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Hokkien Hokkien ( , ) is a Varieties of Chinese, variety of the Southern Min group of Chinese language, Chinese languages. Native to and originating from the Minnan region in the southeastern part of Fujian in southeastern China, it is also referred ...
, a
variety of Chinese There are hundreds of local Chinese language varieties forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast part of mainland Chi ...
that forms part of the
Southern Min Southern Min (), Minnan ( Mandarin pronunciation: ) or Banlam (), is a group of linguistically similar and historically related Chinese languages that form a branch of Min Chinese spoken in Fujian (especially the Minnan region), most of Taiwa ...
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 Cantonese is the traditional prestige variety of Yue Chinese, a Sinitic language belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family. It originated in the city of Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton) and its surrounding Pearl River Delta. While th ...
and
Standard Chinese Standard Chinese ( zh, s=现代标准汉语, t=現代標準漢語, p=Xiàndài biāozhǔn hànyǔ, l=modern standard Han speech) is a modern standard form of Mandarin Chinese that was first codified during the republican era (1912–1949). ...
(Mandarin). In Taiwan, a standard for Written Hokkien has been developed by the
Ministry of Education An education ministry is a national or subnational government agency politically responsible for education. Various other names are commonly used to identify such agencies, such as Ministry of Education, Department of Education, and Ministry of Pub ...
including its ''
Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwan Minnan The ''Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwanese Taigi'' ( zh, t=, poj=Tâi-oân Tâi-gí Siông-iōng-sû Sû-tián) is a dictionary of Taiwanese Hokkien (also known as Taigi, including Written Hokkien) commissioned by the Ministry of Education o ...
'', 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.


History

Prior to the modern era, the main written language of China was
Classical Chinese Classical Chinese is the language in which the classics of Chinese literature were written, from . For millennia thereafter, the written Chinese used in these works was imitated and iterated upon by scholars in a form now called Literary ...
, which has grammar and vocabulary based on
Old Chinese Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese language, Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones ...
used in ancient times. Whilst the written form of Chinese mostly remained static, the spoken varieties of Chinese diverged from Old Chinese. In the early 20th century, reformers in China saw the need for language reform and championed the development of a writing system that allowed Chinese people to write in a form more closely reflecting speech called
written vernacular Chinese Written vernacular Chinese, also known as ''baihua'', comprises forms of written Chinese based on the vernacular varieties of the language spoken throughout China. It is contrasted with Literary Chinese, which was the predominant written form ...
. However, there are various differences between the spoken Chinese varieties, such as Hokkien, Mandarin, Cantonese, including in vocabulary, meaning that Vernacular Chinese is less suited for writing texts spoken in Hokkien. Various expressions in Hokkien, as with other Chinese varieties, do not have associated Chinese characters in Vernacular Chinese, meaning that some words originally could not be written. In the case of Cantonese, a vernacular system specifically for writing Cantonese was developed in Hong Kong, then a British colony. On the other hand, since Hokkien was never standardized, different people began to use various separate methods to solve the issue of Hokkien-specific words, where such words would eventually be written phonetically, using either a Latin-based alphabet,
bopomofo Bopomofo, also called Zhuyin Fuhao ( ; ), or simply Zhuyin, is a Chinese transliteration, transliteration system for Standard Chinese and other Sinitic languages. It is the principal method of teaching Chinese Mandarin pronunciation in Taiwa ...
, or through the use of Chinese characters as loangraphs for their phonetically with no relation to the original word via meaning. Varieties of Hokkien are spoken in the
Southern Fujian Minnan, Banlam or Minnan Golden Triangle (), refers to the coastal region in South 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 Pr ...
in
mainland China "Mainland China", also referred to as "the Chinese mainland", is a Geopolitics, geopolitical term defined as the territory under direct administration of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the aftermath of the Chinese Civil War. In addit ...
, Taiwan, Chinese communities in Malaysia,
Singapore Singapore, officially the Republic of Singapore, is an island country and city-state in Southeast Asia. The country's territory comprises one main island, 63 satellite islands and islets, and one outlying islet. It is about one degree ...
, and other Chinese expatriate communities. Initially there was no effort by the
government of the Republic of China The Government of the Republic of China is the central government, national authority whose actual-controlled territory consists of Taiwan (island), main island of Taiwan (Formosa), Penghu, Kinmen, Matsu Islands, Matsu, and list of islands of ...
on Taiwan, nor other governments, to create a standardized Hokkien vernacular. During the initial stages of
Kuomintang The Kuomintang (KMT) is a major political party in the Republic of China (Taiwan). It was the one party state, sole ruling party of the country Republic of China (1912-1949), during its rule from 1927 to 1949 in Mainland China until Retreat ...
rule in Taiwan, the official Kuomintang language policy was to promote the use of Mandarin Chinese in everyday speech, and to discourage the use of other dialects such as Hokkien and Hakka; this was done in an attempt to promote national linguistic unity, and to promulgate a Chinese identity over that of a Taiwanese one for political reasons. Following the
Taiwan localization movement Taiwanese nationalism () is a nationalist political movement that promotes the cultural identity and unity of Taiwanese people as a nation. In recent decades, it consists of cultural or political movements that seek to resolve the current polit ...
, education and everyday usage of spoken and written Hokkien by local Taiwanese became more widely used. A Chinese character online dictionary for Hokkien was released in 2008 by the ROC Ministry of Education. Nevertheless, within literature circles there is still ongoing debate over which writing system should be used to write Taiwanese Hokkien, and controversy exists between the various rival systems currently used to write Hokkien. Today usage of languages remains a politicized issue in Taiwan. In Singapore, in an effort to promote Mandarin as a
lingua franca A lingua franca (; ; for plurals see ), also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, link language or language of wider communication (LWC), is a Natural language, language systematically used to make co ...
amongst ethnic Chinese through the
Speak Mandarin Campaign The Speak Mandarin Campaign (SMC; ) is an initiative by the Government of Singapore to encourage the Chinese Singaporean population to speak Standard Mandarin Chinese, one of the four official languages of Singapore. Launched on 7 September 19 ...
, usage of other varieties such as Hokkien is discouraged. Today, whilst
Taiwanese Hokkien Taiwanese Hokkien ( , ), or simply Taiwanese, also known as Taigi ( zh, c=臺語, tl=Tâi-gí), Taiwanese Southern Min ( zh, c=臺灣閩南語, tl=Tâi-uân Bân-lâm-gí), Hoklo and Holo, is a variety of the Hokkien language spoken natively ...
speakers speak in their variety of Hokkien, they would officially write in Vernacular Chinese for formal documents, and only use vernacular Hokkien writings during informal occasions, if at all. In Taiwan, vernacular Chinese is used for academic writings, newspaper articles and television news report headlines, whilst Hokkien writings are used in novels, songs lyrics, film subtitles, theatrical and opera scripts, and in informal communication.


Phonetic writing systems


() is a Latin alphabet developed by Western missionaries working in Southeast Asia in the 19th century to write Hokkien. allows Hokkien to be written phonetically in
Latin script The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...
, meaning that phrases specific to Hokkien can be written without having to deal with the issue of non-existent Chinese characters. Current usage of is restricted to some Taiwanese Christians, non-native learners of Hokkien, and native-speaker enthusiasts in Taiwan. POJ remains the Taiwanese script with "the richest inventory of written work, including dictionaries, textbooks, literature ..and other publications in many areas". can also be used along with Chinese characters in a mixed script called , where words specific to Hokkien are written in , and words with associated characters written in Han Characters. ''Sample mixed orthography text: ''
翻 tńg 工,我 koh hap i tī Hotel ê 餐廳食西式 ê chái 起,我講 beh tò 去稅厝 ê 所在,i beh 送我去,我 kā 拒絕,mā 無 beh hō͘ i 知我 ê 地址、電話番,講若有緣就會 koh 再相會。I 講人海茫茫,我若無 tī hit 間跳舞、唱歌,i beh 去 toh 位 chhōe--我?「就是 án-ni m̄-chiah 講是緣」,我嘴是 án-ni 應,心肝內知影 kap i 自細漢到這時 ê 牽連、綿纏無 hiah 簡單就煞。


Bopomofo

Bopomofo is another script used in Taiwanese Hokkien writings. It is commonly used in Taiwanese literature to represent Hokkien-specific
grammatical particle In grammar, the term ''particle'' ( abbreviated ) has a traditional meaning, as a part of speech that cannot be inflected, and a modern meaning, as a function word (functor) associated with another word or phrase in order to impart meaning. Alth ...
s, along with Chinese characters, and can also be used to gloss Chinese characters with their Hokkien readings. :''Sample text:'' ('I am like the fish that has left the water', with
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 cha ...
being used as a replacement for
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 cha ...
ê .)


Taiwanese kana

During the period of
Taiwan under Japanese rule The Geography of Taiwan, island of Taiwan, together with the Penghu, Penghu Islands, became an annexed territory of the Empire of Japan in 1895, when the Qing dynasty ceded Taiwan Province, Fujian-Taiwan Province in the Treaty of Shimonoseki a ...
, a
kana are syllabary, syllabaries used to write Japanese phonology, Japanese phonological units, Mora (linguistics), morae. In current usage, ''kana'' most commonly refers to ''hiragana'' and ''katakana''. It can also refer to their ancestor , wh ...
-based system was introduced to gloss Hokkien writing in Chinese characters, as well writing as other languages of Taiwan.


Chinese characters

Writing Hokkien using Chinese characters ( or , ) is a common method of writing in Taiwanese literature. However, there are various problems relating to the use of Chinese characters to write vernacular Hokkien, and in many cases Chinese characters are used alongside other scripts, such as bopomofo or POJ. The problem with using only Chinese characters to write Min Nan is that there are many morphemes, estimated to be around 15% of running text, which are not definitively associated with a particular character. Various strategies have been developed to deal with the issue, including researching and reviving the etymologically correct Chinese character from ancient Chinese texts and classical Chinese, creating new characters, allocating Chinese characters used in written Mandarin with similar meanings, but dissimilar etymology, to represent the missing characters, or using romanization for the missing 15%. In many cases, when writing Hokkien using Chinese characters phonetically, the use of characters is entirely unrelated to the original meaning of the phrase. While most Hokkien morphemes have standard designated characters, they are not always etymologically correct or phono-semantic. Similar-sounding, similar-meaning or rare characters are commonly borrowed or substituted to represent a particular morpheme. In addition, there may be many different ways to write a specific Hokkien phrase using Chinese characters.
Wanhua District Wanhua District (), known in Taiwanese Hokkien as Báng-kah khu () and historically as "Monga" or "Monka", is a district in Taipei, Taiwan. It is Taipei's oldest district. The district is home to historic buildings such as the Bangka Lungs ...
in Taipei is commonly written as ('ten thousand flowers'); however, the original meaning of the location name, pronounced ''Báng-kah'' in Taiwanese Hokkien (old character form ), is a rendering of a non-Chinese
indigenous Indigenous may refer to: *Indigenous peoples *Indigenous (ecology) In biogeography, a native species is indigenous to a given region or ecosystem if its presence in that region is the result of only local natural evolution (though often populari ...
name for 'boat'. Along with location names, common words also have orthography problems due to non-standardization; ''chhit-thô'' or ''thit-thô'' ('play (around)') is commonly written as 𨑨迌; however, neither characters have anything to do with the act of "playing" (the characters mean 'near' and 'cunning', 'deceitful'). Within Robert Cheng's publication of a Han character edition of the Taiwanese Hokkien novella ' ('Beloved Enemy') by Lai Jinsheng, the word ', meaning 'gangster' and cognate with Standard Chinese ), is transcribed as ; these two phonetically used characters literally translate to 'perch' and 'eel'. Additional examples include the word for 'beautiful' ( is the literary form), which has the vernacular morpheme ''suí'' represented by characters such as (an obsolete character), (a vernacular reading of this character) and even (''suí'', typically meaning 'water'), and 'tall' (; ''ko'' is the literary form), whose morpheme ''kôan'' is . 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 non-standard character ''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 writing via , which has etymologically unrelated colloquial and literary readings (''he̍k'' and ''jio̍k'', respectively). In other cases, a character is borrowed to represent a morpheme with the same meaning, but a different pronunciation; the morpheme ''kē'' ('low', as in ''kē-thn̂g'' 'low sugar') has been assigned the character , whose phonetic reading is ''te'', by the Republic of China's Ministry of Education. Another case is the word 'to eat', ''chia̍h'', which is often transcribed in Taiwanese newspapers and media as (a Mandarin transliteration, ''xiā'', to approximate the Hokkien term), even though its recommended character in dictionaries is .
Victor H. Mair Victor Henry Mair (; born March 25, 1943) is an American Sinology, sinologist currently serving as a professor of Chinese language, Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania. Among other accomplishments, Mair has edited the standard ''Columbia His ...
makes an estimate that if "pure, unadulterated spoken vernacular Taiwanese" were written exclusively in Chinese characters, with minimal use of Mandarin phrases, over 25% of morphemes would have no character, about 25% would have arbitrarily selected (yet more or less conventionally accepted) characters that are homophones or near-homophones, 10% would be written using characters exclusive to Hokkien, and 40% would be written with characters that have the correct sound and meaning. However, in more colloquial styles of Taiwanese Hokkien, the proportion of morphemes written with conventionally accepted characters would drop even lower than 40%. Likewise,
Carstairs Douglas Carstairs Douglas (; 27 December 1830 in Kilbarchan, Renfrewshire – 26 July 1877 in Xiamen, China) was a Scottish missionary and lexicographer, remembered chiefly for his writings concerning the Hokkien language of Southern Min in Southern Fu ...
, who has compiled a historical comprehensive 1873 Dictionary on Hokkien as well that later formed the basis of many other dictionaries for Hokkien in the subsequent decades, regarding Chinese characters would argue as well that: 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 and they can be ambiguous in meaning. In 2007, Taiwan's
Ministry of Education An education ministry is a national or subnational government agency politically responsible for education. Various other names are commonly used to identify such agencies, such as Ministry of Education, Department of Education, and Ministry of Pub ...
formulated and released a standard character set known as the ''
Taiwanese Southern Min Recommended Characters ''Taiwan Taigi Recommended Characters'', old name ''Taiwanese Southern Min Recommended Characters'' is a set of three lists of Taiwanese Hokkien characters, numbering 700 in total, which were published by the Taiwan Ministry of Education betwe ...
'' to overcome these difficulties. These standard Chinese characters for writing Taiwanese Hokkien are now taught in schools in Taiwan. When writing Hokkien in Chinese characters, some writers create 'new' characters when they consider it impossible to use existing ones; this corresponds to similar practices in character usage in Cantonese, Vietnamese
chữ Nôm Chữ Nôm (, ) is a logographic writing system formerly used to write the Vietnamese language. It uses Chinese characters to represent Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and some native Vietnamese words, with other words represented by new characters ...
, Korean
hanja Hanja (; ), alternatively spelled Hancha, are Chinese characters used to write the Korean language. After characters were introduced to Korea to write Literary Chinese, they were adapted to write Korean as early as the Gojoseon period. () ...
and Japanese
kanji are logographic Chinese characters, adapted from Chinese family of scripts, Chinese script, used in the writing of Japanese language, Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are ...
. These are usually not encoded in
Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
. The earliest Hokkien vernacular literature written in hàn-jī is ''
Tân Saⁿ and Gō͘-niû The ''Tale of the Lychee Mirror'' () is a 16th-century Ming dynasty play written by an unknown author. History The play was written in a mixture of the Southern Min dialects of Quanzhou and Chaozhou ( Teochew), and is one of the earliest sources ...
'' in the
Ming dynasty The Ming dynasty, officially the Great Ming, was an Dynasties of China, imperial dynasty of China that ruled from 1368 to 1644, following the collapse of the Mongol Empire, Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. The Ming was the last imperial dynasty of ...
, and koa-á-chheh is also an important kind of hàn-jī vernacular literature in the history of the Hokkien language.


Vocabulary

The following table lists a few examples displaying differences in vocabulary between Vernacular Chinese based on Mandarin, and
Taiwanese Hokkien Taiwanese Hokkien ( , ), or simply Taiwanese, also known as Taigi ( zh, c=臺語, tl=Tâi-gí), Taiwanese Southern Min ( zh, c=臺灣閩南語, tl=Tâi-uân Bân-lâm-gí), Hoklo and Holo, is a variety of the Hokkien language spoken natively ...
written in Chinese characters: In addition, Hokkien literature can consist of phrases that are vernacular to Hokkien, as well as literary terms originating from Classical Chinese. The following list of Taiwanese Hokkien words is adapted from a list by scholar
Ong Iok-tek Ong Iok-tek (Ikutoku Ō; /; POJ: Ông Io̍k-tek; Hepburn:''Ō Ikutoku:'' ; 30 January 1924–9 September 1985) was a Taiwanese scholar and early leader of the Taiwan independence movement. He is considered to be an authority on the Southe ...
, contrasting vernacular terms with relevant literary terms; the English translations have been added by Mair.


Literary and colloquial character readings

Hokkien separates reading pronunciations () from spoken pronunciations () and explications () of Chinese characters (see
Literary and colloquial readings of Chinese characters 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 usuall ...
). The following examples in Pe̍h-oē-jī show differences in readings in Taiwanese Hokkien:


See also

*
Taiwanese literature movement The Taiwanese literature movement (also Taiwan literature movement, Nativist literature movement) refers to the effort of authors, poets, dramatists, musicians, and publishers in Taiwan to establish recognition of a distinctly Taiwanese body of l ...
* Comparison of Hokkien writing systems *
Amoy 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 (historically known as "Amoy") and its surrounding metropolitan area, in the ...
*
Singaporean Hokkien Singaporean Hokkien; Tâi-lô: ; zh, poj=''Sin-ka-pho Hok-kiàn-ōe'' 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. Tâi-l ...
*
Penang Hokkien Penang Hokkien ( zh, c=庇能福建話, tl=Pī-néeng Hok-kiàn-uā, poj=Pī-né͘ng Hok-kiàn-ōa; IPA: ) 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 ...


References


Further reading

* * * * ** * An analysis and facsimile of the ''Arte de la Lengua Chio-chiu'' (1620), the oldest extant grammar of Hokkien. * - Chapter examining and detailing the history of Hokkien dictionaries and similar works and the history of Hokkien writing systems over the centuries, especially phonetic scripts for Hokkien {{Authority control
Hokkien Hokkien ( , ) is a Varieties of Chinese, variety of the Southern Min group of Chinese language, Chinese languages. Native to and originating from the Minnan region in the southeastern part of Fujian in southeastern China, it is also referred ...
Hokkien Languages of Taiwan Languages of Singapore