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Taiwanese Hokkien

Topolect

- Hokkien is a group of mutually intelligible Min Nan Chinese dialects spoken by many overseas/foreign Chinese and south-east Asia.

Topolect vs. Dialect

- Topolect includes dialects that are mutually comprehendable

- Different dialects NOT part of the same topolect cannot be mutually comprehendable.

Comparison

Min Nan Dialects

- Literally translates to "Southern people's language".

- Has one of the most diverse phonologies of Chinese variants.

- More consonant usage than both Mandarin and Cantonese. Vowel usage is more/less similar to Mandarin.

- Taiwanese Hokkien: feminine, sounds like one who is talking with their mouth full. Lot of words with "ng" and "th" sounds.

- Mandarin: serious, "gritted teeth". More nasal sounding tone when spoken in the Beijing accent.

- Cantonese: flamoboyant, animated and choppy. "Falling off a cliff" end to sentences (words that don't have meaning, but are there to add emphasis to speech).

Spoken Today

Tone Sandhi

Although words may have the same spelling and even similar pinyin in pronunciation, tones cause them to sound very different.

Sugar

Phonology

- Taiwanese Hokkien is the number one spoken language in Taiwan, Mandarin is second.

- Increasingly being used in media and movies in Taiwan.

- Most young people under the age of 60 in Taiwan speak Hokkien fluently as it is usually their mother tongue.

Tone Sandhi

- Mandarin: pronounced "táng".

- Cantonese: pronounced "tòng" but when put together with another word to mean candy, is pronounced "tóng"

- Taiwanese Hokkien: pronounced "tōng"

- Phonological change in tone of vowels unique to that dialect based on pronunciation of adjacent words.

- Different dialects have different "tones", one of the main reasons why variations of languages (especially Mandarin and Cantonese) cannot be mutually understood.

Origin

Sino-Tibetan

Dialect

- Chinese

- Min

- Min Nan

- Hokkien

- Local variation of a spoken language unique to a specific area or region.

Similarity

- Taiwanese Hokkien is not mutually intelligible with the national/standard language.

- Written language is often times similar.

Min Nan

- Many dialects are in some part phonetically similar with the parent dialects that they emerged from.

- Korean, Chinese, and Japanese also have similar sounding words and even share some of the same written characters (result of invasion and wars throughout history + geographical location).

- Part of a family of languages spoken in parts of China such as Southern Fujian, eastern Guangdong, Hainan, southern Zhejiang, and Taiwan.

- Possess different "tones" or mannerisms in speech compared to other dialects.

"Fú jiàn huà"

- Originated mostly from Southern Fujian, but also from other dialects brought over from the North during wars in ancient China (many dialects are a mix of other dialects).

- Hybrid of mostly Quanzhou and Zhangzhou dialects, which are products of Northern and Middle Chinese dialects.

Pe̍h-ōe-jī

- Latin alphabet developed by Western missionaries working in Southeast Asia in the 19th century to write Hokkien.

- Allows Hokkien to be written phonetically in the Latin script, meaning that phrases can be written without the issue of non-existent Chinese characters.

Origin and Language

Writing System

Chinese Characters

- Does not have a unitary standarized writing system. However, many different methods of writing Hokkien.

- Pe̍h-ōe-jī

- Bopomofo

- Taiwanese kana

- Chinese Characters

Bopomofo

- Unlike Cantonese, Taiwanese Hokkien doesn't possess a standardized character set.

- This leads to some variation in the characters used to express certain words and characters to have ambiguous meanings.

- Consists of 37 characters and four tone marks. Transcribes all possible sounds in Mandarin.

- Used as an educational tool and electronic input method in Taiwan.

- Also known as Zhuyin Fuhao.

Taiwanese Kana

- When Taiwan was under Japanese rule, a katakana-based system was introduced.

- Functioned as a phonetic guide to hanzi, much like furigana in Japanese or Zhuyin fuhao (Bopomofo) in Chinese.

- After Japanese administration ended, the system soon became obsolete.

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