chinese language question

[msa50]

Tshounshwa is a chinese language or dialect?

[WilsonFong]

I don't even think it's a word. I just tried googling "Tshounshwa" and the only result I got was this thread. Can you write that down in Chinese characters instead?

[renzhe]

The way it is written, it almost certainly isn't anything.

Are you trying to write something phonetically? It doesn't sound like any dialect I've heard of.

[SiMaKe]

Same here. Don't recognize it or slight variations of it. Either enter characters, if you can, or give some information about the source (weblink would be ideal for that) or context.

[msa50]

i heard it is some sort of language, but i don't know if it is chinese or not

[SiMaKe]

So did you make up your own spelling to correspond to the sounds you heard or is the spelling supposed to be some recognized romanization like Wade-Giles (possibly with some misspellings)? Given that the web searches came up empty suggests something is probably amiss.

[yonglin]

Ethnologue is a good resource when it comes to tracking down obscure languages. It doesn't have anything like what you listed though. Perhaps there is some other spelling...?

[Daan]

The only one I can think of is Teochew, which is the name of the Mǐn dialect spoken in Cháozhōu 潮州 (incidentally, Teochew is the Postal map romanisation of that city's name). But it doesn't even come close to what you gave. Or maybe the dialect spoken in Chángshā 长沙, but that's even less likely.

[renzhe]

My first association was 中文 or 中国话, but it doesn't really sound like either.

[blaketx]

Maybe 台山话？

[msa50]

yes I made my own spelling to correspond to what I heard. I heard it from an Arab man and I am Arab myself.

I find Changsha closer.

Maybe 台山话？

how does this sound in English?

[Daan]

It's pronounced as Táishānhuà in Mandarin. By the way, why don't you just ask whoever you were speaking to which dialect he was talking about?

[Shi Tong]

Tshounshwa is misleading, but there are a lot of cases where hwa is a bad translitteration of the word "huà​", there isn't really a good way of splitting up the words from there though, since none of the syllables seem to correlate with Mandarin- my best stab is that it's supposed to be 3 zi, or characters, and therefore should be split into three to make it work: Ts houns hwa.. maybe the closest "sound" is Táishānhuà (台山话).. but I've not heard of that either, personally!

[Goma]

By sounding out what you've written phonetically, I believe you are looking for Taishanese (in English) or 台山话, which is the Chinese dialect spoken by the people in Taishan, a city in Guangdong. Many overseas Chinese people are of Taishan-descent, and Taishanese was what most people in Vancouver Chinatown spoke through the 1980's (where I am originally from). It is a dialect of Cantonese, and would be described (in my humble opinion) as a kind of "country bumpkin" or "farmer" version of Cantonese. Although many words are similar to Cantonese, there are different tones in Taishanese.

I did a quick search on wikipedia and it sounds like there are fewer and few people who live in Taishan, as the number of overseas Taishanese now outnumber those who live there. My guess is that the language may slowly disappear over generations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taishan

[噴嚏疋]

It sounds like "Swatow." It's a coastal city in Canton Province right next to Fujian, and the folks there speak the Teochew dialect that's mentioned above.

Language or dialect? Both! Varieties of Chinese can be considered both as different dialect AND also be thought of as related languages in the same family.

[噴嚏疋]

I just came across this article today & I'm fairly certain what you're asking about is Chao-Swa (潮汕), the combination of Chaozhou (Teochow) + Swatow.