level or yang entering. Put another way, one and the same word in different phrases gives the first syllable a different value, and a table with one cell per tone will record it wrong. Chaozhou, Jieyang and Chenghai have one more rule: where a yin rising leads and the second syllable is yin rising, yin departing or yin entering, that second yin rising is read 21.

This site’s Chaoshan speech records a simplified account: yin level and yang departing do not change; yin entering and yang entering swap; yin departing becomes yin rising or yang level; yin rising becomes yang rising; yang level and yang rising both become yang departing. Checked cell by cell against the Shantou sandhi table, six cells agree — yin level, yin rising, yin departing, yang level, yin entering, yang entering (yin rising 53 to 35, yin departing 213 to 55, yang level 55 to 11) — and yang rising does not: the source table gives 21, where “becomes yang departing” would give 11; yang departing is also inconsistent, the source table giving 12 where this site records no change. Neither is settled here; both wait until there is material from enough speakers, place by place.

Two practical things. First, record the sandhi. A record of the isolated tone alone reads out as written sound, not as speech. Second, do not ask a speaker “how is this word read” but “how is this sentence said” — asked in isolation, anyone drifts back to the isolated tone.

4. How to use it

Look at the class in a dictionary, match the value against a recording; both together and only then is a word recorded correctly. To record a whole sentence, record the sandhi with it, and note the collection point and the speaker’s age band — the same word may differ between a man of seventy and one of twenty, a point already made in the three hard rules for transcription on Dialect and performance.

Sources

Wikipedia, “Teochew dialect” (consulted 26 October 2026): the eight example words with their values, the contour names, the six-place value table, the principle of tone sandhi, and the account of the two sandhi forms in Chaozhou, Jieyang and Chenghai all come from that entry; the values and sandhi notation already on this site’s Chaoshan speech.

Notation: the numerical form of the five-level notation is used here. For the other schemes — church romanisation, the 1960 romanisation, the International Phonetic Alphabet — see Writing Chaoshan speech down; for word forms, see Chaoshan speech against Mandarin.

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Last revised: 4 November 2026