Taiwanese Hokkien ( ),
commonly known as Taiwanese (Tâi-oân-oē,
), is the Hokkien dialect of
Min Nan as spoken
by about 70% of the population of Taiwan
. The
largest ethnic group in Taiwan, for which Hokkien is considered a
native language, is known as
Hoklo or
Holo (Hō-ló). The correspondence between language
and ethnicity is generally true though not absolute, as some Hoklo
speak Hokkien poorly while some non-Hoklo speak Hokkien fluently.
Pe̍h-oē-jī (POJ) is a
popular orthography for this language, and for Hokkien in
general.
Classification
Taiwanese Hokkien is a variant of
Min Nan,
closely related to the
Amoy dialect. It
is often seen as a
Chinese
dialect within the larger
Sinitic language family. On the other hand,
it may also be seen as an independent
language. As with most “language/dialect”
distinctions, how one describes Taiwanese depends largely on one's
political views (see the article “
varieties of Chinese”).
Min is the only branch of Chinese that
cannot be directly derived from
Middle
Chinese. This may account for the difficulty in finding the
appropriate
Chinese characters for
some Min Nan vocabulary. This is maybe also part of the reasons why
it is almost totally mutually unintelligible with Mandarin or other
Chinese dialects.
There is both a colloquial version and a literary version of
Taiwanese Hokkien. Spoken Taiwanese Hokkien is almost identical to
spoken
Amoy Hokkien.
Regional variations
within Taiwanese may be traced back to Hokkien variants spoken in
Southern Fujian (Quanzhou
and Zhangzhou
). Taiwanese Hokkien also contains loanwords
from
Japanese and the
Formosan languages. Recent work by
scholars such as
Ekki Lu,
Sakai Toru, and
Lí Khîn-hoāⁿ (also known as Tavokan Khîn-hoāⁿ
or Chin-An Li), based on former research by scholars such as
Ông Io̍k-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.
A literary
form of Minnan once flourished in Fujian
and was
brought to Taiwan by early emigrants. Tale of the
Lychee Mirror (Nāi-kèng-kì), a
manuscript for a series of plays published during the Ming Dynasty
in 1566, is one of the earliest
known works. This form of the language is now largely
extinct.
Phonology
Phonologically, Min Nan is a
tonal language with extensive
tone sandhi rules.
Syllables consist maximally of an initial
consonant, a
vowel, a final
consonant, and a tone; any or all of the consonants or vowels may
be nasal.
Consonants
Unlike many other varieties of Chinese such as
Standard Mandarin or
Standard Cantonese, there are no native
labiodental phonemes.
- Coronal affricates and fricatives become alveolo-palatal before , that is, , , , and
are pronounced , , , and .
- The consonant may be realized as a fricative; that is, as in
most environments and before .
- The voiced plosives ( and )
become the corresponding fricatives ( and ) in some phonetic
contexts.
- H represents a glottal stop at the end of a
syllable.
Vowels
Taiwanese has the following
vowels:
|
a |
e |
i |
|
|
u |
m |
ŋ |
|
a |
e |
i |
o |
o͘ |
u |
m |
ng |
|
a |
e |
i |
oi |
o |
u |
m |
ng |
| TLPA |
a |
e |
i |
o |
oo |
u |
m |
ng |
The vowel
o is akin to a schwa; in contrast,
o͘
is more open. In addition, there are several
diphthongs and
triphthongs (for example,
iau). The
consonants
m and
ng can function as a syllabic
nucleus and are therefore included here as vowels. The vowels may
be either plain or nasal:
a is non-nasal, and
aⁿ is the same vowel with concurrent nasal
articulation. This is similar to
French,
Portuguese, and many other
languages.
There are two pronunciations of vowel
o.
It is in Southern
Taiwan mainly such as Tainan
and Kaohsiung
, and in Northern Taiwan such as Taipei
. But because of people moving and the
development of communication, these two pronunciations are common
and acceptable throughout the entire island.
Tones
Taiwanese tones, close to Taipei
values.
In the traditional analysis, there are eight 'tones',
numbered from 1 to 8. Strictly speaking, there
are only five
tonal contours. But as
in other Chinese dialects, the two kinds of stopped syllables are
considered also to be 'tones' and assigned numbers 4 and 8. In
Taiwanese tones 2 and 6 are the same, and thus duplicated in the
count. Here the eight tones are shown, following the traditional
tone class categorization, named after the tones of
Middle Chinese:
- {| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center"
See (for one example) Wi-vun Taiffalo Chiung's modern phonological
analysis in the
References, which
challenges these notions.
For tones 4 and 8, a final consonant
p,
t, or
kmay appear. When this happens, it is impossible for the
syllable to be nasal. Indeed, these are the counterpart to the
nasal final consonants
m,
n, and
ng,
respectively, in other tones. However, it is possible to have a
nasal 4th or 8th tone syllable such as
siaⁿh, as long as
there is no final consonant other than
h.
In the dialect spoken near the northern coast of Taiwan, there is
no distinction between tones number 8 and number 4 – both are
pronounced as if they follow the tone sandhi rules of tone number
4.
Tone number 0, typically written with a double dash (
--)
before the syllable with this tone, is used to mark
encliticsdenoting the extent of a verb action, the
end of a noun phrase, etc. A frequent use of this tone is to denote
a question, such as in "Chia̍h-pá--bē?", literally meaning "Have
you eaten yet?". This is realized by speaking the syllable with
either a low-falling tone (3) or a low stop (4). The syllable prior
to the "--" maintains its original tone.
Syllabic structure
A
syllablerequires a vowel (or diphthong or
triphthong) to appear in the middle. All consonants can appear at
the initial position. The consonants
p,
t,
k;
m,
n, and
ng(and some
consider
h) may appear at the end of a syllable.
Therefore, it is possible to have syllables such as
ngiau("(to) itch") and
thng("soup").
Incidentally, both of these example syllables are nasal: the first
has a nasal initial consonant; the second a nasal vowel. Compare
with
hangul.
Tone sandhi
Schema of the tone sandhi rules in
Taiwanese.
Taiwanese has extremely extensive
tone
sandhi(tone-changing) rules: in an utterance, only the last
syllable pronounced is not affected by the rules. What an ‘
utterance’ (or ‘
intonational phrase’) is, in the context
of this language, is an ongoing topic for linguistic research. For
the purpose of this article, an utterance may be considered a
word, a
phrase, or a
short
sentence. The following
rules, listed in the traditional pedagogical mnemonic order, govern
the pronunciation of tone on each of the syllables affected (that
is, all but the last in an utterance):
- If the
original tone number is 5, pronounce it as tone
number 3 (Quanzhou/Taipei
speech) or 7 (Zhangzhou/Tainan speech).
- If the original tone number is 7, pronounce it
as tone number 3.
- If the original tone number is 3, pronounce it
as tone number 2.
- If the original tone number is 2, pronounce it
as tone number 1.
- If the original tone number is 1, pronounce it
as tone number 7.
- If the original tone number is 8 and the final
consonant is not h (that is, it is
p, t, or k),
pronounce it as tone number 4.
- If the original tone number is 4 and the final
consonant is not h (that is, it is
p, t, or k),
pronounce it as tone number 8.
- If the original tone number is 8 and the final
consonant is h, pronounce it as tone number
3.
- If the original tone number is 4 and the final
consonant is h, pronounce it as tone number
2.
See the work by Tiuⁿ Jū-hông and Wi-vun Taiffalo Chiung in the
References, and the work by
Robert L.Cheng(Tēⁿ Liông-úi) of the
University of Hawaii, for modern
linguisticapproaches to tones and tone
sandhi in Taiwanese.
Lexicon
Modern linguistic studies (by Robert L. Cheng and Chin-An Li, for
example) estimate that most (75% to 90%) Taiwanese
wordshave
cognatesin other
Chinese languages.
False friendsdo exist; for example,
cháumeans "to run" in Taiwanese, whereas the
Mandarincognate,
zǒu, means "to
walk". Moreover, cognates may have different
lexical categories; for example, the
morphemephīⁿ 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(person, concrete)
vs.
jîn(人, person, abstract);
cha-bó͘(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
languagehas left a legacy of Japanese
loanwords. 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 オートバイ
ootobai"
autobike", an "
Engrish"
word) and
pháng(from パン
pan"
bread," which is itself a loanword from
Portuguese). Grammatical particles
borrowed from Japanese, notably
te̍k(from
teki的)
and
ka(from か), show up in the Taiwanese of older
speakers.
Whereas Mandarin attaches a syllabic suffix to the singular pronoun
to make a
collectiveform, Taiwanese
pronouns are collectivized through
nasalization. For example,
i(he/she/it) and
goá(I) become
in(they)
and
goán(we), respectively. The
-nthus represents
a subsyllabic morpheme. Like all other
Chinese languages, Taiwanese does not have
true
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,
goánmeans
we excluding you, while
lánmeans
we including
you(similar to
pluralis
auctoris). The inclusive
lánmay be used to express
politeness or solidarity, as in the example of a speaker asking a
stranger "Where do we live?", but meaning "Where do
youlive?".
Grammar
The
grammarof Taiwanese is similar to
southern
Chinese languagessuch as
Hakkaand
Cantonese. The sequence '
subject verb object' 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").
- Subject verb object (typical sequence): The sentence in the
typical sequence would be: Goá phō lí. ("I hold
you.")
- Subject kā object verb: Another sentence of roughly
equivalent meaning is Goá kā lí phō, with the slight
connotation of "I take you and hold" or "I get to you and
hold."
- Object hō͘ subject verb (the passive voice): Then,
Lí hō͘ goá phō means the same thing but in the passive voice, with the connotation of "You
allow yourself to be held by me" or "You make yourself available
for my holding."
With this, more complicated sentences can be constructed:
Goá
kā chúi hō͘ lí lim("I give water for you to drink":
chúimeans "water";
limis "to drink").
This article can only give a few very simple examples on grammar,
for flavour. Linguistic work on the
syntaxof
Taiwanese is still a (quite nascent) scholarly topic being
explored.
Listen to an
audio
sample of Taiwanesefor the sentence: "Kin-á-jit hit-ê cha-bó͘
gín-á lâi góan tau khòaⁿ góa." (Today that girl came to my house to
see me.)
Scripts and orthographies
A selection of literary works
(original and translated) in Taiwanese, in several
orthographies.
Taiwanese does not have a strong written tradition. Until the late
19th century, Taiwanese speakers wrote solely in
literary Chinese. A system of writing
Taiwanese using Latin characters called
pe̍h-oē-jī(POJ) was developed in
the 19th century. (For additional romanized systems, see references
in "Orthography in Latin characters", below.) Nonetheless,
Taiwanese speakers nowadays most commonly write in
vernacular Chinese, which uses the
vocabulary and grammar of
Mandarin, though Chinese characters are
also used to represent spoken Taiwanese in writing.
Han characters
In most cases, Taiwanese speakers write using the
scriptcalled
Han
charactersas in Mandarin, although there are a number of
special characters which are unique to Taiwanese and which are
sometimes used in informal writing. Where Han characters are used,
they are not always etymological or genetic; the borrowing of
similar-sounding or similar-meaning characters is a common
practice. Mandarin-Taiwanese bilingual speakers sometimes attempt
to represent the sounds by adopting similar-sounding Mandarin Han
characters. For example, the Han characters of the vulgar slang
'khoàⁿ siáⁿ siâu' (看三小, substituted for the etymologically correct
看啥痟, meaning "What are you looking at?") has very little meaning in
Mandarin and may not be readily understood by a Taiwanese
monolingual, as knowledge of Mandarin character readings is
required to fully decipher it.
Orthography in Latin characters
An issue of the
Taiwan Church
News, first published by Presbyterian missionaries in
1885.
This was the first printed newspaper in Taiwan, and was
written in Taiwanese, in the Latin orthography pe̍h-oē-jī.
In some situations, Taiwanese is written with the
Latin alphabetusing an
orthographycalled
pe̍h-oē-jī(POJ), meaning
"vernacular writing". POJ was developed first by
Presbyterianmissionariesand later by the indigenous
Presbyterian Church in
Taiwan; they have been active in promoting the language since
the late 19th century. Recently there has been an increase in texts
using a mixed orthography of Han characters and romanization,
although these texts remain uncommon. Other Latin-based
orthographies exist, the most significant being
Taiwanese Language Phonetic
Alphabet(TLPA),
Daighi
tongiong pingim(DT),
Ganvsig daighix tongiong
pingimv(GDT),
Modern
Literal Taiwanese(MLT),
Simplified
MLT(SMLT), and
Phofsit
Daibuun(PSDB). GDT, MLT, SMLT and PSDB employ tonal spelling to
indicate tone without use of
diacriticsymbols.
In POJ, the traditional list of letters is
- a b ch chh e g h i j k kh l m n ng o o͘ p ph s t th (ts) u
Twenty-four in all, including the obsolete
ts, which was
used to represent the modern
chat some places. The
additional necessities are the nasal symbol
ⁿ
(superscript n; the uppercase form
Nis sometimes used in
all capstexts, such as book titles or section
headings), and the tonal
diacritics.
In 2006, the
National
Languages Committee(Ministry of Education, Republic of China)
proposed a scheme called "Tâi-ôan Lô-má-jī" (literally, "romanized
orthography for Taiwanese"). This scheme reconciles the two of the
more senior orthographies, TLPA and POJ. The changes for the
consonants involved using "ts" for POJ's "ch" (reverting to the
orthography in the 19th century), and "tsh" for "chh". For the
vowels, "o͘" could optionally represented as "oo". The nasal mark
"ⁿ" could also be represented optionally as "nn". The rest of the
scheme, most notably the use of diacritics to mark the tones,
appeared to keep to the POJ tradition. One of the aims of this
compromise was to curb any increase of "market share" for Tongyong
Pinyin. It is unclear whether the community will adopt this new
agreement.
Orthographies in kana and in bopomofo
The Taiwanese-Japanese Dictionary,
using the orthography in kana
There was an orthography of Taiwanese based on the
Japanese kanaduring
Japanese rule. The
Kuomintanggovernment also tried to introduce an
orthography in
bopomofo.
Comparison of orthographies
Here the different orthographies are compared:
Computing
Many
keyboard layoutsand
input methodsfor
entering either Latin or Han characters in Taiwanese are available.
Some of them are free-of-charge, some commercial.
The language
Min-nanis registered per RFC
3066 as
zh-min-nan[9297]. Taiwanese can be represented as
zh-min-nan-TW.
When writing Taiwanese in Han characters, some writers create 'new'
characters when they consider it is impossible to use directly or
borrow existing ones; this corresponds to similar practices in
character usage in
Cantonese,
Vietnamese chữ nôm,
Korean
hanjaand
Japanese kanji. These are usually
not encoded in
Unicode(or the corresponding
ISO/IEC 10646:
Universal
Character Set), thus creating problems in computer
processing.
All Latin characters required by pe̍h-oē-jī can be represented
using
Unicode(or the corresponding ISO/IEC
10646:
Universal character
set), using precomposed or combining (diacritics)
characters.
Prior to June 2004, the vowel akin to but more open than
o, written with a
dot above right, was
not encoded. The usual workaround was to use the (stand-alone;
spacing) character
middle
dot(U+00B7,
·) or less commonly the combining
character
dot above(U+0307). As these are far from ideal,
since 1997 proposals have been submitted to the ISO/IEC
working groupin charge of ISO/IEC 10646 –
namely,
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2– to encode a new combining
character
dot above right. This is now officially assigned
to U+0358 (see documents
N1593,
N2507,
N2628,
N2699, and
N2770). Font support has followed: for example, in
Charis SIL.
Sociolinguistics
Regional variations
Within the
wider Hokkien speaking community in Southeast Asia, Ē-mn̂g (Amoy or
Xiamen
) is historically the variant of prestige (close to
a 'standard language'), with other
major variants from Choâⁿ-chiu/Choân-chiu (Chinchew or Quanzhou in Fujian) and
Chiang-chiu (Changchew or Zhangzhou in Fujian).Another Min Nan language, Tiô-chiu
(Teochew or Chaozhou
in Guangdong
) is also widely spoken in these
regions.
In Taiwan,
however, the Tâi-lâm (Tainan, southern
Taiwan) speech is the variant of prestige, and the other major
variants are the northern speech, the central speech (near Taichung
and the port town of Lo̍k-káng
in Changhua County
), and the northern (northeastern) coastal speech
(dominant in Gî-lân).The
distinguishing feature of the coastal speech is the use of the
vowel 'uiⁿ' in place of 'ng'. The northern speech is
distinguished by the absence of the
8th tone,
and some vowel exchanges (for example, 'i' and 'u', 'e' and 'oe').
The central speech has an additional vowel or between 'i' and 'u',
which may be represented as 'ö'.
Fluency
A great majority of people in Taiwan can speak both
Mandarin Chineseand Taiwanese although the
degree of fluency varies widely. There are however small but
significant numbers of people in Taiwan, mainly but not exclusively
Hakkaand
Mainlanders, who cannot speak Taiwanese
fluently. A shrinking percentage of the population, mainly people
born before the 1950s, cannot speak Mandarin at all, though some of
these speak Japanese fluently. Urban, working-class Hakkas as well
as younger, southern-Taiwan Mainlanders tend to have better, even
native-like fluency. Approximately half of the Hakka in Taiwan do
speak Taiwanese. There are many families of mixed Hakka, Hoklo, and
Aboriginalbloodlines. There is,
however, a large percentage of people in Taiwan, regardless of
their background, whose ability to understand Taiwanese is greater
than their ability to speak it.
Which variant is used depends strongly on the context, and in
general people will use Mandarin in more formal situations and
Taiwanese in more informal situations. Taiwanese tends to get used
more in
ruralareas, while Mandarin is used
more in
urbansettings. Older people tend
to use Taiwanese, while younger people tend to use Mandarin. In the
broadcast media,
soap opera/
dramasand
variety
showstend to use Taiwanese, while
game
showsand
documentariestend to
use Mandarin. Political news is broadcast in both Taiwanese and
Mandarin.
Special literary and art forms
Puppetry is part of the heritage in
Minnan
(literally, "that which has seven syllables") is
a
poeticmeterwhere each verse has 7 syllables.
There is a special form of
musical/
dramaticperformance
koa-á-hì: the
Taiwanese opera; the subject matter is
usually a
historical event. A similar form
of
puppetry,
pò͘-tē-hì(
"Taiwanese puppetry"), is also
unique and has been elaborated in the past two decades into
impressive
televisedspectacles.
See
Taiwanese cuisinefor names of
several local dishes.
Conceptualization and history
In the
first decades of the 18th century, the language difference between
the Chinese Qing
imperial
bureaucrats and the commoners was recorded by
the first Imperial High
Commissioner to Taiwan (1722), Huáng
Shújǐng, a Beijinger sent by the
Kangxi Emperor, during whose reign
Taiwan was annexed in 1684:
This set the tone for the uneasy relationship between this language
community and the colonial establishments in the next few
centuries.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, civil unrest and armed conflicts
were frequent in Taiwan.
In addition to resistance against the
government (both Chinese
and Japanese
), battles between ethnic groups were also
significant: the belligerent usually grouped around the language
they use.History recorded battles between the
Hakkaand the Taiwanese-language speakers;
between these and the
aborigines; and between those who spoke
the Choâⁿ-chiu variant of what became the Taiwanese language and
those who spoke the Chiang-chiu variant.
Later, in the 20th century, the conceptualization of Taiwanese is
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 Taiwanese
have been more controversial and sensitive than for other variants
of Chinese.
The history of Taiwanese and the interaction with Mandarin is
complex and at times controversial. Even the name is somewhat
controversial. Some dislike the name Taiwanese as they feel that it
belittles other variants such as Mandarin,
Hakka, and the
aboriginal languageswhich are spoken on
Taiwan.
Others prefer the name Min-nan or Hokkien as
this views Taiwanese as a variant of the speech which is spoken on
Fujian province in Mainland
China.Others dislike the name Min-nan and Hokkien for
precisely the same reason. One can get into similar controversial
debates as to whether Taiwanese is a language or a dialect.
Bible translations
As with many other languages, the
translations of the Biblein
Taiwanese marked milestones in the standardization attempts of the
language and its orthography.
The first translation of the Bible in Amoy or Taiwanese in the
pe̍h-ōe-jī orthography was by the first missionary to Taiwan,
James Laidlaw Maxwell, with
the New Testament
Lán ê Kiù-chú Iâ-so͘ Ki-tok ê
Sin-iokpublished in 1873 and the Old Testament
Kū-iok ê
Sèng Kengin 1884.
A copy of Barclay’s Amoy translation,
opened to the Proverbs.
The next translation of the Bible in Taiwanese or Amoy was by the
missionary to Taiwan,
Thomas
Barclay, carried out in Fujian and Taiwan. A New Testament
translation was completed and published in 1916. The resulting work
containing the Old and the New Testaments, in the pe̍h-ōe-jī
orthography, was completed in 1930 and published in 1933 as the
Sin-kū-iok ê
Sèng-keng(
Amoy Romanized Bible). This edition was
later transliterated into Han characters and published as
Sèng-keng
Tâi-gí Hàn-jī Pún(聖經台語漢字本) in 1996
[9298].
A page from the Red-Cover Bible.
The Ko-Tân (
Kerygma) Colloquial Taiwanese
Version of the New Testament (
Sin-iok) in pe̍h-ōe-jī, also
known as the Red-Cover Bible (
Âng-phoê Sèng-keng),
was published in 1973 as an ecumenical effort between the
Protestant
Presbyterian
Church in Taiwanand the Roman Catholic mission
Maryknoll.
This translation used a more modern
vocabulary (somewhat influenced by Mandarin), and reflected the
central Taiwan dialect, as the Maryknoll mission was based near
Tâi-tiong.It was soon confiscated by the Kuomintang
government (which objected to the use of Latin orthography) in
1975.
A translation using the principle of
functional equivalence,
Hiān-tāi
Tâi-gú Sin-iok Sèng-keng(Today's Taiwanese Romanized
Version), containing only the New Testament, again in pe̍h-ōe-jī,
was published in 2008
[9299]as a collaboration between the Presbyterian
Church in Taiwan and the
Bible
Society in Taiwan. A translation of the Old Testament,
following the same principle, is being prepared
[9300].
Politics
Until the 1980s, the use of Taiwanese, along with all dialects
other than Mandarin, was discouraged by the
Kuomintangthrough measures such as banning its
use in schools and limiting the amount of Taiwanese broadcast on
electronic media. These measures were removed by the 1990s, and
Taiwanese became an emblem of
localization. Mandarin
remains the predominant language of education, although there is a
"mother tongue" language requirement in Taiwanese schools which can
be satisfied with student's choice of mother-tongue: Taiwanese,
Hakka, or aboriginal languages.
Although the use of Taiwanese over Mandarin was historically part
of the
Taiwan
independencemovement, the linkage between politics and language
is not as strong as it once was. Some fluency in Taiwanese is
desirable for political office in Taiwan for both independence and
unificationist politicians. At the same time even some supporters
of Taiwan independence have played down its connection with
Taiwanese language in order to gain the support of the
Mainlandersand
Hakka.
James Soongrestricted the use of
Taiwanese and other local tongues in broadcasting while serving as
Director of the
Government
Information Officeearlier in his career, but later became one
of the first Mainlander politicians to use Taiwanese in semi-formal
occasions.Since then, politicians opposed to Taiwan independence
have used it frequently in rallies even when they are not native
speakers of the language and speak it badly. Conversely,
politicians who have traditionally been identified with Taiwan
independence have used Mandarin on formal occasions and semi-formal
occasions such as press conferences. An example of the latter is
former President
Chen Shui-bianwho
uses Mandarin in all official state speeches, but uses mainly
Taiwanese in political rallies and some informal state occasions
such as New Year greetings. The current DPP chairwoman
Tsai Ing-wenhave been criticised by her
supporters for not using Taiwanese in speeches. President
Ma Ying-jeouspoke in Taiwanese during his 2008
Double Ten Dayspeech when he was
talking about the state of the economy in Taiwan.
In the early 21st century, there are few differences in language
usage between the anti-independence leaning
Pan-Blue Coalitionand the independence
leaning
Pan-Green Coalition.
Both tend to use Taiwanese at political rallies and sometimes in
informal interviews and both tend to use Mandarin at formal press
conferences and official state functions. Both also tend to use
more Mandarin in northern Taiwan and more Taiwanese in southern
Taiwan. However at official party gatherings (as opposed to both
Mandarin-leaning state functions and Taiwanese-leaning party
rallies), the DPP tends to use Taiwanese while KMT and PFP tend to
use Mandarin. The
Taiwan
Solidarity Union, which advocates a strong line on
Taiwan independence, tends to use
Taiwanese even in formal press conferences. In speaking,
politicians will frequently
code
switch. In writing, almost everyone uses
vernacular Mandarinwhich is farther from
Taiwanese, and the use of semi-alphabetic writing or even
colloquial Taiwanese characters is rare.
Despite these commonalities, there are still different attitudes
toward the relationship between Taiwanese and Mandarin. In general,
while supporters of Chinese reunification believe that all
languages used on Taiwan should be respected, they tend to believe
that Mandarin should have a preferred status as the common working
language between different groups. Supporters of Taiwan
independence tend to believe that either Taiwanese should be
preferred or that no language should be preferred.
In 2002, the Taiwan Solidarity Union, a party with about 10 %
of the
Legislative Yuanseats at the
time, suggested making Taiwanese a second official language. This
proposal encountered strong opposition not only from Mainlander
groups but also from Hakka and aboriginal groups who felt that it
would slight their home languages, as well as others including
Hoklo who objected to the proposal on logistical grounds and on the
grounds that it would increase ethnic tensions. Because of these
objections, support for this measure is lukewarm among moderate
Taiwan independence supporters, and the proposal did not
pass.
In 2003, there was a controversy when parts of the civil service
examination for judges were written in characters used only in
Taiwanese. After strong objections, these questions were not used
in scoring. As with the official-language controversy, objections
to the use of Taiwanese came not only from Mainlander groups, but
also Hoklo, Hakka and aborigines.
See also
References
Notes
- Ethnologue
- Mei Tsu-lin (1970) Tones and Prosody in Middle Chinese and
The Origin of The Rising Tone. Harvard Journal of Asiatic
Studies 30:86–110
- 臺灣閩南語羅馬字拼音方案 (Orthographical scheme for the Minnan
language in Taiwan, "Tâi-ôan Lô-má-jī")
- 教育部國語推行委員會: 關於閩南語拼音整合工作相關問題說帖 (National Languages
Committee: On the integration of Minnan orthographies),
2006-10-16
- 蔡英文不說台語 高雄人涼了半截 (Tsai Ing-wen doesn't speak Taiwanese; The
people in Kaohsiung feel half-disappointed) (Traditional
Chinese), retrieved on 12 October 2008
Books and other material
(As English language material on Taiwanese learning is limited,
Japanese and German books are also listed here.)
- Su-chu Wu, Bodman, Nicholas C.: Spoken Taiwanese with
cassette(s), 1980/2001, ISBN 0-87950-461-7 or ISBN 0-87950-460-9 or
ISBN 0-87950-462-5
- Campbell, William: Ē-mn̂g-im Sin Jī-tián (Dictionary of the
Amoy Vernacular). Tainan, Taiwan: Tâi-oân Kàu-hoē Kong-pò-siā
(Taiwan Church Press, Presbyterian Church in Taiwan). June 1993
(First published July 1913).
- Iâu Chèng-to: Cheng-soán Pe̍h-oē-jī (Concise Colloquial
Writing). Tainan, Taiwan: Jîn-kong (an imprint of the Presbyterian
Church in Taiwan). 1992.
- Tân, K. T: A Chinese-English Dictionary: Taiwan Dialect.
Taipei: Southern Materials Center. 1978.
- Klöter, Henning. Written Taiwanese. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz,
2005. ISBN 3-447-05093-4.
- Maryknoll Language Service Center: English-Amoy Dictionary.
Taichung, Taiwan: Maryknoll Fathers. 1979.
- Tiuⁿ Jū-hông: Principles of Pe̍h-oē-jī or the Taiwanese
Orthography: an introduction to its sound-symbol correspondences
and related issues. Taipei: Crane Publishing, 2001. ISBN
957-2053-07-8
- Wi-vun Taiffalo Chiung: Tone Change in Taiwanese: Age and Geographic
Factors.
- 樋口 靖: 台湾語会話, 2000, ISBN 4-497-20004-3 (Good and yet concise
introduction to the Taiwanese language in Japanese; CD: ISBN
4-497-20006-X)
- 趙 怡華: はじめての台湾語, 2003, ISBN 4-7569-0665-6 (Introduction to
Taiwanese [and Mandarin]; in Japanese).
- 鄭 正浩: 台湾語基本単語2000, 1996, ISBN 4876156972 (Basic vocabulary in
Taiwanese 2000; in Japanese).
- 趙 怡華, 陳 豐惠, たかお かおり, 2006, 絵でわかる台湾語会話. ISBN 978-4756909916
(Conversations in Taiwanese [and Mandarin] with illustrations; in
Japanese).
- Katharina Sommer, Xie Shu-Kai: Taiwanisch Wort für Wort, 2004,
ISBN 3-89416-348-8 (Taiwanese for travellers, in German. CD: ISBN
3-8317-6094-2)
- Taiwanese learning resources (a good
bibliography in English) (Google cache as a web page)
External links
- On the language
- Dictionaries
- Learning aids
- Other
Taiwanese tones
|
Tone
number
|
Name |
POJ
accent
|
Pitch in
Taipei
|
Description |
Pitch in
Tainan
|
Description |
|
| 1 |
yin level (陰平) |
a |
(55) |
high |
(44) |
high |
|
| 2 (6) |
rising (上聲) |
á |
(51) |
falling |
(53) |
high falling |
|
| 3 |
yin departing (陰去) |
à |
to (31~21) |
low falling |
(11) |
low |
|
| 4 |
yin entering (陰入) |
ah |
(32) |
mid stopped |
(21) |
low stopped |
|
| 5 |
yang level (陽平) |
â |
to (14~24) |
rising |
(25) |
rising |
|
| 7 |
yang departing (陽去) |
ā |
(33) |
mid |
(22) |
mid |
|
| 8 |
yang entering (陽入) |
a̍h |
(4) |
high stopped |
(5) |
high stopped |
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