Topic summary
Penang Hokkien
Penang Hokkien (Chinese: 庇能福建話; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Pī-né͘ng Hok-kiàn-ōa; Tâi-lô: Pī-néeng Hok-kiàn-uā; IPA: /pi˨˩nɛŋ˦˥hɔk̚˦kiɛn˥˧ua˨˩/) 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.
It was once the lingua franca among the majority Chinese population in Penang, Kedah, Perlis and northern Perak. However, since the 1980s, many younger speakers have shifted towards Malaysian Mandarin under the Speak Mandarin Campaign in Chinese-medium schools in Malaysia, even though Mandarin was not previously spoken in these regions. Mandarin has been adopted as the only language of instruction in Chinese schools and, from the 1980s to mid-2010s, these schools penalised students and teachers for using non-Mandarin varieties of Chinese. A 2021 study found that Penang Hokkien was a 'threatened' language in the Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale, due to the encroachment of Mandarin.
Penang Hokkien is a subdialect of Zhangzhou (漳州; Tsiang-tsiu) Hokkien, with extensive use of Malay and Englishloanwords. Compared to dialects in Fujian (福建; Hok-kiàn) province, it most closely resembles the variety spoken in the district of Haicang (海滄; Hái-tshng) in Longhai (龍海; Liông-hái) county and in the districts of Jiaomei (角美; Kak-bí) and Xinglin (杏林; Hēng-lîm) in neighbouring Xiamen (廈門; Ēe-muî) prefecture. In Southeast Asia, similar dialects are spoken in the states bordering Penang (Kedah, Perlis and northern Perak), as well as in Medan and North Sumatra, Indonesia. It is markedly distinct from Southern Peninsular Malaysian Hokkien, Singaporean Hokkien and Taiwanese Hokkien.