Taiwanese Hokkien
Taiwanese Hokkien (/ˈhɒkiɛn/ HOK-ee-en, US also /ˈhoʊkiɛn/ HOH-kee-en; Chinese: 臺灣話; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Tâi-oân-ōe; Tâi-lô: Tâi-uân-uē), or simply Taiwanese, also known as Taiuanoe, Taigi, Taigu (Chinese: 臺語; Pe̍h-ōe-jī/Tâi-lô: Tâi-gí / Tâi-gú),[c][11] Taiwanese Minnan (Chinese: 臺灣閩南語), Hoklo and Holo,[12][13] is a variety of the Hokkien language spoken natively by more than 70 percent of the population of Taiwan.[14] It is spoken by a significant portion of those Taiwanese people who are descended from Hoklo immigrants of southern Fujian.[15] It is one of the national languages of Taiwan.
"Taiwanese language" redirects here. For other languages spoken in Taiwan, see Languages of Taiwan. For the indigenous languages of Taiwan, see Formosan languages. For other uses, see Taiwanese language (disambiguation).Taiwanese Hokkien
13.5 million (2017)[1]
-
Sinitic
- Chinese
- Min
- Coastal Min
- Southern Min
- Hokkien
- Taiwanese Hokkien
- Hokkien
- Southern Min
- Coastal Min
- Min
- Chinese
nan
taib1242 Taibei Hokkien
79-AAA-jh
Tâi-oân Bân-lâm-gí / Bân-lâm-gú
Tâi-oân Bân-lâm-gí / Bân-lâm-gú
Tâi-oân Bân-lâm-gí / Bân-lâm-gú
Tâi-uân Bân-lâm-gí / Bân-lâm-gú
Tâi-oân-ōe
Táiwān huà
Táiwān huà
ㄊㄞˊ ㄨㄢ ㄏㄨㄚˋ
T'ai2-wan1 hua4
Táiwan huà
The-uae-ho
Tòih wāan wá
Toi4 waan1 waa2
Tâi-oân-ōe
Tâi-uân-uē
Tâi-gí / Tâi-gú
Táiyǔ
Táiyǔ
ㄊㄞˊ ㄩˇ
T'ai2-yü3
Tái-yǔ
The-nyy
Tòih yúh
Toi4 jyu5
Tâi-gí / Tâi-gú
Tâi-gí / Tâi-gú
Taiwanese is generally similar to Hokkien spoken in Amoy, Quanzhou, and Zhangzhou, as well dialectal forms used in Southeast Asia, such as Singaporean Hokkien, Penang Hokkien, Philippine Hokkien, Medan Hokkien, and Southern Peninsular Malaysian Hokkien. It is mutually intelligible with the Amoy and Zhangzhou varieties at the mouth of the Jiulong River in mainland China, and with Philippine Hokkien to the south in the Philippines, spoken altogether by about 3 million people.[16] The mass popularity of Hokkien entertainment media from Taiwan has given prominence to the Taiwanese variety of Hokkien, especially since the 1980s.
Classification[edit]
Taiwanese Hokkien is a variety of Hokkien, a Southern Min language. Like many varieties of Min Chinese, it has distinct literary and colloquial layers of vocabulary, often associated with formal and informal registers respectively. The literary layer can be traced to the late Tang dynasty, and as such is related to Middle Chinese. In contrast, the colloquial layers of Min varieties are believed to have branched from the mainstream of Chinese around the time of the Han dynasty.[17][18][19][20]
Regional variations within the Taiwanese variant may be traced back to Hokkien variants spoken in Southern Fujian, specifically those from Quanzhou and Zhangzhou, and later from Amoy. Taiwanese also contains loanwords from Japanese and native Formosan languages. Recent work by scholars such as Ekki Lu,[21] Toru Sakai,[22] and Li Khin-hoann,[23] based on former research by scholars such as Ong Iok-tek, has gone so far as to associate part of the basic vocabulary of the colloquial Taiwanese with the Austronesian and Tai language families; however, such claims are controversial.
The literary form of Hokkien once flourished in Fujian and was brought to Taiwan by early emigrants. Tale of the Lychee Mirror, a manuscript of a series of plays published during the Ming dynasty in 1566, is one of the earliest known works. This form of language is now largely extinct. However, literary readings of the numbers are used in certain contexts, such as reciting telephone numbers (see Literary and colloquial readings of Chinese characters).
Lexicon[edit]
Modern linguistic studies (by Robert L. Cheng and Chin-An Li, for example) estimate that most (75% to 90%) Taiwanese words have cognates in other Sinitic languages. False friends do exist; for example, cháu (走) means "to run" in Taiwanese, whereas the Mandarin cognate, zǒu, means "to walk". Moreover, cognates may have different lexical categories; for example, the morpheme phīⁿ (鼻) means not only "nose" (a noun, as in Mandarin bí) but also "to smell" (a verb, unlike Mandarin).
Among the apparently cognate-less words are many basic words with properties that contrast with similar-meaning words of pan-Chinese derivation. Often the former group lacks a standard Han character, and the words are variously considered colloquial, intimate, vulgar, uncultured, or more concrete in meaning than the pan-Chinese synonym. Some examples: lâng (人 or 儂, person, concrete) vs. jîn (人, person, abstract); cha-bó͘ (查某, woman) vs. lú-jîn (女人, woman, literary). Unlike the English Germanic/Latin contrast, however, the two groups of Taiwanese words cannot be as strongly attributed to the influences of two disparate linguistic sources.
Extensive contact with the Japanese language has left a legacy of Japanese loanwords, with 172 recorded in the Ministry of Education's Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwan Minnan.[48] Although a very small percentage of the vocabulary, their usage tends to be high-frequency because of their relevance to modern society and popular culture. Examples are: o͘-tó͘-bái from ōtobai (オートバイ, "autobike"/motorcycle) and pháng from pan (パン, "bread", itself a loanword from Portuguese). Grammatical particles borrowed from Japanese, notably te̍k from teki (的) and ka from ka (か), show up in the Taiwanese of older speakers.
Whereas Mandarin attaches a syllabic suffix to the singular pronoun to make a collective form, Taiwanese pronouns are collectivized through nasalization. For example, i (he/she/it) and goá (I) become in (they) and goán (we), respectively. The -n thus represents a subsyllabic morpheme. Like all other varieties of Chinese, Taiwanese does not have true grammatical plurals.
Unlike English, Taiwanese has two first-person plural pronouns. This distinction is called inclusive, which includes the addressee, and exclusive, which excludes the addressee. Thus, goán means we excluding you, while lán means we including you (similar to pluralis auctoris). The inclusive lán may be used to express politeness or solidarity, as in the example of a speaker asking a stranger "Where do we live?" while implicitly asking "Where do you live?".
The syntax of Taiwanese is similar to southern Sinitic languages such as Hakka and Yue. The subject–verb–object sequence is typical as in, for example, Mandarin, but subject–object–verb or the passive voice (with the sequence object–subject–verb) is possible with particles. Take a simple sentence for example: 'I hold you.' The words involved are: goá ('I' or 'me'), phō ('to hold'), lí ('you').
With this, more complicated sentences can be constructed: Goá kā chúi hō͘ lí lim ('I give water for you to drink': chúi means 'water'; lim is 'to drink').
This article can only give a few very simple examples on the syntax, for flavour. Linguistic work on the syntax of Taiwanese is still a (quite nascent) scholarly topic being explored.