Baisha Town Bak-sa in the Taishanese language and "White Sand" in the English translation; in Taishan

Taishan

Taishan is a coastal county-level city in Guangdong Province, China. The city is part of the Greater Taishan Region....

 County, Guangdong

Guangdong

Guangdong is a province on the South China Sea coast of the People's Republic of China. The province was previously often written with the alternative English name Kwangtung Province...

 province.

History

Baisha town was the ancestral home of many of the first Canadian

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

-Chinese

Overseas Chinese

Overseas Chinese are people of Chinese birth or descent who live outside the Greater China Area . People of partial Chinese ancestry living outside the Greater China Area may also consider themselves Overseas Chinese....

. Their descendants live all over Canada, and used to predominate before the 1980s in the Chinatowns of Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary, Banff and Edmonton, and US West Coast

West Coast of the United States

West Coast or Pacific Coast are terms for the westernmost coastal states of the United States. The term most often refers to the states of California, Oregon, and Washington. Although not part of the contiguous United States, Alaska and Hawaii do border the Pacific Ocean but can't be included in...

 cities such as San Francisco and Seattle.

Economy

Baisha Town is one of the few regions in northern Guangdong

Guangdong

Guangdong is a province on the South China Sea coast of the People's Republic of China. The province was previously often written with the alternative English name Kwangtung Province...

 province where illegal rare earth mines were operating. Baisha Town is rich in rare earth minerals such as dysprosium

Dysprosium

Dysprosium is a chemical element with the symbol Dy and atomic number 66. It is a rare earth element with a metallic silver luster. Dysprosium is never found in nature as a free element, though it is found in various minerals, such as xenotime...

.

Dialect

The Baisha variant of the Taishan language is fading amongst the descendants of Canadian-Chinese, as Cantonese and Mandarin become more dominant. Based on observations of Chinese-Canadian elders living in Edmonton between 1980 and 2005, it would seem that the Taishan language spoken in Baisha in the mid-20th century differed somewhat from that spoken in Taicheng (Hoiseng in the Hoisan language, 台城), the county seat of Taishan (Hoisan, 台山县). Indeed, the pronunciation was more or less the same as that of people living across the river in the next county, Kaiping

Kaiping

Kaiping : Hoi3 Pen6) or Hoi Ping is a county-level city in Guangdong Province, southern China. It has a population of 680,000 as of 2003 and an area of 1,659 km². The locals speak a variation of the Taishan dialect.-Administration:...

 (Hoiping in the Toisanese language, 开平). One notable difference can be seen in the shift of certain vowel sounds, as follows:

English	Taishanese		Cantonese			Mandarin
	Baisha	Taishan	IPA	Jyutping Jyutping Jyutping is a romanization system for Cantonese developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong in 1993. Its formal name is The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong Cantonese Romanization Scheme...	Hanzi	IPA	Pinyin	Hanzi
blood	het	hut				ɕjɛ˨˩˦	xuě	血
moon	nget	ngut				ɥɛ˥˩	yùe	月
snow	hlet	hlut				ɕɥɛ˨˩˦	xǔe	雪

Besides the differences in some vowel sounds, the consonant [b] of Mandarin is usually realized as [v], and [p] as [h].

English	Taishanese		Cantonese			Mandarin
	Baisha	Taishan	IPA	Jyutping Jyutping Jyutping is a romanization system for Cantonese developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong in 1993. Its formal name is The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong Cantonese Romanization Scheme...	Hanzi	IPA	Pinyin	Hanyu
(stomach) full	vow	bow				pɑʊ˨˩˦	bǎo	饱
eight	vatt	batt				pa˥	bā	八
quilt	hi	pi				peɪ˥˩tsɨ	bèizi	被子
wife	law hu	law pu				lɑʊ˨˩pʰo˧˥	lǎopó	老婆