Pe̍h-ōe-jī

Pe̍h-ōe-jī ( ; Taiwanese Hokkien: 白話字, pronounced, lit.'vernacular writing'; POJ), also known as Church Romanization, is an orthography used to write variants of HokkienSouthern Min, particularly Taiwanese and Amoy Hokkien. It is widely employed as one of the writing systems for Southern Min. During its peak, it had hundreds of thousands of readers.

Developed by Western missionaries working among the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia in the 19th century and refined by missionaries working in Xiamen and Tainan, it uses a modified Latin script and some diacritics to represent the spoken language. After initial success in Fujian, POJ became most widespread in Taiwan and, in the mid-20th century, there were over 100,000 people literate in POJ. A large amount of printed material, religious and secular, has been produced in the script, including Taiwan's first newspaper, the Taiwan Church News.

During Japanese rule (1895–1945), the use of Pe̍h-ōe-jī was suppressed and Taiwanese kana encouraged; it faced further suppression during the martial law period (1947–1987). In Fujian, use declined after the establishment of the People's Republic of China (1949) and by the early 21st century the system was not in general use there. However, Taiwanese Christians, non-native learners of Southern Min, and native-speaker enthusiasts in Taiwan are among those that continue to use Pe̍h-ōe-jī. Full computer support was achieved in 2004 with the release of Unicode 4.1.0, and POJ is now implemented in many fonts, input methods, and is used in extensive online dictionaries.

Versions of Pe̍h-ōe-jī have been devised for other Southern Chinese varieties, including Hakka and Teochew Southern Min. Other related scripts include Pha̍k-fa-sṳ for Hakka, Bǽh-oe-tu for Hainanese, Bàng-uâ-cê for Fuzhou, Pe̍h-ūe-jī for Teochew, Gṳ̿ing-nǎing Lô̤-mǎ-cī for Northern Min, and Hing-hua̍ báⁿ-uā-ci̍ for Pu-Xian Min.

POJ laid the foundation for the creation of new literature in Taiwan. Before the 1920s, many people had already written literary works in POJ, contributing significantly to the preservation of Southern Min vocabulary since the late 19th century. In 2006, the Taiwanese Romanization System (Tâi-lô), a government-sponsored successor based on Pe̍h-ōe-jī, was released. Despite this, native language education, and writing systems for Taiwanese, have remained a fiercely debated topic in Taiwan.