Today, I want to share some bits and bobs about my experiences learning something that I have been wanting to do for a long time. I have been to Taiwan twice in my life, and had great memories from that country. With great food, interesting architecture, and an interesting spread of linguistic diversity, Taiwan is definitely one of my most favourite countries to travel to.

We commonly associate Taiwan with the use of Mandarin Chinese, but written with traditional Chinese characters and some words more or less unique to Taiwan. While some may be borrowed directly from Japanese during the occupation from 1895 to 1945, some are borrowed through a Taiwanese variant of a language I have been interested in learning. That is, Minnan. Or Southern Min, or Banlam.

Southern Min is a group of language varieties spoken in the provinces of Fujian, Hainan, and some parts of Guangdong and Zhejiang in China, as well as Taiwan and some parts of Southeast Asia. Among this, is a variety of smaller dialects or variants called Hokkien. This largely belongs to the Quanzhang branch of the Southern Min languages (or however one might classify them, classifying these is quite messy as language, varieties, and dialects appear to be used by everyone, though it may differ by who you ask). Zooming into a specific variety, we find Taiwanese Hokkien.

Taiwanese Hokkien goes by several other names. This includes names like Taiwanese, and Taiwanese Minnan, to Hoklo or Taigi. Today, it is spoken by a majority of the Taiwanese population, making it the second most spoken language (or language variety) in Taiwan after Taiwanese Mandarin. Reaching Taiwan through the Hoklo immigration from Southern Fujian, Taiwanese Hokkien has developed to adopt its own colloquialisms over time. This is not unique, since the various Hokkien varieties have adopted their own distinct regional quirks as well.

Even though Taiwanese Hokkien is seeing a decrease in use in younger generations, as people shift towards using Mandarin at home, around 70% of people born in 1996-2004 still use Taiwanese Hokkien for communication at home. With Taiwanese institutions offering Taiwanese Hokkien classes, including those leading up to the Taiwanese Hokkien Language Proficiency Certification (閩南語語言能力認證), I would expect it to be easy to come by resources to learn this language variant.

Unsurprisingly, most of these resources are in Mandarin Chinese, but this offered a way to understand the Chinese characters corresponding to Taiwanese Hokkien words. Formerly, from my rather rudimentary background in Singaporean Hokkien, its predominantly spoken status meant that written Hokkien was extremely rare to come by. Additionally, it was not until recently when Hokkien was allowed to be spoken on television again, but even so, subtitles were in Mandarin Chinese. And so, it was interesting to learn about some examples of one-to-many correspondence between character and sound in Taiwanese Hokkien, such as the compound word 食食, literally meaning ‘eat food’, but pronounced tsia̍h si̍h.

In addition to this, the words I learned also had their corresponding readings using a romanisation system called Pe̍h-ōe-jī. It functions quite like the hanyu pinyin in helping me learn how some written Taiwanese Hokkien is pronounced. Some might also associate it with the Chữ Nôm used in Vietnamese today, as both systems use the Latin alphabet, but modify it to adapt certain sounds in their respective languages. This also includes the use of various tone markings, a common feature between Chữ Nôm, hanyu pinyin, and Pe̍h-ōe-jī.

Taiwanese Hokkien has a more diverse set of finals compared to Mandarin Chinese, with plosive and nasal finals. This includes a nasalisation of the coda, and glottal stop. Factoring in the fact that Taiwanese Hokkien has five tonal contours, (or eight total tones if you follow traditional analysis), this allows more possible syllables in Taiwanese Hokkien compared to Mandarin Chinese.

What I found particularly difficult to get used to was the tonal changes that occurs in a word or a sentence. In fact, Taiwanese Hokkien, like many Hokkien varieties, has an elaborate system of tonal changes ranging from normal tonal changes to doubled ones, and tonal changes that are applied for triplicated adjectives when a speaker wants to place an emphasis on something. Some of these tonal changes depend on the final consonants, while some do not. I heard that there is a mnemonic I could use to help me get used to tonal changes, and perhaps I could try using it as I progress.

I have not yet dived deep enough into Taiwanese Hokkien to make a comment on how the language works, or how words are formed, but I get the impression that there are many false friends between Taiwanese Hokkien and Mandarin Chinese, the most prominent of which is the meaning of the word 走. Pronounced cháu in Taiwanese Hokkien, it means “to run”. But in Mandarin Chinese, this is pronounced as zǒu, and translates as “to walk”. As exemplified by the compound word tsia̍h si̍h, also written as 食食, the same word (or character) can adopt multiple lexical classes, such as nouns and verbs.

Perhaps a distinction that can be made between Mandarin and Taiwanese Hokkien is the use of inclusive and exclusive ‘we’ in Taiwanese Hokkien. Here, guán (阮) refers to the exclusive ‘we’, and lán (咱) refers to the inclusive ‘we’. Additionally, Taiwanese pronouns are pluralised by simply adding the final sound ‘-n’. So to say ‘I’ in Taiwanese Hokkien, it is guá (我).

Taiwanese Hokkien has been an interesting dive thus far, and I sure look forward to picking up other regional varieties of Hokkien. Among what I have learnt, the most impactful one would be learning the characters used to write Hokkien, and how they can differ from what I am previously familiar with in Mandarin Chinese. But this is not really the weirdest way Taiwanese Hokkien is written. For in the 1980s, there is one writing system proposed to write Taiwanese Hokkien.

I will link some of the resources I have consulted when doing my little dive, although all of them are printed in traditional Chinese. These can be found here:

Ministry of Education Taiwanese Minnan Dictionary of commonly used words — 教育部臺灣閩南語常用詞辭典 https://sutian.moe.edu.tw/zh-hant/

Learning Taiwanese Minnan Pe̍h-ōe-jī — 臺灣閩南語羅馬字拼音教學網 https://tailo.moe.edu.tw/index.php