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.
Thai numerals are a set of numerals traditionally used in Thailand, although the Arabic numerals are more common due to extensive westernization of Thailand in the modern Rattanakosin period. Thai numerals follow the Hindu–Arabic numeral system commonly used in the rest of the world. In Thai language, numerals often follow the modified noun and precede a measure word, although variations to this pattern occur.
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.
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.
Teochew, also known as Teo-Swa, is a Southern Min language spoken by the Teochew people in the Chaoshan region of eastern Guangdong and by their diaspora around the world. It is sometimes referred to as Chiuchow, its Cantonese rendering, due to English romanization by colonial officials and explorers. It is closely related to Hokkien, as it shares some cognates and phonology with Hokkien.
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 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.
Bàng-uâ-cê or Fuzhou romanization (福州話羅馬字), is a Latin alphabet for the Fuzhou dialect of Eastern Min adopted in the middle of the 19th century by Western missionaries. It had varied at different times, and became standardized in the 1890s. Bàng-uâ-cê was mainly used inside of church circles, and was taught in some mission schools in Fuzhou. However, unlike its counterpart Pe̍h-ōe-jī for Hokkien, even in its prime days Bàng-uâ-cê was by no means universally understood by Christians.
This article describes the grammar of the Khmer (Cambodian) language, focusing on the standard dialect.
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.
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.
The official romanization system for Taiwanese Hokkien in Taiwan is locally referred to as Tâi-uân Bân-lâm-gí Lô-má-jī Phing-im Hong-àn or Taiwan Minnanyu Luomazi Pinyin Fang'an, often shortened to Tâi-lô. It is derived from Pe̍h-ōe-jī and since 2006 has been one of the phonetic notation systems officially promoted by Taiwan's Ministry of Education. The system is used in the MoE's Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwan Minnan. It is nearly identical to Pe̍h-ōe-jī, apart from: using ts tsh instead of ch chh, using u instead of o in vowel combinations such as oa and oe, using i instead of e in eng and ek, using oo instead of o͘, and using nn instead of ⁿ.
Differing literary and colloquial readings for certain Chinese characters are a common feature of many Chinese varieties, and the reading distinctions for these linguistic doublets often typify a dialect group. Literary readings are usually used in loanwords, names, literary works, and in formal settings, while colloquial/vernacular readings are usually used in everyday vernacular speech.
Hokkien, a Southern Min 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 Hokkien are still commonly seen in literature, film, performing arts and music.
Hokkien is one of the largest Chinese language groups worldwide. Profanity in Hokkien most commonly involves sexual references and scorn of the object's ancestors, especially their mother. The mentioning of sexual organs is frequently used in Hokkien profanity.
The Hokkien language uses a broad array of honorific suffixes or prefixes for addressing or referring to people. Most are suffixes. Honorifics are often non-gender-neutral; some imply a feminine context while others imply a masculine one, and still others imply both.
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.
