13.5 million in Taiwan (2017), 2 million in Malaysia (2000), 1 million in Philippines (2010), 0.5 million in Singapore (2015), large fraction of 28 million Minnan speakers in mainland China (2018)[1]
Distribution of Southern Min languages. Quanzhang (Hokkien) is dark green.
Distribution of Quanzhang (Minnan Proper) dialects within Fujian Province and Taiwan. Lengna dialect (Longyan Min) is a variant of Southern Min that is spoken near the Hakka speaking region in Southwest Fujian.
The Betawi Malay language, spoken by some five million people in and around the Indonesian capital Jakarta, includes numerous Hokkien loanwords due to the significant influence of the Chinese Indonesian diaspora, most of whom are of Hokkien ancestry and origin.
Names
Chinese speakers of the Quanzhang variety of Southern Min refer to the mainstream Southern Min language as
Bân-lâm-gú / Bân-lâm-ōe (闽南语/闽南话; 閩南語/閩南話, literally 'language or speech of Southern Min') in China and Taiwan.[8]
Tâi-gí (臺語, literally 'Taiwanese language') or Ho̍h-ló-ōe / Ho̍h-ló-uē (literally 'Hoklo speech') in Taiwan.
Lán-lâng-ōe (咱儂話, literally 'our people's speech') in the Philippines.
In parts of Southeast Asia and in the English-speaking communities, the term Hokkien ([hɔk˥kiɛn˨˩]) is etymologically derived from the Southern Min pronunciation for Fujian (Chinese:福建; pinyin:Fújiàn; Pe̍h-ōe-jī:Hok-kiàn), the province from which the language hails. In Southeast Asia and the English press, Hokkien is used in common parlance to refer to the Southern Min dialects of southern Fujian, and does not include reference to dialects of other Sinitic branches also present in Fujian such as the Fuzhou dialect (Eastern Min), Putian dialect, Northern Min, Gan Chinese or Hakka. In Chinese linguistics, these dialects are known by their classification under the Quanzhang division (Chinese:泉漳片; pinyin:Quánzhāng piàn) of Min Nan, which comes from the first characters of the two main Hokkien urban centers of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou.
The word Hokkien first originated from Walter Henry Medhurst when he published the Dictionary of the Hok-këèn Dialect of the Chinese Language, According to the Reading and Colloquial Idioms in 1832. This is considered to be the earliest English-based Hokkien Dictionary and the first major reference work in POJ, although the romanization within was quite different from the modern system. In this dictionary, the word "Hok-këèn" was used. In 1869, POJ was further revised by John Macgowan in his published book A Manual Of The Amoy Colloquial. In this book, "këèn" was changed to "kien" and from then on, the word "Hokkien" began to be used more often.
Hokkien originated in the southern area of Fujian province, an important center for trade and migration, and has since become one of the most common Chinese varieties overseas. The major pole of Hokkien varieties outside of Fujian is nearby Taiwan, where immigrants from Fujian arrived as workers during the 40 years of Dutch rule, fleeing the Qing Dynasty during the 20 years of Ming loyalist rule, as immigrants during the 200 years of Qing dynasty rule, especially in the last 120 years after immigration restrictions were relaxed, and even as immigrants during the period of Japanese rule. The Taiwanese dialect mostly has origins with the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou variants, but since then, the Amoy dialect, also known as the Xiamen dialect, is becoming the modern prestige standard for the language in China. Both Amoy and Xiamen come from the Chinese name of the city (simplified Chinese:厦门; traditional Chinese:廈門; pinyin:Xiàmén; Pe̍h-ōe-jī:Ē-mûi); the former is from Zhangzhou Hokkien, whereas the later comes from Mandarin.
There are many Minnan (Hokkien) speakers among overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia as well as in the United States (Hoklo Americans). Many ethnic Han Chinese emigrants to the region were Hoklo from southern Fujian, and brought the language to what is now Burma (Myanmar), Vietnam, Indonesia (the former Dutch East Indies) and present day Malaysia and Singapore (formerly Malaya and the British Straits Settlements). Many of the Minnan dialects of this region are highly similar to Xiamen dialect (Amoy) and Taiwan Hokkien with the exception of foreign loanwords. Hokkien is reportedly the native language of up to 80% of the Chinese people in the Philippines, among which is known locally as Lan-nang or Lán-lâng-oē ("Our people's language"). Hokkien speakers form the largest group of overseas Chinese in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Philippines.[citation needed]
Traditionally speaking, Quanzhou dialect spoken in Quanzhou is the Traditional Standard Minnan, it is the dialect that is used in and Liyuan Opera[zh] (梨园戏) and Nanying music[zh] (南音). Being the Traditional Standard Minnan, Quanzhou dialect is considered to have the purest accent and the most conservative Minnan dialect.
In the late 18th to the early 19th century, Xiamen (Amoy) became the principal city of southern Fujian.[citation needed] Xiamen (Amoy) dialect is adopted as the Modern Standard Minnan. It is a hybrid of the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou dialects. It has played an influential role in history, especially in the relations of Western nations with China, and was one of the most frequently learnt dialect of Quanzhang variety by Westerners during the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century.
The Modern Standard form of Quanzhang accent spoken around the city of Tainan in Taiwan is a hybrid of the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou dialects, in the same way as the Amoy dialect. All Quanzhang dialects spoken throughout the whole of Taiwan are collectively known as Taiwanese Hokkien, or Holo locally, although there is a tendency to call these Taiwanese language for political reasons. It is spoken by more Taiwanese than any Sinitic language except Mandarin, and it is known by a majority of the population;[9] thus, from a socio-political perspective, it forms a significant pole of language usage due to the popularity of Holo-language media.
Southeast Asia
The varieties of Hokkien in Southeast Asia originate from these dialects.
The Singaporeans, Southern Malaysians and people in Indonesia's Riau and surrounding islands variant is from the Quanzhou area. They speak a distinct form of Quanzhou Hokkien called Southern Peninsular Malaysian Hokkien (SPMH).
Among ethnic Chinese inhabitants of Penang, and other states in Northern Malaysia and Medan, with other areas in North Sumatra, Indonesia, a distinct form of Zhangzhou Hokkien has developed. In Penang, it is called Penang Hokkien while across the Malacca Strait in Medan, an almost identical variant is known as Medan Hokkien.
The Philippines variant is mostly from Quanzhou or Amoy (Xiamen), as most of their ancestors are from the aforementioned area.
Variants of Hokkien dialects can be traced to two sources of origin: Quanzhou and Zhangzhou. Both Amoy and most Taiwanese are based on a mixture of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou dialects, while the rest of the Hokkien dialects spoken in South East Asia are either derived from Quanzhou and Zhangzhou, or based on a mixture of both dialects.
Quanzhou
During the Three Kingdoms period of ancient China, there was constant warfare occurring in the Central Plain of China. Northerners began to enter into Fujian region, causing the region to incorporate parts of northern Chinese dialects. However, the massive migration of northern Han Chinese into Fujian region mainly occurred after the Disaster of Yongjia. The Jìn court fled from the north to the south, causing large numbers of northern Han Chinese to move into Fujian region. They brought the Old Chinese spoken in the Central Plain of China from the prehistoric era to the 3rd century into Fujian. This then gradually evolved into the Quanzhou dialect.
The Amoy dialect is the main dialect spoken in the Chinese city of Xiamen (formerly romanized and natively pronounced as "Amoy") and its surrounding regions of Tong'an and Xiang'an, both of which are now included in the greater Xiamen area. This dialect developed in the late Ming dynasty when Xiamen was increasingly taking over Quanzhou's position as the main port of trade in southeastern China. Quanzhou traders began traveling southwards to Xiamen to carry on their businesses while Zhangzhou peasants began traveling northwards to Xiamen in search of job opportunities. A need for a common language arose. The Quanzhou and Zhangzhou varieties are similar in many ways (as can be seen from the common place of Henan Luoyang where they originated), but due to differences in accents, communication can be a problem. Quanzhou businessmen considered their speech to be the prestige accent and considered Zhangzhou's to be a village dialect. Over the centuries, dialect leveling occurred and the two speeches mixed to produce the Amoy dialect.
Early sources
Several playscripts survive from the late 16th century, written in a mixture of Quanzhou and Chaozhou dialects. The most important is the Romance of the Litchi Mirror, with extant manuscripts dating from 1566 and 1581.[11][12]
In the early 17th century, Spanish missionaries in the Philippines produced materials documenting the Hokkien varieties spoken by the Chinese trading community who had settled there in the late 16th century:[11][13]
Diccionarium Sino-Hispanicum (1604), a Spanish-Hokkien dictionary, giving equivalent words, but not definitions.[14]
Doctrina Christiana en letra y lengua china (1607), a Hokkien translation of the Doctrina Christiana.[15][16]
Bocabulario de la lengua sangleya (c. 1617), a Spanish-Hokkien dictionary, with definitions.
Arte de la Lengua Chiõ Chiu (1620), a grammar written by a Spanish missionary in the Philippines.
These texts appear to record a Zhangzhou dialect, from the area of Haicheng (an old port that is now part of Longhai).[17]
Chinese scholars produced rhyme dictionaries describing Hokkien varieties at the beginning of the 19th century:[18]
Lūi-im Biāu-ngō͘ (Huìyīn Miàowù) (彙音妙悟 "Understanding of the collected sounds") was written around 1800 by Huang Qian (黃謙), and describes the Quanzhou dialect. The oldest extant edition dates from 1831.
Lūi-chi̍p Ngé-sio̍k-thong Si̍p-ngó͘-im (Huìjí Yǎsútōng Shíwǔyīn) (彙集雅俗通十五音 "Compilation of the fifteen elegant and vulgar sounds") by Xie Xiulan (謝秀嵐) describes the Zhangzhou dialect. The oldest extant edition dates from 1818.
Hokkien has one of the most diverse phoneme inventories among Chinese varieties, with more consonants than Standard Mandarin and Cantonese. Vowels are more-or-less similar to that of Standard Mandarin. Hokkien varieties retain many pronunciations that are no longer found in other Chinese varieties. These include the retention of the /t/ initial, which is now /tʂ/ (Pinyin 'zh') in Mandarin (e.g. 'bamboo' 竹 is tik, but zhú in Mandarin), having disappeared before the 6th century in other Chinese varieties.[19]
Finals
Unlike Mandarin, Hokkien retains all the final consonants corresponding to those of Middle Chinese. While Mandarin only preserves the n and ŋ finals, Southern Min also preserves the m, p, t and k finals and developed the ʔ (glottal stop).
Southern Min has aspirated, unaspirated as well as voiced consonant initials. For example, the word khui (開; "open") and kuiⁿ (關; "close") have the same vowel but differ only by aspiration of the initial and nasality of the vowel. In addition, Southern Min has labial initial consonants such as m in m̄-sī (毋是; "is not").
Another example is ta-po͘-kiáⁿ (查埔囝; "boy") and cha-bó͘-kiáⁿ (查某囝; "girl"), which differ in the second syllable in consonant voicing and in tone.
Quanzhou and nearby may pronounce dz as l or gl.[citation needed]
Approximant sounds [w] [j], only occur word-medially, and are also realized as laryngealized [w̰] [j̰], within a few medial and terminal environments.[23]
Tones
In general, Hokkien dialects have 5 to 8 phonemictones. Four tones can be transcribed ⟨V́ V̄ V̀ V̂⟩. According to the traditional Chinese system, however, there are 7 to 9 tones if the two additional entering tones are counted (see the discussion on Chinese tone). Tone sandhi is extensive.[24] There are minor variations between the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou tone systems. Taiwanese tones follow the patterns of Amoy or Quanzhou, depending on the area of Taiwan. Many dialects have an additional phonemic tone ("tone 9" according to the traditional reckoning), used only in special or foreign loan words.[25]
The Hokkien language (Minnan) is spoken in a variety of accents and dialects across the Minnan region. The Hokkien spoken in most areas of the three counties of southern Zhangzhou have merged the coda finals -n and -ng into -ng. The initial consonant j (dz and dʑ) is not present in most dialects of Hokkien spoken in Quanzhou, having been merged into the d or l initials.
The -ik or -ɪk final consonant that is preserved in the native Hokkien dialects of Zhangzhou and Xiamen is also preserved in the Nan'an dialect (色, 德, 竹) but lost in most dialects of Quanzhou Hokkien.[27]
The Amoy dialect (Xiamen) is a hybrid of the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou dialects. Taiwanese is also a hybrid of these two dialects. Taiwanese in northern and coastal Taiwan tends to be based on the Quanzhou variety, whereas the Taiwanese spoken in central, south and inland Taiwan tends to be based on Zhangzhou speech. There are minor variations in pronunciation and vocabulary between Quanzhou and Zhangzhou dialects. The grammar is generally the same. Additionally, extensive contact with the Japanese language has left a legacy of Japanese loanwords in Taiwanese Hokkien. On the other hand, the variants spoken in Singapore and Malaysia have a substantial number of loanwords from Malay and to a lesser extent, from English and other Chinese varieties, such as the closely related Teochew and some Cantonese.
The Quanzhou dialect, Xiamen dialect, Zhangzhou dialect and Taiwanese are generally mutually intelligible.[28] Varieties such as Penang Hokkien and Singaporean Hokkien could be less intelligible to some speakers of Quanzhou, Xiamen, Zhangzhou and Taiwanese varieties due to the existence of loanwords from Malay.
Although the Min Nan varieties of Teochew and Amoy are 84% phonetically similar including the pronunciations of un-used Chinese characters as well as same characters used for different meanings,[citation needed] and 34% lexically similar,[citation needed], Teochew has only 51% intelligibility with the Tong'anXiamen dialect of the Hokkien language (Cheng 1997)[who?] whereas Mandarin and Amoy Min Nan are 62% phonetically similar[citation needed] and 15% lexically similar.[citation needed] In comparison, German and English are 60% lexically similar.[29]
Hainanese, which is sometimes considered Southern Min, has almost no mutual intelligibility with any form of Hokkien.[28]
Grammar
Hokkien is an analytic language; in a sentence, the arrangement of words is important to its meaning.[30] A basic sentence follows the subject–verb–object pattern (i.e. a subject is followed by a verb then by an object), though this order is often violated because Hokkien dialects are topic-prominent. Unlike synthetic languages, seldom do words indicate time, gender and plural by inflection. Instead, these concepts are expressed through adverbs, aspect markers, and grammatical particles, or are deduced from the context. Different particles are added to a sentence to further specify its status or intonation.
A verb itself indicates no grammatical tense. The time can be explicitly shown with time-indicating adverbs. Certain exceptions exist, however, according to the pragmatic interpretation of a verb's meaning. Additionally, an optional aspect particle can be appended to a verb to indicate the state of an action. Appending interrogative or exclamative particles to a sentence turns a statement into a question or shows the attitudes of the speaker.
Choice of grammatical function words also varies significantly among the Hokkien dialects. For instance, 乞 khit (denoting the causative, passive or dative) is retained in Jinjiang (also unique to the Jinjiang dialect is 度 thoo) and in Jieyang, but not in Longxi and Xiamen, whose dialects use 互 (hoo) instead.[32]
Pronouns
Hokkien dialects differ in their preferred choice of pronouns. For instance, while the second person pronoun lí (汝) is standard in Taiwanese Hokkien, the Teochew loanword lú (汝) is more common among Hokkien-speaking communities in Southeast Asia. The plural personal pronouns tend to be nasalized forms of the singular ones. Personal pronouns found in the Hokkien dialects are listed below:
Person
Singular
Plural
First person
我 góa
阮1, 3gún, góan
咱2, 3 or 俺 lán or án
我儂 góa-lâng
Second person
汝 lí
汝 lú
恁 lín
恁儂 lín lâng
Third person
伊 i
𪜶 in
伊儂 i lâng
1 Inclusive
2 Exclusive
3 儂 (-lâng) is typically suffixed in Southeast Asian Hokkien dialects (with the exception of Philippine Hokkien)
Possessive pronouns are marked by the particle ê (的), or its literary version chi (之). Plural pronouns are typically unmarked (the nasalized final serves as the possessive indicator):[33]
阮翁姓陳。
"My husband's surname is Tan."
Reflexive pronouns are made by appending the pronouns ka-kī (家己) or chū-kí (自己).
Hokkien dialects use a variety of differing demonstrative pronouns, which are as follows:
States and qualities are generally expressed using stative verbs that do not require the verb "to be":
我腹肚枵。
"I am hungry." (lit. I-stomach-hungry)
With noun complements, the verb sī (是) serves as the verb "to be".
昨昏是八月節。
"Yesterday was the Mid-Autumn festival."
To indicate location, the words tī (佇) tiàm (踮), leh (咧), which are collectively known as the locatives or sometimes coverbs in Chinese linguistics, are used to express "(to be) at":
我踮遮等汝。
"I am here waiting for you."
伊這摆佇厝裡咧睏。
"He's sleeping at home now."
Negation
Hokkien dialects have a variety of negation particles that are prefixed or affixed to the verbs they modify. There are five primary negation particles in Hokkien dialects:
m̄ (毋, 呣, 唔)
bē, bōe (袂, 未)
mài (莫, 勿)
bô (無)
put (不) - literary
Other negative particles include:
biàu (嫑) - a contraction of bô iàu (無要), as in biàu-kín (嫑緊) [citation needed]
bàng (甭)
bián (免)
thài (汰)
The particles m̄ (毋, 呣, 唔) is general and can negate almost any verb:
伊毋捌字。
"He cannot read." (lit. he-not-know-word)
The particle mài (莫, 勿), a concatenation of m-ài (毋愛) is used to negate imperative commands:
莫講!
"Don't speak!"
The particle bô (無) indicates the past tense:
伊無食。
"He did not eat."
The verb 'to have', ū (有) is replaced by bô (無) when negated (not 無有):
伊無錢。
"He does not have any money."
The particle put (不) is used infrequently, mostly found in literary compounds and phrases:
伊真不孝。
"He is truly unfilial."
Vocabulary
The majority of Hokkien vocabulary is monosyllabic.[34][bettersourceneeded] Many Hokkien words have cognates in other Chinese varieties. That said, there are also many indigenous words that are unique to Hokkien and are potentially not of Sino-Tibetan origin, while others are shared by all the Min dialects (e.g. 'congee' is 糜 mê, bôe, bê, not 粥 zhōu, as in other dialects).
As compared to Standard Chinese (Mandarin), Hokkien dialects prefer to use the monosyllabic form of words, without suffixes. For instance, the Mandarin noun suffix 子 (zi) is not found in Hokkien words, while another noun suffix, 仔 (á) is used in many nouns. Examples are below:
'duck' - 鴨 ah or 鴨仔 ah-á (SC: 鴨子 yāzi)
'color' - 色 sek (SC: 顏色 yán sè)
In other bisyllabic morphemes, the syllables are inverted, as compared to Standard Chinese. Examples include the following:
'guest' - 人客 lâng-kheh (SC: 客人 kèrén)
In other cases, the same word can have different meanings in Hokkien and standard written Chinese. Similarly, depending on the region Hokkien is spoken in, loanwords from local languages (Malay, Tagalog, Burmese, among others), as well as other Chinese dialects (such as Southern Chinese dialects like Cantonese and Teochew), are commonly integrated into the vocabulary of Hokkien dialects.
Literary and colloquial readings
The existence of literary and colloquial readings is a prominent feature of some Hokkien dialects and indeed in many Sinitic varieties in the south. The bulk of literary readings (文讀, bûn-tha̍k), based on pronunciations of the vernacular during the Tang Dynasty, are mainly used in formal phrases and written language (e.g. philosophical concepts, given names, and some place names), while the colloquial (or vernacular) ones (白讀, pe̍h-tha̍k) are usually used in spoken language, vulgar phrases and surnames. Literary readings are more similar to the pronunciations of the Tang standard of Middle Chinese than their colloquial equivalents.
The pronounced divergence between literary and colloquial pronunciations found in Hokkien dialects is attributed to the presence of several strata in the Min lexicon. The earliest, colloquial stratum is traced to the Han dynasty (206 BCE - 220 CE); the second colloquial one comes from the period of the Southern and Northern Dynasties (420 - 589 CE); the third stratum of pronunciations (typically literary ones) comes from the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE) and is based on the prestige dialect of Chang'an (modern day Xi'an), its capital.[35]
Some commonly seen sound correspondences (colloquial → literary) are as follows:
p- ([p-], [pʰ-]) → h ([h-])
ch-, chh- ([ts-], [tsʰ-], [tɕ-], [tɕʰ-]) → s ([s-], [ɕ-])
k-, kh- ([k-], [kʰ-]) → ch ([tɕ-], [tɕʰ-])
-ⁿ ([-ã], [-uã]) → n ([-an])
-h ([-ʔ]) → t ([-t])
i ([-i]) → e ([-e])
e ([-e]) → a ([-a])
ia ([-ia]) → i ([-i])
This table displays some widely used characters in Hokkien that have both literary and colloquial readings:[36][37]
Chinese character
Reading pronunciations
Spoken pronunciations / †explications
English
白
pe̍k
pe̍h
white
面
biān
bīn
face
書
su
chu
book
生
seng
seⁿ / siⁿ
student
不
put
m̄†
not
返
hóan
tńg†
return
學
ha̍k
o̍h
to study
人
jîn / lîn
lâng†
person
少
siàu
chió
few
轉
chóan
tńg
to turn
This feature extends to Chinese numerals, which have both literary and colloquial readings.[37] Literary readings are typically used when the numerals are read out loud (e.g. phone numbers, years), while colloquial readings are used for counting items.
Numeral
Reading
Numeral
Reading
Literary
Colloquial
Literary
Colloquial
1
it
chi̍t
6
lio̍k
la̍k
2
jī, lī
nn̄g
7
chhit
3
sam
saⁿ
8
pat
peh, poeh
4
sù, sìr
sì
9
kiú
káu
5
ngó͘
gō͘
10
si̍p
cha̍p
Semantic differences between Hokkien and Mandarin
Quite a few words from the variety of Old Chinese spoken in the state of Wu, where the ancestral language of Min and Wu dialect families originated, and later words from Middle Chinese as well, have retained the original meanings in Hokkien, while many of their counterparts in Mandarin Chinese have either fallen out of daily use, have been substituted with other words (some of which are borrowed from other languages while others are new developments), or have developed newer meanings. The same may be said of Hokkien as well, since some lexical meaning evolved in step with Mandarin while others are wholly innovative developments.
This table shows some Hokkien dialect words from Classical Chinese, as contrasted to the written Chinese standard, Mandarin:
For other words, the classical Chinese meanings of certain words, which are retained in Hokkien dialects, have evolved or deviated significantly in other Chinese dialects. The following table shows some words that are both used in both Hokkien dialects and Mandarin Chinese, while the meanings in Mandarin Chinese have been modified:
Loanwords are not unusual among Hokkien dialects, as speakers readily adopted indigenous terms of the languages they came in contact with. As a result, there is a plethora of loanwords that are not mutually comprehensible among Hokkien dialects.
Taiwanese Hokkien, as a result of linguistic contact with Japanese[39] and Formosan languages, contains many loanwords from these languages. Many words have also been formed as calques from Mandarin, and speakers will often directly use Mandarin vocabulary through codeswitching. Among these include the following examples:
'market' - 巴剎 pa-sat, from Malay pasar from Persian bazaar (بازار)[40]
Other Hokkien variants: 市場 (chhī-tiûⁿ), 菜市 (chhài-chhi)
'they' - 伊儂 i lâng from Teochew (i1 nang5)
Other Hokkien variants: 𪜶 (in)
'together' - 做瓠 chò-bú from Teochew 做瓠 (jo3 bu5)
Other Hokkien variants: 做夥 (chò-hóe), 同齊 (tâng-chê) or 鬥陣 (tàu-tīn)
茶箍 (sap-bûn) from Malay sabun from Arabic ṣābūn (صابون).[40][41][42]
Philippine Hokkien dialects, as a result of centuries-old contact with both Philippine language and Spanish also incorporate words from these languages. Examples include:
'cup' - ba-sù, from Spanish vaso and Tagalog baso
Other Hokkien variants: 杯仔 (poe-á), 杯 (poe)
'office' - o-pi-sín, from Spanish oficina and Tagalog opisina
Other Hokkien variants: 辦公室 (pān-kong-sek/pān-kong-siak)
'soap' - sap-bûn, from Spanish jabon and Tagalog sabon
Other Hokkien variants:
'but' - ka-so, from Tagalog kaso
Other Hokkien variants: 但是 (tān-sǐ), 毋過 (m̄-koh)
Standard Hokkien
Hokkien originated from Quanzhou.[43][bettersourceneeded] After the Opium War in 1842, Xiamen (Amoy) became one of the major treaty ports to be opened for trade with the outside world. From the mid-19th century onwards, Xiamen slowly developed to become the political and economical center of the Hokkien speaking region in China. This caused Amoy dialect to gradually replace the position of dialect variants from Quanzhou and Zhangzhou. From the mid-19th century until the end of World War II, [citation needed] western diplomats usually learned Amoy as the preferred dialect if they were to communicate with the Hokkien-speaking populace in China or South-East Asia. In the 1940s and 1950s, Taiwan[who?] also held Amoy Minnan as its standard and tended to incline towards Amoy dialect.
The retreat of the Republic of China to Taiwan in 1949 drove party leaders to seek to both culturally and politically assimilate the islanders. As a result, laws were passed throughout the 1950s to suppress Hokkien and other languages in favor of Mandarin. By 1956, speaking Hokkien in ROC schools or military bases was illegal. However, popular outcry from both older islander communities and more recent Mainlander immigrants prompted a general wave of education reform, during which these and other education restrictions were lifted. The general goal of assimilation remained, with Amoy Hokkien seen as less ‘native’ and therefore preferred.[44]
In the 1990s, marked by the liberalization of language development and mother tongue movement in Taiwan, Taiwanese Hokkien had undergone a fast pace in its development. In 1993, Taiwan became the first region in the world to implement the teaching of Taiwanese Hokkien in Taiwanese schools. In 2001, the local Taiwanese language program was further extended to all schools in Taiwan, and Taiwanese Hokkien became one of the compulsory local Taiwanese languages to be learned in schools.[45] The mother tongue movement in Taiwan even influenced Xiamen (Amoy) to the point that in 2010, Xiamen also began to implement the teaching of Hokkien dialect in its schools.[46] In 2007, the Ministry of Education in Taiwan also completed the standardization of Chinese characters used for writing Hokkien and developed Tai-lo as the standard Hokkien pronunciation and romanization guide. A number of universities in Taiwan also offer Taiwanese degree courses for training Hokkien-fluent talents to work for the Hokkien media industry and education. Taiwan also has its own Hokkien literary and cultural circles whereby Hokkien poets and writers compose poetry or literature in Hokkien.
Thus by the 21st century, Taiwan has become one of the most significant Hokkien cultural hubs of the world. The historical changes and development in Taiwan had led Taiwanese Hokkien to become the more influential pole of the Hokkien dialect after the mid-20th century. Today, Taiwaneseprestige dialect (Taiyu Youshiqiang/Tongxinqiang 台語優勢腔/通行腔) is heard on Taiwanese media.
Hokkien dialects are typically written using Chinese characters (漢字, Hàn-jī). However, the written script was and remains adapted to the literary form, which is based on classical Chinese, not the vernacular and spoken form. Furthermore, the character inventory used for Mandarin (standard written Chinese) does not correspond to Hokkien words, and there are a large number of informal characters (替字, thè-jī or thòe-jī; 'substitute characters') which are unique to Hokkien (as is the case with Cantonese). For instance, about 20 to 25% of Taiwanese morphemes lack an appropriate or standard Chinese character.[36]
While most Hokkien morphemes have standard designated characters, they are not always etymological or phono-semantic. Similar-sounding, similar-meaning or rare characters are commonly borrowed or substituted to represent a particular morpheme. Examples include "beautiful" (美bí is the literary form), whose vernacular morpheme suí is represented by characters like 媠 (an obsolete character), 婎 (a vernacular reading of this character) and even 水 (transliteration of the sound suí), or "tall" (高ko is the literary form), whose morpheme kôan is 懸.[47] Common grammatical particles are not exempt; the negation particle m̄ (not) is variously represented by 毋, 呣 or 唔, among others. In other cases, characters are invented to represent a particular morpheme (a common example is the character 𪜶in, which represents the personal pronoun "they"). In addition, some characters have multiple and unrelated pronunciations, adapted to represent Hokkien words. For example, the Hokkien word bah ("meat") has been reduced to the character 肉, which has etymologically unrelated colloquial and literary readings (he̍k and jio̍k, respectively).[48][49] Another case is the word 'to eat,' chia̍h, which is often transcribed in Taiwanese newspapers and media as 呷 (a Mandarin transliteration, xiā, to approximate the Hokkien term), even though its recommended character in dictionaries is 食.[50]
Moreover, unlike Cantonese, Hokkien does not have a universally accepted standardized character set. Thus, there is some variation in the characters used to express certain words and characters can be ambiguous in meaning. In 2007, the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China formulated and released a standard character set to overcome these difficulties.[51] These standard Chinese characters for writing Taiwanese Hokkien are now taught in schools in Taiwan.
Latin script
Hokkien, especially Taiwanese Hokkien, is sometimes written in the Latin script using one of several alphabets. Of these the most popular is POJ, developed first by Presbyterianmissionaries in China and later by the indigenous Presbyterian Church in Taiwan. Use of this script and orthography has been actively promoted since the late 19th century. The use of a mixed script of Han characters and Latin letters is also seen, though remains uncommon. Other Latin-based alphabets also exist.
When writing Hokkien in Chinese characters, some writers create 'new' characters when they consider it impossible to use directly or borrow existing ones; this corresponds to similar practices in character usage in Cantonese, Vietnamese chữ nôm, Korean hanja and Japanese kanji. Some of these are not encoded in Unicode (or the corresponding ISO/IEC 10646: Universal Character Set), thus creating problems in computer processing.
All Latin characters required by Pe̍h-ōe-jī can be represented using Unicode (or the corresponding ISO/IEC 10646: Universal Character Set), using precomposed or combining (diacritics) characters. Prior to June 2004, the vowel akin to but more open than o, written with a dot above right, was not encoded. The usual workaround was to use the (stand-alone; spacing) character Interpunct (U+00B7, ·) or less commonly the combining character dot above (U+0307). As these are far from ideal, since 1997 proposals have been submitted to the ISO/IEC working group in charge of ISO/IEC 10646—namely, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2—to encode a new combining character dot above right. This is now officially assigned to U+0358 (see documents N1593, N2507, N2628, N2699, and N2713).
Hokkien (or Min Nan) can trace its roots through the Tang Dynasty and also even further to the people of the Minyue, the indigenous non-Han people of modern-day Fujian.[53] Min Nan (Hokkien) people call themselves "Tang people," (唐人; Tn̂g-lâng) which is synonymous to "Chinese people". Because of the widespread influence of the Tang culture during the great Tang dynasty, there are today still many Min Nan pronunciations of words shared by the Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese languages.
In 2002, the Taiwan Solidarity Union, a party with about 10% of the Legislative Yuan seats at the time, suggested making Taiwanese a second official language.[54] This proposal encountered strong opposition not only from Mainlander groups but also from Hakka and Taiwanese aboriginal groups who felt that it would slight their home languages. Because of these objections, support for this measure was lukewarm among moderate Taiwan independence supporters, and the proposal did not pass.
Hokkien was finally made an official language of Taiwan in 2018 by the ruling DPP government.
Taiwanese Hokkien, also known as Taiwanese Minnan, Holo, Taiwanese, or Taigi, is a variety of the Hokkien language spoken natively by about 70% of the population of Taiwan. It is spoken by the Taiwanese Hoklo people, who descended from immigrants from southern Fujian during the Qing dynasty. The Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ) romanization is a popular orthography for Taiwanese Hokkien.
Min is a broad group of Sinitic languages spoken by about 30 million people in Fujian province as well as by the descendants of Min speaking colonists on Leizhou peninsula and Hainan, or assimilated natives of Chaoshan, parts of Zhongshan, three counties in southern Wenzhou, Zhoushan archipelago, and Taiwan. The name is derived from the Min River in Fujian, which is also the abbreviated name of Fujian Province. Min varieties are not mutually intelligible with one another nor with any other variety of Chinese.
Southern Min, Minnan or Banlam, is a group of linguistically similar and historically related Sinitic languages that form a branch of Min Chinese spoken in Fujian, most of Taiwan, Eastern Guangdong, Hainan and Southern Zhejiang. The Minnan dialects are also spoken by descendants of emigrants from these areas in diaspora, most notably the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and New York City. It is the most populous branch of Min Chinese, spoken by an estimated 48 million people in ca. 2017–2018.
Penang Hokkien is a local variant of Hokkien spoken in Penang, Malaysia. It is the lingua franca among the majority Chinese population in Penang, as well as the neighbouring states of Kedah, Perlis and northern part of Perak. This Chinese dialect is spoken as a mother tongue by up to 63.9% of Penang's Chinese community. It is also spoken by some members of the Penangite Indian and Malay communities.
Zhangzhou, alternately romanized as Changchow, is a prefecture-level city in Fujian Province, China. The prefecture around the city proper comprises the southeast corner of the province, facing the Taiwan Strait and surrounding the prefecture of Xiamen. During the 2010 census, the entire area of Zhangzhou was home to 4,809,983 inhabitants. Along with the 1.9 million people of central Xiamen, its urban districts of Xiangcheng, Longwen, Longhai and Changtai, form a single metropolitan area of about 6 million people (2010).
The Hoklo people are descendants of Han Chinese people whose traditional ancestral homes are in southern part of Fujian, China. They are speakers of Hokkien, a prestige Southern Min language on the basis of preponderance of their Bamboo network billionaires, in the Southern Min language family, and known by various endonyms, or other related terms such as Banlam (Minnan) people or Hokkien people. There are significant populations in Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
Pe̍h-ōe-jī is an orthography used to write variants of Southern Min Chinese, particularly Taiwanese Hokkien and Amoy Hokkien.
Philippine Hokkien or Lannang-Oe, is a particular dialect of Southern Min language spoken by part of the ethnic Chinese population of the Philippines. The use of Hokkien in the Philippines is influenced by Philippine Spanish, Tagalog and Philippine English. Hokaglish is an oral contact language involving Philippine Hokkien, Tagalog and English. Hokaglish shows similarities to Taglish, the everyday mesolect register of spoken Filipino language within Metro Manila and its environs.
The Amoy dialect or Xiamen dialect, also known as Amoynese, Amoy Hokkien, Xiamenese or Xiamen Hokkien, is a dialect of Hokkien spoken in the city of Xiamen and its surrounding metropolitan area, in the southern part of Fujian province. Currently, it is one of the most widely researched and studied varieties of Southern Min. It has historically come to be one of the more standardized varieties. Most present-day publications in Southern Min are mostly based on this dialect.
Puxian, also known as Pu-Xian Chinese, Puxian Min, Xinghua, Henghwa or Hinghwa, is a Sinitic language that forms a branch of Min Chinese.
Singaporean Hokkien is a local variant of the Hokkien language spoken in Singapore. In Chinese academic circles, this dialect is known as Singaporean Ban-lam Gu. It is closely related to the Southern Malaysian Hokkien (南馬福建話) spoken in Southern Malaysia, as well as to Riau Hokkien (廖內福建話) spoken in the Indonesian province of Riau. It also closely resembles Amoy spoken in Amoy, People's Republic of China, and Taiwanese Hokkien which is spoken in Taiwan, Republic of China.
Longyan Min (龍巖閩語) or Longyan Minnan (龍巖閩南語), is a Southern Min language spoken in the urban city area of Longyan in the province of Fujian while Hakka is spoken in rural villages of longyan by the peasantry. The Longyan Min people had settled in the region from southern part of Fujian Province as early as the Tang dynasty period (618–907). Although Longyan Min has some Hakka influence to a limited extent by the peasant Hakka Chinese language due to close distance of rural village Hakka peasants of the region, Longyan Min is a close dialect of the Minnan language and has more number of tones than Hakka. Longyan Min has a high but limited intelligibility with Southern Min dialects such as Hokkien–Taiwanese. Today, Longyan Minnan is predominantly spoken in Longyan's urban district Xinluo District while Zhangzhou Minnan is spoken in Zhangping City. Hakka on the other hand is spoken in the non-urban rest of the rural areas of Longyan prefecture: Changting County, Yongding County, Shanghang County, Liancheng County and Wuping County.
The Quanzhou dialect, also known as the Chin-chew dialect, is a dialect of Hokkien that is spoken in southern Fujian, in the area centered on the city of Quanzhou. Due to migration, variations of the Quanzhou dialect are spoken outside of Quanzhou, notably in Taiwan and many Southeast Asian countries, including Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines.
The Zhangzhou dialect, also known as Changchew dialect or Changchow dialect, is a dialect of Hokkien spoken in southern Fujian province, centered on the city of Zhangzhou. It is the source of some former place names in English, including Amoy and Quemoy.
Bbánlám Hōng'ggián Pìngyīm Hōng'àn, Bbánlám pìngyīm, Minnan pinyin or simply pingyim, is a romanization system for Hokkien Southern Min, in particular the Amoy (Xiamen) version of this language.
Hokkien, a Min Nan variety of Chinese spoken in Southeastern China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, does not have a unitary standardized writing system, in comparison with the well-developed written forms of Cantonese and Vernacular Chinese (Mandarin). In Taiwan, a standard for Written Hokkien has been developed by the Republic of China Ministry of Education including its Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwan Minnan, but there are a wide variety of different methods of writing in Vernacular Hokkien. Nevertheless, vernacular works written in the Hokkien are still commonly seen in literature, film, performing arts and music.
Southern Malaysian Hokkien is a local variant of the Min Nan Chinese variety spoken in Central and Southern Peninsular Malaysia, Singapore, Riau and Riau Islands
Minnan, Southern Fujian or Minnan Golden Triangle, refers to the coastal region in Southern Fujian Province, China, which includes the prefecture-level cities of Xiamen, Quanzhou and Zhangzhou. The region accounts for 40 percent of the GDP of Fujian Province. It is the native homeland of the Hokkien people who speak the Hokkien language or Minnan language, a variety of Southern Min.
Minnan culture or Hokkien/Hoklo culture, also considered as the Mainstream Southern Min Culture, refers to the culture of the Hoklo people, a group of Han Chinese people who have historically been the dominant demographic in the province of Fujian in Southern China, Taiwan, Singapore, and certain overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia.
↑ 《國家語言發展法》立院三讀！政府得設台語專屬頻道[Third Reading of the National Language Development Law! The government must set up a Taiwanese-only channel]. ltn.com.tw (in Chinese).
↑ 大眾運輸工具播音語言平等保障法[Public Transport Broadcast Language Equality Guarantee Law]. zh.wikisource.org.
↑ Lee, Jack Tsen-Ta (28 April 2015) [2004]. "Hokkien". A Dictionary of Singlish and Singapore English. Retrieved 22 June 2020.
↑ West (2010), pp.289-90. sfnp error: no target: CITEREFWest2010 (help)
↑ 臺灣閩南語漢字之選用原則[Selection Principles of Taiwanese Min Nan Chinese Characters](PDF).
↑ Lien, Chinfa (2015). "Min languages". In Wang, William S.-Y.; Sun, Chaofen (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics. Oxford University Press. pp.160–172. ISBN978-0-19-985633-6.
↑ Klöter, Henning (2011). The Language of the Sangleys: A Chinese Vernacular in Missionary Sources of the Seventeenth Century. BRILL. ISBN978-90-04-18493-0.
↑ Yue, Anne O. (1999). "The Min translation of the Doctrina Christiana". Contemporary Studies on the Min Dialects. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series. 14. Chinese University Press. pp.42–76. JSTOR23833463.
↑ Tay, Mary W. J. (1970). Hokkien Phonological Structure. Journal of Linguistics Vol. 6, No. 1: Cambridge University Press. pp.81–88.CS1 maint: location (link)
↑ 無標題文件 (in Chinese). Ntcu.edu.tw. 1 August 2007. Retrieved 16 September 2010.
↑ Li, Y.C. (1986). "Historical significance of certain distinct grammatical features in Taiwanese". In John McCoy, Timothy Light (ed.). Contributions to Sino-Tibetan studies. Brill Archive. ISBN978-90-04-07850-5.
↑ "台湾河洛话发展历程"[Development of Heluo dialect in Taiwan]. www.taiwan.cn. 26 December 2005.
↑ Wong, Ting-Hong (May 2020). "Education and National Colonialism in Postwar Taiwan: The Paradoxical Use of Private Schools to Extend State Power, 1944–1966". History of Education Quarterly. 60 (2): 156–184. doi:10.1017/heq.2020.25.
Branner, David Prager (2000). Problems in Comparative Chinese Dialectology — the Classification of Miin and Hakka. Trends in Linguistics series, no. 123. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN3-11-015831-0.
Chung, Raung-fu (1996). The segmental phonology of Southern Min in Taiwan. Taipei: Crane Pub. Co. ISBN957-9463-46-8.
Klöter, Henning (2011). The Language of the Sangleys: A Chinese Vernacular in Missionary Sources of the Seventeenth Century. BRILL. ISBN978-90-04-18493-0. An analysis and facsimile of the Arte de la Lengua Chio-chiu (1620), the oldest extant grammar of Hokkien.
Mançano, Melchior; Feyjoó, Raymundo (1620). Arte de la Lengua Chio-chiu. Manila. A manual for learning Hokkien written by a Spanish missionary in the Philippines.
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