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.
Fujian is a province on the southeastern coast of China. Fujian is bordered by Zhejiang to the north, Jiangxi to the west, Guangdong to the south, and the Taiwan Strait to the east. Its capital is Fuzhou and its largest city by population is Quanzhou, other notable cities include the port city of Xiamen and Zhangzhou. Fujian is located on the west coast of the Taiwan Strait as the closest geographically and culturally to Taiwan. Certain islands such as Kinmen are only approximately 10 km (6.2 mi) east of Xiamen in Fujian.
Xiamen is a sub-provincial city in southeastern Fujian, People's Republic of China, beside the Taiwan Strait. It is divided into six districts: Huli, Siming, Jimei, Tong'an, Haicang, and Xiang'an. All together, these cover an area of 1,700.61 square kilometers (656.61 sq mi) with a population of 5,163,970 as of 2020 and estimated at 5.308 million as of 31 December 2022. The urbanized area of the city has spread from its original island to include most parts of all six of its districts, as well as 4 Zhangzhou districts, which form a built-up area of 7,284,148 inhabitants. This area also connects with Quanzhou in the north, making up a metropolis of nearly ten million people. The Kinmen Islands (Quemoy) administered by the Republic of China (Taiwan) lie less than 6 kilometers (4 mi) away separated by Xiamen Bay. As part of the Opening Up Policy under Deng Xiaoping, Xiamen became one of China's original four special economic zones opened to foreign investment and trade in the early 1980s.
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, 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.
Taiwanese opera commonly known as Ke-Tse opera or Hokkien opera, is a form of traditional drama originating in Taiwan. Taiwanese opera uses a stylised combination of both the literary and colloquial registers of Taiwanese Hokkien. Its earliest form adopted elements of folk songs from Zhangzhou, Fujian, China. The plots are traditionally drawn from folk tales of the southern Fujian region, though in recent years stories are increasingly set in Taiwan itself. Taiwanese opera was later exported to other Hokkien-speaking areas, such as Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Fujian, China.
The Hoklo people are a Han Chinese subgroup who speak Hokkien, a Southern Min language, or trace their ancestry to southeastern Fujian in China, and known by various related terms such as Banlam people, Minnan people, or more commonly in Southeast Asia as the Hokkien people. The Hokkien people are found in significant numbers in mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei, Myanmar, the United States, Hong Kong, and Macau. The Hokkien people have a distinct culture and architecture, including Hokkien shrines and temples with tilted sharp eaves, high and slanted top roofs, and finely detailed decorative inlays of wood and porcelain. The Hokkien language, which includes Taiwanese Hokkien, is the mainstream Southern Min, which is partially mutually intelligible to the Teochew language, Hainanese, Leizhou Min, and Haklau Min.
Fuchien Province, also romanized as Fujian and rendered as Fukien, is a nominal province of the Republic of China without formal administrative function. It includes three small archipelagos off the coast of the Fujian Province of the People's Republic of China, namely the Matsu Islands, which make up Lienchiang County, and the Wuqiu Islands and Kinmen Islands, which make up Kinmen County. The seat of the administrative centre is Jincheng Township of Kinmen County which serves as its de facto capital. The province is also known as the Golden Horse, after the literal reading of the Chinese character abbreviation for "Kinmen-Matsu".
Thian Hock Keng, is a temple built for the worship of Mazu, a Chinese sea goddess, located in Singapore. It is the oldest and most important temple of the Hokkien (Hoklo) people in the country. Another shrine at the back is Buddhist dedicated to Guanyin, the Mahayana Buddhist bodhisattva of mercy.
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.
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 Amoy dialect or Xiamen dialect, also known as Amoyese, 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.
Singaporean Hokkien is a local variety of the Hokkien language spoken natively in Singapore. Within Chinese linguistic academic circles, this dialect is known as Singaporean Ban-lam Gu. It bears similarities with the Amoy spoken in Amoy, now better known as Xiamen, as well as Taiwanese Hokkien which is spoken in Taiwan.
Carstairs Douglas was a Scottish missionary, remembered chiefly for his writings concerning the Hokkien language of Southern Min in Southern Fujian, in particular his Chinese–English Dictionary of the Vernacular or Spoken Language of Amoy.
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.
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 the indigenous peoples (natives) in the lands where ethnic Chinese are historical immigrants.
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.
Lan Mu was from Dabu, Chaozhou of Guangdong Province. He was a famous craftsman of traditional architecture in Taiwan and Penghu during 1916 to 1943. According to the area of his hometown, he might be a Hakka.
Hokkien, Hoklo (Holo), and Minnan people are found in the United States. The Hoklo people are a Han Chinese subgroup with ancestral roots in Southern Fujian and Eastern Guangdong, particularly around the modern prefecture-level cities of Quanzhou, Zhangzhou, Xiamen and Chaoshan area. They are also known by various endonyms, or other related terms such as Hoklo people (河洛儂), Banlam (Minnan) people, Hokkien people or Teochew people (潮州人;Tiê-tsiu-lâng). These people usually also have roots in the Hokkien diaspora in Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia.
The Bible translations into the languages of Taiwan are into Taiwanese, Hakka, Amis, and other languages of Taiwan.
Xiamen Gaoqi International Airport Terminal 3
Xiamen University campus
