Baisha, Taishan

Baisha Town is one of the few regions in northern Guangdong province where illegal rare earth mines were operating.^[6] Baisha Town is rich in rare earth minerals such as dysprosium.^[6]

This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (October 2018) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

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

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