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The Kuomintang heavily discouraged the use of Southern Min and other non-Mandarin languages, portraying them as inferior, [28] [29] and school children were punished for speaking their non-Mandarin native languages. [25] Guoyu was thus established as a lingua franca among the various groups in Taiwan at the expense of existing languages. [29] [30]
In the last 400 years, several waves of Han emigrations brought several different Sinitic languages into Taiwan. These languages include Taiwanese Hokkien, Hakka, and Mandarin, which have become the major languages spoken in present-day Taiwan. Formosan languages were the dominant language of prehistorical Taiwan.
In writing, almost everyone uses vernacular Mandarin which is further from Taiwanese, and the use of semi-alphabetic writing or even colloquial Taiwanese characters is rare. [80] [81] In 2002, the Taiwan Solidarity Union, a party with about 10% of the Legislative Yuan seats at the time, suggested making Taiwanese Hokkien a second official ...
The Chinese language enjoys the status as official language in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and Taiwan. It is recognized as a minority language in Malaysia. However, the language shows a high degree of regional variation among these territories.
"Chinese" is a blanket term covering many different varieties spoken across China. Mandarin Chinese is the most popular dialect, and is used as a lingua franca across China. Linguists classify these varieties as the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family .
Chinese eventually replaced many of the languages previously dominant in these areas, and forms of the language spoken in different regions began to diverge. [7] During periods of political unity there was a tendency for states to promote the use of a standard language across the territory they controlled, in order to facilitate communication ...
Hokkien, a variety of Chinese that forms part of the Southern Min family and is spoken in Southeastern China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, does not have a unitary standardized writing system, in comparison with the well-developed written forms of Cantonese and Standard Chinese (Mandarin). In Taiwan, a standard for Written Hokkien has been ...
Bopomofo, also called Zhuyin Fuhao [1] (/ dʒ uː ˌ j ɪ n f uː ˈ h aʊ / joo-YIN foo-HOW; 注音符號; Zhùyīn fúhào; 'phonetic symbols'), or simply Zhuyin, [2] is a transliteration system for Standard Chinese and other Sinitic languages. It is the principal method of teaching Chinese Mandarin pronunciation in Taiwan.