Hokkien is perhaps one of the most recognisable languages spoken in Taiwan, Fujian, and Southeast Asia. With more than 13 million native speakers, the Taiwanese variety of Hokkien is spoken by a majority of the Taiwanese population. Tracing its roots to the Hoklo immigration from southern Fujian to Taiwan, this language finds itself mutually intelligible with the Hokkien spoken in Amoy, Zhangzhou, and some parts of the Philippines. While this language is traditionally written using Han characters, with the later introduction of the romanised form called pe̍h-ōe-jī, not much is known beyond the other writing systems used to write Taiwanese Hokkien.

Some might have heard of Taiwanese kana, a syllabary-alphabet hybrid used during the time of the Japanese Occupation of Taiwan. This functioned quite similarly to the furigana used to read Japanese kanji, as Taiwanese kana was used as a phonetic guide to hanzi, the traditional way Taiwanese Hokkien was written. Following the end of Japanese occupation, so too did the use of Taiwanese kana. Some elements of this writing system do warrant a further look at, which we would cover in a future post.

But above all of these, has anyone heard of Taiwanese Hangeul? That’s right, the writing system of the Korean language has been adapted for the sounds of Taiwanese Hokkien. Called 대끼깐뿐, this does not seem to make sense to the average Korean speaker (who would read it as tae kki kkan ppun). This is pronounced Tâi-gí Gān-bûn (using the POJ system). Developed by Taiwanese linguist Hsu Tsao-te in the late 1980s, this writing system aimed to use the featural alphabet system of Hangeul to represent the sounds of Taiwanese Hokkien.

Before going into how the writing system is different from Hangeul, we have to look at the sounds of Taiwanese Hokkien. Like many languages spoken across China, Taiwanese Hokkien is a tonal language with 8 phonemic tones, or at least that is what the traditional definitions say. This includes two “stopped” tones, marked by a “-h” in the Pe̍h-ōe-jī transcription. Additionally, there are two syllabic consonants, m and ng, meaning that these two sounds can function as their distinct syllables. For further details about the sounds of Taiwanese Hokkien, check out the post I made two weeks ago, where I introduced my first impressions of Taiwanese Hokkien. With these in mind, let us see how Hangul could theoretically be ported over to Taiwanese Hokkien.

In Korean, Hangul represents the following sounds:

There are other orthographical rules governing the interaction of the final consonant sounds in a syllable with the initial consonant of the following syllable, but the essential sounds represented are there.

Taiwanese Hangul shares many consonant sounds with Korean Hangul, but there are certain differences to be noted.

The first, and probably the most obvious one, is how tone might be expressed using Hangul. Tone markings are done using Hangul components, but in actual texts, they may not be written at all. Interestingly, tones that will be affected by tonal changes called sandhi are marked, unlike in Pe̍h-ōe-jī. That is, if tone markings are used.

Next, Taiwanese Hokkien does not have the tense consonants as they are used in Korean. Instead, these corresponding letters are used to represent the voiced counterparts in Taiwanese Hokkien. And so, a syllable ban would be 빤. The letters ㅈ, ㅉ,ㅊ, and ㅅrepresent two sounds, as shown in the table, and the letter ㅆ is not even used at all as an initial. Instead, ㅆ is used to represent the final nasal sound /ⁿʔ/, a combination of the final sounds represented by ㅅ (nasalisation) andㅎ.

Some Korean Hangul vowel letters are used to represent close phonetic counterparts found in Taiwanese Hokkien, such as the ᅥ for /ə/ or /o/ in Taiwanese Hokkien instead of /ʌ / in Korean. Taiwanese Hokkien also uses nasal vowels, and to represent nasalisation, ㅅis used as a final in the syllable block. In Korean, this would have been the /t̚/ sound in the syllable coda.

Lastly, how might the syllabic m and ng be represented in Taiwanese Hangul? Looking at the unused letters in Hangul, a rather interesting choice was made during development. ㅡ was made silent, while 의 was made the ‘initial’ and ‘vowel nucleus’ of the syllable. The value was determined solely by the coda, in which case, 읨 was used to write /m̩ʔ/, and 읭was used to write /ŋ̍ʔ/.

Putting these together, to express 關係 or koan-he (connection or relation) in Taiwanese Hangul, for example, it is written as 관헤. Similarly, 報賞 or pò-siúⁿ (reward) is written as 버슛. And look, no tone markers are used!

That being said, you might be curious to know if Taiwanese Hangul is indeed used in Taiwan. And the short answer is no. For various reasons, this writing system might have simply failed to catch on, as it faced up against more established writing systems, particularly the Chinese characters, and Pe̍h-ōe-jī. Perhaps it could have just been put forth as a proof of concept, that Hangul was capable of representing the sounds of Taiwanese Hokkien. But undoubtedly, Taiwanese Hangul would remain as one of the more unusual quirks of adapting writing systems for languages that do not really share a strong connotation, for practical or cultural reasons. That is, until someone decides, for whatever reason, to adapt cuneiform for Taiwanese Hokkien. Maybe someone has already tried it, but did not share their work with the wider audience.