18 Facts About Taiwanese Hokkien

Taiwanese Hokkien is a branched-off variety of standard Hokkien, a group of Southern Min language.

Taiwanese Hokkien contains loanwords from Japanese and the native Formosan languages.

Literary form of Taiwanese Hokkien once flourished in Fujian and was brought to Taiwan by early emigrants.

From that period onwards, many people from the Taiwanese Hokkien-speaking regions started to emigrate overseas due to political and economic reasons.

Taiwanese Hokkien'story has recorded battles between Hakka speakers and Hokkien speakers, between these and the aborigines, and even between those who spoke different variants of Hokkien.

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Later, in the 20th century, the conceptualization of Taiwanese Hokkien 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 Hokkien.

Phonologically, Taiwanese Hokkien is a tonal language with extensive tone sandhi rules.

Taiwanese Hokkien has extremely extensive tone sandhi rules: in an utterance, only the last syllable pronounced is not affected by the rules.

Syntax of Taiwanese Hokkien is similar to southern sinitic languages such as Hakka and Yue.

Until the late 19th century, Taiwanese Hokkien speakers wrote mostly in Classical Chinese, although songbooks using Han characters are attested from the 1820s.

In most cases, Taiwanese Hokkien speakers write using the script called Han characters as in Mandarin, although there are a number of special characters which are unique to Taiwanese Hokkien and which are sometimes used in informal writing.

Prestige variant of Taiwanese Hokkien is the southern speech found in Tainan and Kaohsiung.

Taiwanese Hokkien tends to get used more in rural areas, while Mandarin is used more in urban settings.

Taiwanese Hokkien is perceived by some to have a slight masculine leaning, making it more popular among the males of the younger population.

Translation using the principle of functional equivalence, "Today's Taiwanese Romanized Version", containing only the New Testament, again in Peh-oe-ji, was published in 2008 as a collaboration between the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan and the Bible Society in Taiwan.

Some fluency in Taiwanese Hokkien is desirable for political office in Taiwan for both independence and unificationist politicians.

Since then, politicians opposed to Taiwanese Hokkien independence have used it frequently in rallies, even when they are not native speakers.

Kloter's Written Taiwanese Hokkien has been described as "the most comprehensive English-language study of written Taiwanese Hokkien".