Lui Chew vs Teochew: two prefectures, two languages, one spelling habit

Lui Chew is Leizhou (雷州). It is a peninsula and a city at the far southwest corner of Guangdong. Teochew is Chaozhou (潮州), and its home region Chaoshan (潮汕) sits on Guangdong’s eastern coast, at the other end of the same province. Two homelands, two Min languages, and in Melaka two clan houses founded seventy-seven years apart.

The two are kin. They are not the same thing, and none of the three published classifications of Leizhou Min makes it a kind of Teochew. What the two names really share is an English spelling habit, and that turns out to be the most interesting part of the answer.

The two, side by side

Everything in this table is a quotation, a count, or a conclusion the row’s own source supports. Nothing in it is an impression. Where a source says something loosely, the loose version is what appears here, in the words the source used.

The homeland figures are worth one caution. Both come from English Wikipedia, both are 2004 estimates, and they do not measure the same area: 14 million is Chaoshan alone, 2.8 million is the whole of China. They are a rough sense of scale, not a like-for-like count.

Why the two names look alike

Here is the part our own pages have been getting wrong, in a small way that matters.

“Luichew” is English, and it is old. Wiktionary’s entry for it traces the word to “either or both Leizhou Min 雷州 and Hokkien 雷州 (Lûi-chiu)”, and calls it a doublet of “Leizhou” and “Luichow”. Teochew was built the same way, from the southern reading Tiô-chiu. Both readings end in chiu (州), the old word for a prefecture, and English clerks wrote chiu as “chew”.

That is a rule, not an accident. The same entry’s own “see also” list gathers eleven more English names from the same colonial layer: Amoy, Chiangchew, Chinchew, Hailam, Hai Lok Hong, Hainam, Hinghwa, Hokchew, Hokchia, Hokkien and Teochew. Four of them end in “chew” exactly as Luichew does: Chiangchew, Chinchew, Hokchew and Teochew. Nobody sat down and confused two peoples. A whole generation of clerks and migrants wrote down what they heard, and the names came out rhyming because the ending was the same ending.

So the sentence this site currently prints, that the resemblance is “a coincidence of romanisation”, is a little too quick, and so is its companion, that the two share the suffix “and nothing else”. Both under-sell the story. The ending is shared because of a habit, and the two languages are related for reasons that have nothing to do with spelling.

The entry gives two printed quotations. The earlier is an 1884 report in a Shanghai newspaper, which tells you the spelling was already in use in English by then. The one that matters for a Malaysian family comes from 1987, and it is in the next section.

Was your family ever counted as Teochew?

The short answer is that nobody could have been, because none of the counts below has a Lui Chew line to move anyone out of.

Of the three Malaysian and Singaporean counts this page examines, Singapore’s 2020 census is the most recent one that breaks the Chinese population down by dialect group. Its table names nine groups: Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hakka, Hainanese, Foochow, Henghua, Shanghainese and Hockchia. Teochew is the second largest of them, 583,963 people. There is no Leizhou or Lui Chew column anywhere in the table. Every Lui Chew person counted in Singapore that year sits inside a tenth column called “Other Chinese”, 244,529 people, alongside every other group the census does not name. That number is a ceiling for Lui Chew, not a figure for it.

Malaysia does not publish the cut at all. Its current open population table sorts people by ethnicity into seven values, one of which is simply “chinese”, with nothing underneath it. The most detailed Malaysian dialect-group breakdown still in circulation is a 2003 set that English Wikipedia reports, and it has the same shape as Singapore’s: nine groups named, Teochew among them at 497,280, and then “different other ethnic Chinese with 202,977”.

Two lists of nine names, one table with no dialect names at all, and not a Lui Chew line anywhere among them. That is the real answer to the question. A family was not moved into the Teochew column; it was left out of the naming altogether, which is a different kind of erasure and an easier one to reverse.

And where the record does name Lui Chew, it names it in its own right. A 1987 social history of Kuching, written by Craig Alan Lockard, lists the smaller speech groups of that town one by one: “Foochows (Hokchius)… Henghuas… Hokchias, closely related to Henghuas… and Luichews, whose home area was the Luichew Peninsula of Kwangtung.” Four small groups, each with its own name and its own home district. Teochew is not one of the four, and nobody in that sentence is filed under anybody else.

How close are the two languages, really?

Closer than this site has sometimes said, and still not the same.

Teochew’s own description is short and settled: it is a Southern Min language (闽南语), the branch that also holds Hokkien. Leizhou Min has no settled description. Three scholars have put it in three different places, and all three are still in print:

• Yuan Jiahua placed it inside Southern Min, the same group as Teochew, while noting that it has low intelligibility with other Southern Min varieties.
• Li Rong, whose scheme the Language Atlas of China uses, treated it as a separate Min subgroup of its own.
• Hou Jingyi grouped it with Hainanese, in a subgroup called Qiong-Lei (琼雷).

Read those three together and the answer falls out. Under one of them, Lui Chew and Teochew are siblings inside one group. Under the other two, they are not in the same subgroup at all. Under none of the three is Lui Chew a form of Teochew.

The Leizhou city government says the same thing in its own words, more warmly. Its page on the local dialect calls Leizhou Min, Putian, Hainanese and Teochew sister languages (姐妹语系), and then adds the part that gets left off: that Leizhou’s vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar have gradually developed differences from its mother language and from its sisters. Sisters, grown apart. That is a better sentence than “different sub-branches” and a much better one than “nothing else”.

Glottolog, a reference catalogue that gives the world’s languages and dialects each their own entry and code, sorts the two into different tiers. Leizhou Chinese has its own entry as a “Spoken L1 Language” with the ISO code luh, marked threatened. Chaozhou’s entry is headed “Dialect”, and carries no ISO code of its own. One is filed as a language in its own right and the other as a variety within one. Whatever else the pair are, they are not a big language and its small offshoot.

What we don't know yet

Three gaps, and we would rather name them than paper over them.

Nobody has tested the pair. No published study of Teochew speakers listening to Leizhou Min, or the reverse, appears in any source named on this page. The strongest honest statement is an inference from two separate sentences: Teochew is “closely related to Hokkien” and yet “has only limited intelligibility” with it, and Leizhou Min “has low intelligibility with other Southern Min varieties”. Both point the same way. Neither is a test of these two.

No Malaysian count names us. Not the current open population table, which stops at “chinese”, and not the 2003 breakdown, which names nine groups and stops. The Lui Chew figures on our own dialect-groups page are community estimates rather than census lines: the “a few thousand” printed there is a 2023 field-study figure, and that page says plainly that the Lui Chew have never been counted separately in any census.

Nobody has found the paperwork. If a Malayan registration clerk, an association secretary or a school form ever wrote “Teochew” against a Lui Chew family, no record of it has been found. An empty search is not proof that it never happened. If your family holds a document that says otherwise, it would be the first of its kind we know of.

The nearer miss is Hainanese

If you came here to rule out Teochew, you have ruled it out. But there is a second confusion waiting, and that one is closer to the bone: Hou Jingyi’s Qiong-Lei grouping puts Leizhou Min and Hainanese in the same branch, and in Malaya the two communities arrived in the same migration, the Lui Chew clan house in Melaka going up thirty years after the Hainanese one. The Hainanese story is the harder one to unpick, because it is half true.

That comparison is its own page: Lui Chew vs Hainanese is where to go next. If you want the name itself in full, with every old spelling it ever had, what “Lui Chew” means has it. And if you want to see where both groups sit among all the others who came to Malaya, the dialect groups of Malaya lays them out in arrival order. The rest of who the Lui Chew are sits one level up.

One standing ask, as always. If your family is Lui Chew, tell us your version. A gravestone reading, an association card, a grandparent’s word about what the family used to be called: every one of those is a piece of a record that no census ever kept. Corrections are just as welcome as additions.