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As compared to Mandarin, Hokkien dialects prefer to use the monosyllabic form of words, without suffixes. For instance, the Mandarin noun suffix 子; zi is not found in Hokkien words, while another noun suffix, 仔; á is used in many nouns. Examples are below: 'duck' – 鴨; ah or 鴨仔; ah-á (cf. Mandarin 鴨子; yāzi)
Some grammatical differences also exist, often due to Hokkien influence. The two varieties of Mandarin have diverged in the decades since the political separation of Taiwan and the mainland. Guoyu spoken in Taiwan exists on a spectrum, from the most formal, standardized variety to the least formal, with the heaviest Hokkien influence.
Pe̍h-ōe-jī (白話字) is a Latin alphabet developed by Western missionaries working in Southeast Asia in the 19th century to write Hokkien. Pe̍h-ōe-jī allows Hokkien to be written phonetically in Latin script, meaning that phrases specific to Hokkien can be written without having to deal with the issue of non-existent Chinese characters.
Taiwanese Hokkien is a variety of Hokkien, a Southern Min language. Like many varieties of Min Chinese, it has distinct literary and colloquial layers of vocabulary, often associated with formal and informal registers respectively. The literary layer can be traced to the late Tang dynasty, and as such is related to Middle Chinese.
Hokkien remains the most prestigious language other than Mandarin and English in Taiwan. Although Hokkien, Hakka, and Taiwan's many Indigenous languages have now been elevated to the status of national languages, it is notable that there is a clear de facto gradient of valuation of these languages.
A 2021 study found that Penang Hokkien was a 'threatened' language in the Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale, due to the encroachment of Mandarin. [ 13 ] Penang Hokkien is a subdialect of Zhangzhou (漳州; Tsiang-tsiu ) Hokkien, with extensive use of Malay and English loanwords .
The extensive 1987 Language Atlas of China groups Chinese local varieties into the following units: [7] Supergroup (大区 dàqū), of which there are but two: Mandarin and Min; Group (区 qū), corresponding to the varieties of Chinese of the ISO standard; Subgroup (片 piàn), which may be mutually unintelligible with other subgroups [note 3]
Since then, Mandarin has been established as a lingua franca among the various groups in Taiwan: the majority Taiwanese-speaking Hoklo (Hokkien), the Hakka who have their own spoken language, the aboriginals who speak aboriginal languages; as well as Mainland Chinese immigrated in 1949 whose native tongue may be any Chinese variant.