Hakka forms a language group of varieties of Chinese, spoken natively by the Hakka people in parts of Southern China and some diaspora areas of Taiwan, Southeast Asia and in overseas Chinese communities around the world.
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.
Hsinchu County is a county administered as part of the nominal Taiwan Province of the Republic of China (ROC). Located in north-western Taiwan, the population of the county is mainly Hakka; with a Taiwanese aboriginal minority in the southeastern part of the county. Zhubei is the county seat, where the government office and county office is located. A portion of the Hsinchu Science Park is located in Hsinchu County.
Miaoli County is a county in western Taiwan. Miaoli is adjacent with Hsinchu County and Hsinchu City to the north, Taichung to the south, and borders the Taiwan Strait to the west. Miaoli is classified as a county in central Taiwan by the National Development Council, while the Taiwan Central Weather Bureau classifies Miaoli as a county in northern Taiwan. Miaoli City is the capital of the county, and is also known as "Mountain Town", owing to the number of mountains nearby, making it a destination for hiking.
The Han Chinese people can be defined into subgroups based on linguistic, cultural, ethnic, genetic, and regional features. The terminology used in Mandarin to describe the groups is: "minxi", used in mainland China or "zuqun", used in Taiwan. No Han subgroup is recognized as one of People's Republic of China's 56 official ethnic groups, in Taiwan only three subgroups, Hoklo, Hakka and Waishengren are recognized.
The term "Taiwanese people" has various interpretations. It may generally be considered the people living on the island of Taiwan who share a common culture, ancestry and speak Mandarin, Hokkien, Hakka, or indigenous Taiwanese languages as a mother tongue. Taiwanese people may also refer to the indigenous peoples of the areas under the control of the Government of the Republic of China since 1945, including Kinmen and Matsu Islands that collectively form its streamlined Fujian Province. However, the inhabitants of Kinmen and the Matsu Islands themselves may not consider the "Taiwanese" label to be accurate as they are a part of Fujian and not Taiwan. They have a distinctive identity from that of the Taiwanese; viewing themselves as Kinmenese or Matsunese, respectively, or as simply Chinese.
Saisiyat is the language of the Saisiyat, a Taiwanese indigenous people. It is a Formosan language of the Austronesian family. It has approximately 4,750 speakers.
Pha̍k-fa-sṳ is an orthography similar to Pe̍h-ōe-jī and used to write Hakka, a variety of Chinese. Hakka is a whole branch of Chinese, and Hakka dialects are not necessarily mutually intelligible with each other, considering the large geographical region. This article discusses a specific variety of Hakka. The orthography was invented by the Presbyterian church in the 19th century. The Hakka New Testament published in 1924 is written in this system.
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.
The population of Taiwan is approximately 23.35 million as of April 2023.
Special municipality, historically known as Yuan-controlled municipality, is a first-level administrative division unit in Taiwan. It is the highest level of the country's administrative structure and is equivalent to a province. After the suspension of the provincial governments of 2018, the special municipalities along with provincial cities and counties have all governed directly under the central government.
The Wuhua dialect is a major dialect of Hakka Chinese spoken in Wuhua County, Jiexi County, Shenzhen, eastern Dongguan, Northern Guangdong around Shaoguan, Sichuan Province, and Tonggu County in Jiangxi Province.
Raoping Hakka, also known as Shangrao Hakka, is a dialect of Hakka Chinese spoken in Raoping, Guangdong, as well as Taiwan.
The Sixian dialect, also known as the Sixian accent, is a dialect of Hakka used by Taiwanese Hakkas, and it is the most spoken dialect of Taiwanese Hakka, being used in Hakka broadcasting in many public occasions. The Sixian dialect is generally spoken in northern and southern Taiwan, with main representative regions being Taoyuan and Miaoli in the north, as well as the Liudui Region in Kaohsiung and Pingtung in the south.
The Hailu dialect, also known as the Hoiluk dialect or Hailu Hakka, is a dialect of Hakka Chinese that originated in Shanwei, Guangdong. It is also the second most common dialect of Hakka spoken in Taiwan.
Protection of the varieties of Chinese refers to efforts to protect the continued existence of the varieties of Chinese in mainland China and other Sinophone regions, amid pressure to abandon their use, usually in favor of Standard Chinese. The Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China has proclaimed to be taking active measures to protect ten varieties of Chinese. However, a large majority of the citizens of China speak a dialect of Mandarin Chinese, a standardized form of which has been enforced and promoted by the government of China for the last sixty years. The Constitution of the People's Republic of China calls on the government to promote Standard Chinese as the common tongue of the nation, but this policy has caused conflict to a certain extent with plans to preserve local varieties of Chinese. Education and media programming in varieties of Chinese other than Mandarin have been discouraged by the governments of the People's Republic of China, Singapore, and Taiwan. Teaching the varieties of Chinese to non-native speakers is discouraged by the laws of the People's Republic of China in favor of Putonghua. The Guangdong National Language Regulations were passed by the Guangdong provincial government in 2012 to promote the use of Standard Chinese in broadcast and print media at the expense of the local standard Cantonese and other related dialects. It has been labelled "pro-Mandarin, anti-Yue" legislation.
During the martial law period in Taiwan, a Mandarin monolingual policy was implemented in Taiwan by the Kuomintang. The policy was formulated as a political goal to unite the island. However, the demotion of prior local languages into "dialects" across cultural and educational landscapes resulted in a pushback of the policy and eventually rescinded as Taiwan democratized.
