Only a small minority of Chinese Filipinos claim Mandarin as their native first language, with Filipino (Tagalog) or English or Philippine Hokkien typically being the first language.[4][6] The lack of environment for speaking the language and the difficulty of learning it created not just a lack of interest, but even great disgust by some towards it.[4]
Efforts in the 21st century to promote Mandarin Chinese education in Chinese Filipino institutions and recent utilitarian trends, such as more Mandarin job opportunities, recent immigrants from China or Taiwan, summer education trips to China or Taiwan, encouragement of universities and schools by past presidents, and education exchange deals with China have spurred interest and potential for growth in the usage of Mandarin.[7][4]
There are about 150 or so Chinese schools that exist throughout the Philippines, around a third of which operate in Metro Manila.[8][9] Most education of Standard Chinese (Mandarin) provided in the Philippines is facilitated through Chinese Filipino schools established by Chinese Filipinos, which typically include the teaching of Standard Chinese (Mandarin) in one or multiple Chinese class subjects depending on the school, along with other school class subjects taught in English or Filipino (Tagalog) depending on the class subject.
History
The earliest evident record of Mandarin Chinese in the Philippines, excluding the earliest Classical Chinese texts printed in the Philippines by the Spanish friars, are from manuscripts made by the Spanish friars studying Chinese during the 1600s-1700s, such as the Dictionario Hispanico Sinicum (1626-1642), which primarily studied Hokkien Chinese in the Philippines but also additionally started to add romanizedMandarin Chinese sourced from their Sangley Chinese informants, whether in early Spanish Philippines or from late Ming China, which back then centuries ago, the Spaniards had not fully understood yet the differences between the Chinese language family.
The gradual shift to the modern curriculum of teaching Mandarin in the Philippines came mainly around the founding of the Republic of China (ROC) around 1912 after the 1911 Xinhai Revolution ended the Qing dynasty in China. During the early 20th century in 1902, Imperial Japan had initiated a standardized form of the Japanese language, known in Japanese: 國語, romanized:kokugo, lit.'national language', which inspired reformers of the Qing bureaucracy in China, enough that in 1909, the Qing education ministry officially proclaimed the Nanking-based late imperial Mandarin too in MandarinChinese:國語; Wade–Giles:kuo2-yü3; lit.'national language', which its status continued even after the fall of the Qing dynasty, only decades later gradually switching to the modern Beijing-based Mandarin. During the early 20th century American colonial era in the Philippines, newly founded Chinese schools gradually adopted the modern curriculum from China, which included Chinese language, history, geography, math, and sciences, which the language of instruction shifted from monolingual Hokkien to bilingual Hokkien and Mandarin instruction, where initially the Hokkien-speaking Filipino-Chinese teacher would primarily read and explain Chinese texts in Hokkien, whilst simultaneously teaching how it is read in Mandarin for the average Hokkien-speaking Filipino-Chinese student back then, since Mandarin was the official "national language" of ROC, often translated as "Chinese language" from an outside-China perspective. Mandarin Chinese was known back then during the founding of ROC to even now in Philippine HokkienChinese:國語; Pe̍h-ōe-jī:kok-gí; lit.'national language', while in MandarinChinese:華語; Zhuyin Fuhao:ㄏㄨㄚˊ ㄩˇ; lit.'Chinese language', since formally there is a risk of confusion to which country a word that means 'national language' is in reference to.[4] Chinese textbooks as used in Chinese schools in the Philippines during the early 20th century usually did not include any romanization, besides Chinese characters, but it was also the period when Zhuyin Fuhao / Bopomofo was first introduced and taught in Chinese schools in the Philippines, usually known in Philippine HokkienChinese:國音; Pe̍h-ōe-jī:kok-im, after the system's first name in MandarinChinese:國音字母; Wade–Giles:kuo2-yin1 tzŭ4-mu3; Zhuyin Fuhao:ㄍㄨㄛˊ ㄧㄣㄗˋ ㄇㄨˇ; lit.'national pronunciation alphabet'. During the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, it also spurred more refugees and migrants from China to migrate to American-era Philippines, enough that many were educated folk from China that became the Chinese teachers in the new Chinese schools being founded.[11]
During the early 20th century, some Chinese schools in the Philippines also initially added an English class to keep pace with the increasing formal usage of English, which Philippine society gradually adopted under and after the American colonial era. This led to the Chinese schools later adopting a dual curriculum, where there were two independent divisions known as the English Division and the Chinese Division, where each division was held in the morning or afternoon. The Chinese division was patterned after the curriculum standards of primary and secondary education established by the ROC government, while the English division followed the curriculum standards of the primary and secondary education required by the Department of Public Instruction (modern-day Department of Education (DepEd)) of American-era Philippines. The system had issues with duplicated subjects such as mathematics and science which were taught once in English and also another time in the Chinese curriculum.[4] This dual curriculum system though made it so the education then produced trilingual then later quadrilingual students, as the Chinese division used both Hokkien and Mandarin, while the English division initially used English. By the Commonwealth era of the Philippines, Tagalog was proclaimed by Pres. Manuel Quezon on December 31, 1937 as the basis of the National Language (Tagalog: Wikang Pambansâ) of the Philippines. This made it so, the English division additionally added a Tagalog class as well, which during Japanese occupation in WW2, the teaching of Tagalog, Philippine history, and personal character education was given priority instead of English. The Chinese division typically included class subjects like math, science, history, geography, civics, ethics, etc., wherein Mandarin was mainly used in Chinese language class and Chinese literature class, where Chinese teachers mainly read Chinese texts and words in Mandarin and explained them in Hokkien. Class subjects though such as mathematics and sciences in the Chinese division were mainly taught in Hokkien. During this time, Chinese language, literature, and mathematics, were mainly taught via rote memorization, known in Philippine HokkienChinese:死讀; Pe̍h-ōe-jī:sí-tha̍k, where teachers pointed to a picture of an object or animal, then recited the Mandarin vocabulary words together side-by-side their equivalent Hokkien words in Chinese language class, which students were expected to repeatedly recite and orally memorize (e.g. teacher points to a fly, students recite: 苍蝇; tsʻang1-ying2; ㄘㄤ ㄧㄥˊ, 胡蠅; hô͘-sîn; teacher points to a mosquito, students recite: 蚊子; wên2-tzŭ5; ㄨㄣˊ ˙ㄗ; 蠓; báng), then for Chinese mathematics class, the multiplication tables were mainly memorized in Hokkien (e.g. "2 × 1 = 2, 2 × 2 = 4, 2 × 3 = 6" are read in Philippine HokkienChinese:二 × 一 = 二，二 × 二 = 四，二 × 三 = 六; Pe̍h-ōe-jī:lī-it lī, lī-lī sì, lī-saⁿ la̍k).[11]
After WW2 and de-jurePhilippine independence from the United States in 1946, the newly independent Philippine government around the start of the Cold War era signed the Sino-Philippine Treaty of Amity in April 18, 1947 with the ROC government still based in mainland China, which explicitly stated that ROC citizens are allowed to establish schools in the Philippines to educate their children. This made it so Chinese schools in the Philippines from then on were officially under the purview of the Republic of China (ROC) and Chinese schools and teachers had to register with the ROC embassy in the Philippines back then for supervision of the Chinese departments of each school and for teachers to get a certificate to teach, while the other subject departments were registered and supervised by the Philippine government's Department of Education (DepEd). In 1949, the People's Republic of China (PRC) was proclaimed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the ROC government under the Kuomintang (KMT) and its remaining armed forces and refugees retreated to Taiwan as a result of the Chinese Civil War. The Philippine government continued to recognize the Republic of China in Taiwan and the 1947 treaty, which let the ROC Ministry of Education in Taiwan continue to supervise the Chinese department of Chinese schools in the Philippines and begin to provide Chinese textbooks coming from Taiwan. After the retreat of the ROC government under the KMT in 1949, the White Terror began upon Martial law in Taiwan for the KMT to solidify rule and quash dissidents after the end of Imperial Japanese rule over Taiwan. The martial law era of Taiwan saw the promotion of Mandarin with a monolingual Mandarinlanguage policy as part of the KMT's consolidation of power in Taiwan via de-Japanization and promotion of national unity against its ideological rival in mainland China. The ROC government encouraged Mandarin as a national language that would serve as a lingua franca for all groups in Taiwan and heavily discouraged any other with harsh policies, for its ambition of national unity and patriotism through standardizing Mandarin as a means to prove that the newly established Republic of China in Taiwan is more superior and united than the People’s Republic of China. The ROC government in Taiwan intensified this campaign not just in Taiwan but also propagated this to overseas Chinese communities, such as to the Chinese departments of the Chinese schools in the Philippines. Around roughly the 1950s-1970s depending on the school, the Chinese departments of different Chinese schools in the Philippines were to teach Chinese language, history, geography, and mathematics exclusively only in Mandarin.[11]
In 1972, Pres. Ferdinand Marcos Sr. declared Martial law in the Philippines and later promulgated the 1973 constitution, which banned the ownership and operation of alien schools, which were to be phased out in 4 years. The Chinese schools in the Philippines were to be nationalized and became legally Philippine private schools. From a maximum of 160 minutes per day in grade one and two of elementary school and max of 200 minutes per day in high school were all to be reduced to only a maximum of 120 minutes per day only for the teaching of Chinese language class. The names of the schools were also to remove the word "Chinese", which some schools decided to change their school names with Hokkien transcriptions or reworded them to keep their school acronyms by changing the word "Chinese" in their name to another word that started with the letter "C", such as "Cultural", "Central", "Chung Hua", "Chong Hua", "Community", "Christian", "Catholic", "City", "Citizen", "Confucius", "Chamber", etc. There was also a maximum ratio of alien students to be only at one-third, which Chinese schools were able to easily meet by 1974, since the naturalization process was liberalized which caused a mass naturalization of Filipino Chinese (then only with permanent residency and usually ROC, British Hong Kong, Portuguese Macau, and some PRC citizenship), converting many into Chinese Filipinos (with Philippine citizenship) in 1974. There were also some Chinese schools and especially the ROC embassy that resisted the nationalization, citing their service in education, provision of local employment, their high English education standards, and the 1947 Sino-Philippine Treaty of Amity, which increasingly became no longer applicable as the Chinese school owners now mostly received Philippine citizenship after the mass naturalization of 1974. The Chinese schools were nationalized due to previous debates on the direction and focus of education of Chinese schools due to the strong focus on China in the Chinese curriculum, which the older generations tended to be fine with, but the younger generation students during the late 20th century who were typically born and raised in the Philippines increasingly saw little relevance of the Chinese subject matters to their daily lives in the Philippines and had very little idea of the Chinese society in either mainland China or Taiwan. Students and even the Chinese schools themselves saw they had no hand in the designing of the Chinese curriculum controlled by the ROC government, enough that some Chinese schools in the Philippines during the mid-1960s already decided to break away from the system of ROC supervision, such as some Jesuit-run Chinese schools like Xavier school among others, which applied beforehand to be classified as Philippine schools instead of Chinese schools to not be accredited under the ROC system, primarily because they were tired of the redundant Cold War-fueled internecine KMT vs communist political antagonisms that mattered little in the Philippine setting. This policy of nationalizing Chinese schools gave way to in-house Philippine Chinese textbooks teaching Mandarin being made locally in the Philippines to orient to the Philippine setting and the elimination of textbooks imposed from Taiwan that contained KMT political propaganda.[4]
Due to the limit of 120 minutes per day introduced by the nationalization, different schools divided up their curriculums in various ways, some had two 1-hour Chinese classes per day, some had three 40-minute Chinese classes, with some dedicating it all to only Chinese language, or some having half the daily Chinese classes as Chinese composition (綜合, Pe̍h-ōe-jī:Chong-ha̍p) which was a combination of Chinese history, geography, and culture. Some also still had Chinese mathematics (數學, Pe̍h-ōe-jī:Sò͘-ha̍k) and some had Chinese calligraphy (毛筆, Pe̍h-ōe-jī:Mô͘-pit), which the Chinese curriculums tended to vary per school, which the weekly schedule per class section were also variously portioned throughout the school year depending on the school's curriculum per semester or quarter. Sometimes, the allotted time limit was informally exceeded as well, but this typically took up the time of the next class which was not necessarily a Chinese class anymore. In some cases, there were still a few that maintained the dual curriculum set up where afternoons were devoted entirely for Chinese classes, though not as lengthily anymore compared to pre-nationalization years.[4]
Besides the in-house Philippine Chinese textbooks, the sets of textbooks used tended to vary over the years as well depending on different schools, which there are at least 4 or more sets of textbooks used by different Chinese schools in the Philippines, two of whom were prepared by the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, which is the de facto Taiwan embassy, then another was prepared by Philippine Cultural College (PCC), and another was also prepared by Xavier school for the Jesuit-run Catholic Chinese schools, then possibly more sets of textbooks over the years as well in various other schools. For decades as well since the late 20th century to the 21st century, most Chinese schools did not change much in their methods of teaching Mandarin, while Philippine society increasingly became primarily more English and Tagalog speaking. Chinese Filipino schools still often use the first language approach, which assumes that students of Chinese Filipino schools have had native experience of Mandarin, despite the contrary. There has been a deterioration and stagnation in the Mandarin Chinese education in Chinese schools in the Philippines over the years, due to the lack of environment for speaking the language outside school and the difficulty of learning it as Chinese teachers themselves are low in supply in the Philippines and typically have no degree in education to teach Chinese, which creates not just a lack of interest, but even great disgust by some towards it, especially since the Chinese education system in the Philippines usually produces graduates too lacking in Mandarin for effective interactions with Mandarin speakers abroad. The solution pursued by some families was to send their kids to study Mandarin abroad, but in the 1980s-1990s, only very few negligible number usually go out their way to have their kids continue their Chinese education abroad likely due to the impractical high cost for each family. For the Chinese schools themselves, there were attempts to revise the Chinese textbooks, which just ended up with more sets of non-uniform textbooks across different schools, then there were efforts as well for teachers' training but it itself had an underlying shortage in supply of Mandarin teachers to fuel it. The immediate solution mainly pursued to mitigate the problem in past decades of the late 20th to 21st century was to import teachers from abroad initially from Taiwan, then also mainland China as of 2003. It proved only to be a band aid solution as the problem encountered there though during the 1990s-2000s was that the foreign Chinese teachers usually could not communicate well, due to their own lack of English and Tagalog fluency, and usually fail to understand the local culture and behavior of Chinese Filipino students to properly teach and appropriately grade them.[11] Across the 21st century, there have been more students going abroad to study Mandarin, but the terms of study they enroll in are still only short and limited only to gain a bit more fluency to be able to learn enough to do business with Mandarin speakers, but they usually do not come back as well planning to teach.[4]
In 1991, some wealthy Chinese Filipinos donated funds to set up the Philippine Chinese Education Research Center (PCERC) in order to address the deterioration of the Philippine Chinese education system, via education method reform, training teachers, and developing suitable teaching materials. It tried to push for the teaching of Mandarin Chinese as a second language, rather than the first language approach, and encouraged the use and teaching of the Pinyin romanization system rather than the traditional Zhuyin fuhao phonetic system.[4]
In terms of phonology, vocabulary and grammar, the "Chinese" (Mandarin) taught during most of the 20th century in the Philippines in many older Chinese Filipino schools often varied and is somewhat reminiscent sometimes of Taiwanese Mandarin, but ever since the late 20th to 21st century, different Chinese Filipino schools now also teach Beijing-based MandarinStandard Chinese as well. As a result of the history, older Chinese schools in the Philippines still typically teach traditional Chinese characters and the Zhuyin phonetic system or some used to teach it but now shifted to simplified Chinese characters or teaching both depending on the school. In recent decades around the late 20th century to early 2000s depending on the school, many schools started to shift to using simplified Chinese characters and the Pinyin phonetic system instead ever since the Philippine government recognition of the PRC and the introduction of books and teaching materials from mainland China and sometimes Singapore started to be used and taught. In the 21st century, many Chinese Filipino schools now currently teach Chinese (Mandarin) in simplified characters with the Pinyin system, modeled after those in China and Singapore, though some older schools still teach both or either of the systems, where a few still remain teaching solely in traditional Chinese characters and the Zhuyin phonetic system or teach a mixture of simplified and traditional characters with pinyin. Chinese (Mandarin) newspapers in the Philippines, such as World News, United Daily News, Chinese Commercial News, and many others still mostly use traditional Chinese characters in writing. Due to the selection by the founders and sponsors of different Chinese schools, many schools now either teach using simplified Chinese characters only, traditional Chinese characters only, or a mixture of both.[12] Many Chinese Filipino schools either use pinyin and/or bopomofo (zhuyin fuhao) to teach the language.[4]
Taiwanese Hokkien, or simply Taiwanese, also known as Taiuanoe, Taigi, Taigu, Taiwanese Minnan, Hoklo and Holo, is a variety of the Hokkien language spoken natively by more than 70 percent of the population of Taiwan. It is spoken by a significant portion of those Taiwanese people who are descended from Hoklo immigrants of southern Fujian. It is one of the national languages of Taiwan.
Min is a broad group of Sinitic languages with about 70 million native speakers. These languages are spoken in Fujian province as well as by the descendants of Min-speaking colonists on the Leizhou Peninsula and Hainan and by the assimilated natives of Chaoshan, parts of Zhongshan, three counties in southern Wenzhou, the Zhoushan archipelago, Taiwan and scattered in pockets or sporadically across Hong Kong, Macau, and several countries in Southeast Asia, particularly Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam, Brunei. 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 Chinese languages that form a branch of Min Chinese spoken in Fujian, most of Taiwan, Eastern Guangdong, Hainan, and Southern Zhejiang. Southern Min dialects are also spoken by descendants of emigrants from these areas in diaspora, most notably in Southeast Asia, such as Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei, Southern Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Southern and Central Vietnam, as well as major cities in the United States, including San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City. Minnan is the most widely-spoken branch of Min, with approximately 48 million speakers as of 2017–2018.
Penang Hokkien is a local variant of Hokkien spoken in Penang, Malaysia. It is spoken natively by 63.9% of Penang's Chinese community, and also by some Penangite Indians and Penangite Malays.
Chinese Filipinos are Filipinos of Chinese descent with ancestry mainly from Fujian, but are typically born and raised in the Philippines. Chinese Filipinos are one of the largest overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia.
Pe̍h-ōe-jī, sometimes known as Church Romanization, is an orthography used to write variants of Hokkien Southern Min, particularly Taiwanese and Amoy Hokkien, and it is widely employed as one of the writing systems for Southern Min. During its peak, it had hundreds of thousands of readers.
Philippine Hokkien is a dialect of the Hokkien language of the Southern Min branch of Min Chinese descended directly from Old Chinese of the Sinitic family, primarily spoken vernacularly by Chinese Filipinos in the Philippines, where it serves as the local Chinese lingua franca within the overseas Chinese community in the Philippines and acts as the heritage language of a majority of Chinese Filipinos. Despite currently acting mostly as an oral language, Hokkien as spoken in the Philippines did indeed historically have a written language and is actually one of the earliest sources for written Hokkien using both Chinese characters as early as around 1587 or 1593 through the Doctrina Christiana en letra y lengua china and using the Latin script as early as the 1590s in the Boxer Codex and was actually the earliest to systematically romanize the Hokkien language throughout the 1600s in the Hokkien-Spanish works of the Spanish friars especially by the Dominican Order, such as in the Dictionario Hispanico Sinicum (1626-1642) and the Arte de la Lengua Chiõ Chiu (1620) among others. The use of Hokkien in the Philippines was historically influenced by Philippine Spanish, Filipino (Tagalog) and Philippine English. As a lingua franca of the overseas Chinese community in the Philippines, the minority of Chinese Filipinos of Cantonese and Taishanese descent also uses Philippine Hokkien for business purposes due to its status as "the Chinoy business language" [sic]. It is also used as a liturgical language as one of the languages that Protestant Chinese Filipino churches typically minister in with their church service, which they sometimes also minister to students in Chinese Filipino schools that they also usually operate. It is also a liturgical language primarily used by Chinese Buddhist, Taoist, and Matsu veneration temples in the Philippines, especially in their sutra chanting services and temple sermons by monastics.
The languages of Taiwan consist of several varieties of languages under the families of Austronesian languages and Sino-Tibetan languages. The Formosan languages, a geographically designated branch of Austronesian languages, have been spoken by the Taiwanese indigenous peoples for thousands of years. Owing to the wide internal variety of the Formosan languages, research on historical linguistics recognizes Taiwan as the Urheimat (homeland) of the whole Austronesian languages family. In the last 400 years, several waves of Han emigrations brought several different Sinitic languages into Taiwan. These languages include Taiwanese Hokkien, Hakka, and Mandarin, which have become the major languages spoken in present-day Taiwan.
There are many romanization systems used in Taiwan. The first Chinese language romanization system in Taiwan, Pe̍h-ōe-jī, was developed for Taiwanese by Presbyterian missionaries and has been promoted by the indigenous Presbyterian Churches since the 19th century. Pe̍h-ōe-jī is also the first written system of Taiwanese Hokkien; a similar system for Hakka was also developed at that time. During the period of Japanese rule, the promotion of roman writing systems was suppressed under the Dōka and Kōminka policy. After World War II, Taiwan was handed over from Japan to the Republic of China in 1945. The romanization of Mandarin Chinese was also introduced to Taiwan as official or semi-official standard.
The Chinese Television System Inc. is a terrestrial television station in Taiwan and was founded in 1971. Recent milestones of the network are in sports events, including having the distinction to offer exclusive coverage of the 2017 Universiade, which was held in Taipei. This included airing the opening and closing ceremonies, plus major games, and it enabled its YouTube channel with several options to watch the rest of the games. Due to recent interest in soccer in Taiwan triggered by the success of its national team, it also bought the rights to broadcast on its free-to-air waves the 2018 FIFA World Cup for all matches from the round of 16 to the end of the tournament, thereby becoming the only channel which offered an event often reserved to cable TV channels.
Bopomofo, also called Zhuyin Fuhao, or simply Zhuyin, is a transliteration system for Standard Chinese and other Sinitic languages. It is the principal method of teaching Chinese Mandarin pronunciation in Taiwan. It consists of 37 characters and five tone marks, which together can transcribe all possible sounds in Mandarin Chinese.
Hokkien is a variety of the Southern Min languages, native to and originating from the Minnan region, in the southeastern part of Fujian in southeastern mainland China. It is also referred to as Quanzhang, from the first characters of the urban centers of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou.
Tiong Se Academy, formerly known as Anglo-Chinese School and Philippine Tiong Se Academy, is a non-profit, non-sectarian private Chinese school located at Sta. Elena Street, Binondo, Manila near 168 Shopping Mall, the Cityplace Square, and Lucky Chinatown Mall. It was established on April 15, 1899 in response to the growing need of education in the post-Spanish era Chinese community. The school turned the first page of formal Chinese education in the Philippines, earning the recognition of being the country's pioneer and oldest Chinese school.
Huan-a is a Hokkien-language term used by Hokkien speakers in multiple countries, namely mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, etc. The word itself when dissected means 番; hoan; 'foreign', + 仔; á; 'diminutive noun suffix', but to the ethnic Chinese that settled overseas in Taiwan and Maritime Southeast Asia, it soon came to refer to native Southeast Asians and Taiwanese aborigines.
Hokkien, a variety of Chinese that forms part of the Southern Min family and is 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 Standard Chinese (Mandarin). In Taiwan, a standard for Written Hokkien has been developed by the 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 Hokkien are still commonly seen in literature, film, performing arts and music.
The Chinese Commercial News, colloquially called the Commercial News or Siong Po, is a daily broadsheet newspaper in the Philippines written in the Chinese language. Although it is not the Philippines' first Chinese-language newspaper, it is the Philippines' oldest existing Chinese-language newspaper, and the country's third-oldest existing newspaper overall.
The usage of Chinese by the Chinese diaspora and their descendants has been determined by a large number of factors, including their ancestry, their migrant ancestors' "regime of origin", assimilation through generational changes, and official policies of their country of residence. The general trend is that more established Chinese populations in the Western world and in many regions of Asia have Cantonese as either the dominant variety or as a common community vernacular, while Mandarin is much more prevalent among new arrivals, making it increasingly common in many Chinatowns, though still not dominant.
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, and certain overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, such as Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar, Southern Thailand, Cambodia, Southern Vietnam, etc.
The Bible translations into the languages of Taiwan are into Taiwanese, Hakka, Amis, and other languages of Taiwan.
Kiamoy, is a class of Filipino treats made with dried sour plums, prunes, or apricots preserved in brine and vinegar. They are sold covered in a powdery coating of an anise, li hing, salt, and sugar mixture called "kiamoy powder" or kiam-muy-hoon. They are characteristically bright red, orange, or light brown in color. They originate from Chinese Filipino immigrants and are derived from the li hing mui treats of Chinese cuisine. The name is derived from Philippine Hokkien Chinese: 鹹梅; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: kiâm-muî; lit. 'salted plum'.
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