Taiwanese Hokkien ( , ) or Taiwanese (), also called Taigi (), Taiwanese Taigi (), Taiwanese Southern Min (), 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.
Taiwanese Hokkien is generally similar to Hokkien spoken in Xiamen (Amoy), Quanzhou, and Zhangzhou, as well as dialects 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 China, and with Philippine Hokkien to the south in the Philippines, spoken altogether by about 3 million people. The mass popularity of Hokkien entertainment media from Taiwan has given prominence to the Taiwanese variety of Hokkien, especially since the 1980s.
Classification 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.
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, Toru Sakai, and Li Khin-hoann, 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).
History and formation
Spread of Hokkien to Taiwan During the Yuan dynasty, Quanzhou became a major international port for trade with the outside world.教育部，歷史文化學習網，《重要貿易港口－泉州》 From that period onwards, many people from the Hokkien-speaking regions (southern Fujian) started to emigrate overseas due to political and economic reasons. One of the destinations for the emigrants was the island of Taiwan (formerly Formosa), starting around 1600. They brought their native Hokkien language with them.
During the late Ming dynasty, the political chaos pushed more migrants from southern Fujian and eastern Guangdong to Taiwan. The earliest immigrants involved in Taiwan's development included pirate-merchants Pedro Yan Shiqi and Zheng Zhilong. In 1621, Chinese Peter and his forces, hailing from Zhangzhou, occupied Ponkan (modern-day Beigang, Yunlin) and started to develop Tirosen (modern-day Chiayi). After the death of Peter and another pirate, Li Dan of Quanzhou, Zheng sought to dominate the Strait of Taiwan. By 1628, he had grown so powerful that the Ming court bestowed him the official title, "Patrolling Admiral".
In 1624, the number of Chinese on the island was about 25,000. During the reign of Chongzhen Emperor (1627–1644), there were frequent droughts in the Fujian region. Zheng and a Chinese official suggested sending victims to Taiwan and provide "for each person three taels of silver and for each three people one ox". Although this plan was never carried out, the Zheng family maintained an interest in Taiwan that would have dire consequences for the Dutch Empire, who ruled Taiwan as Dutch Formosa at the time.
Development and divergence In 1624 and 1626, the Dutch and Spanish forces occupied the Tainan and Keelung areas, respectively. During the 40 years of Dutch colonial rule of Taiwan, the Dutch recruited many Chinese from the regions around Quanzhou and Zhangzhou in southern Fujian to help develop Taiwan.
In the 1661 Siege of Fort Zeelandia, Chinese general Koxinga, marshaling a military force composed of fellow hometown hoklo soldiers of Southern Fujian, expelled the Dutch and established the Kingdom of Tungning. Koxinga originated from the Quanzhou region. Chen Yonghua, who was in charge of establishing the education system of Tungning, also originated from Tong'an county of Quanzhou Prefecture. Because most of the soldiers he brought to Taiwan came from Quanzhou, the prestige variant of Hokkien on the island at the time was the Quanzhou dialect.
In 1683, Chinese admiral Shi Lang, marshaling a military force again composed of fellow hometown Hoklo soldiers of Southern Fujian, attacked Taiwan in the Battle of Penghu, ending the Tungning era and beginning Qing dynasty rule (until 1895).
In the first decades of the 18th century, the linguistic differences between the Qing imperial bureaucrats and the commoners were recorded by the Mandarin-speaking first Imperial High Commissioner to Taiwan (1722), Huang Shujing:
The tone of Huang's message foretold the uneasy relationships between different language communities and colonial establishments over the next few centuries.
During the 200 years of Qing dynasty rule, thousands of immigrants from Fujian arrived yearly; the population was over one million in the middle of the 18th century. Civil unrest and armed conflicts were frequent. In addition to resistance against governments (both Chinese and later Japanese), battles between ethnic groups were also significant: the belligerents usually grouped around the language they used. History has recorded battles between Hakka speakers and Hokkien speakers, between these and the aborigines, and even between those who spoke different variants of Hokkien.
In the early 20th century, the Hoklo Taiwanese could be categorized as originating from modern-day Xiamen, Quanzhou, Zhangzhou, and Zhangpu. People from the former two areas (Quanzhou-speaking) were dominant in the north of the island and along the west coast,"especially in the cities of Koro (Aulang), Taiko (Taika), Giubato (Gumatau), Gosei (Goche), Tokatsukutsu (Thawkakut), and Rokko (Lokiang)." (modern-day Houlong, Dajia, Qingshui, Wuqi, Longjing, and Lukang, respectively.) whereas people from the latter two areas (Zhangzhou-speaking) were dominant in the south and perhaps the central plains as well.
Although there were conflicts between Quanzhou and Zhangzhou speakers in Taiwan historically, their gradual intermingling led to the mixture of the two accents. Apart from Lukang city and Yilan County, which have preserved their original Quanzhou and Zhangzhou accents, respectively, almost every region of Taiwan now speaks a mixture of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou Hokkien. A similar phenomenon occurred in Xiamen (Amoy) after 1842, when the mixture of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou Hokkien displaced the Quanzhou dialect to yield the modern Amoy dialect.泉州旅游信息网，泉州方言文化
During the Imperial Japanese rule of Taiwan, Taiwan began to hold Amoy Hokkien as its standard pronunciation; the Japanese called this mixture .
Due to the influx of Japanese loanwords before 1945 and the political separation after 1949, Amoy Hokkien and Taiwanese Hokkien began to diverge slightly.
Modern times
Later, in the 20th century, the conceptualization of Taiwanese was more controversial than most variations of Chinese because, at one time, it marked a clear division between the mainlanders who arrived in 1949 and the pre-existing majority native Taiwanese. Although the political and linguistic divisions between the two groups have blurred considerably, the political issues surrounding the Taiwanese have been more controversial and sensitive than for other varieties of Chinese.
After the First Sino-Japanese War, due to military defeat to the Japanese, the Qing dynasty ceded Taiwan to Japan, causing contact with the Hokkien-speaking regions of mainland China to stop. During Japanese rule, Japanese became an official language in Taiwan, and Taiwanese began to absorb a large number of Japanese loanwords into its language. Examples of such loanwords (some which had in turn been borrowed from English) include piān-só͘ from , phêng from (see also Taiwanese units of measurement), ga-suh from , o͘-tó͘-bái from . All of these caused the Taiwanese to deviate from Hokkien used elsewhere.
During Kōminka of the late Japanese colonial period, the Japanese language appeared in every corner of Taiwan. The Second Sino-Japanese War beginning in 1937 brought stricter measures into force, and along with the outlawing of romanized Taiwanese, various publications were prohibited and Confucian-style private schools which taught Classical Chinese with literary Southern Min pronunciation – was closed down in 1939. Taiwanese thus was reduced to a common daily language. In 1937 the colonial government introduced a concept called "National Language Family" (), which meant that families that proved that they adopted Japanese as their daily language enjoyed benefits such as greater access to education.
After the handover of Taiwan to the Republic of China in 1945, there was a brief cultural exchange with mainland China followed by further oppression. The Chinese Civil War resulted in another political separation when the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) government retreated to Taiwan following their defeat by the communists in 1949. The influx of two million soldiers and civilians caused the population of Taiwan to increase from 6 million to 8 million. The government subsequently promoted Mandarin while suppressing, but short of banning, the use of written Taiwanese Hokkien (e.g. Pe̍h-ōe-jī, a phonetic rendering of spoken Hokkien using the Latin alphabet) as part of its general policy of political repression. In 1964 the use of spoken Taiwanese Hokkien or Hakka in schools or in official settings was forbidden; violations of the prohibition in schools often resulted in physical punishments, fines, or humiliation.
Only after the lifting of martial law in 1987 and the mother tongue movement in the 1990s did Taiwan finally see a true revival in Taiwanese Hokkien. Today, there are a large number of Taiwanese Hokkien scholars dedicated to researching the language. Despite this, however, according to census data, the number of people speaking Taiwanese continued to drop. Taiwanese remains the de facto language of temple ceremonies as part of Taiwanese Folk Beliefs.
The history of the Taiwanese variety of Hokkien and its interaction with Mandarin is complex and, at times, controversial, even regarding its name. The language has no official name in Taiwan. Some dislike the name "Taiwanese" as they feel that it belittles other languages spoken on the island such as Mandarin, Hakka, and the indigenous languages. Others prefer the names Southern Min, Minnan or Hokkien as this views Taiwanese as a form of the Chinese variety spoken in Fujian province in mainland China. Others dislike those names for precisely the same reason. In the American Community Survey run by the United States Census Bureau, Taiwanese was referred to as "Formosan" from 2012 to 2015 and as "Min Nan Chinese" since 2016.
Phonology
Phonologically, Hokkien is a tonal language with extensive tone sandhi rules. Syllables consist maximally of an initial consonant, a vowel, a final consonant, and a tone.
Consonants