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Hokkien
Hokkien ( , ) is a Varieties of Chinese, variety of the Southern Min group of Chinese language, Chinese languages. Native to and originating from the Minnan region in the southeastern part of Fujian in southeastern China, it is also referred to as Quanzhang ( zh, c=泉漳, poj=Choân-chiang, links=no), from the first characters of the urban centers of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou. Taiwanese Hokkien is one of the national languages in Taiwan. Hokkien is also widely spoken within the overseas Chinese diaspora in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar, Hong Kong, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam, and elsewhere across the world. Mutual intelligibility between Hokkien dialects varies, but they are still held together by ethnolinguistic identity. In maritime Southeast Asia, Hokkien historically served as the lingua franca amongst overseas Chinese communities of Han Chinese subgroups, all dialects and subgroups, and it remains today as the most spoken Varieties of Ch ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Singaporean Hokkien
Singaporean Hokkien; Tâi-lô: ; zh, poj=''Sin-ka-pho Hok-kiàn-ōe'' is a local variety of the Hokkien language spoken natively in Singapore. Within Chinese linguistic academic circles, this dialect is known as Singaporean Ban-lam Gu. Tâi-lô: It bears similarities with the Amoy dialect, Amoy spoken in Amoy, now better known as Xiamen, as well as Taiwanese Hokkien which is spoken in Taiwan. Hokkien is the Southern Min, Min Nan pronunciation for the province of Fujian, and is generally the term used by the Chinese people, Chinese in Southeast Asia to refer to the 'Banlam' dialect. Singaporean Hokkien generally views Amoy as its prestige dialect, and its accent is predominantly based on a mixture of Quanzhou dialect, Quanzhou and Zhangzhou dialect, Zhangzhou speech, with a greater inclination towards the former. Like many spoken languages in Singapore, Singaporean Hokkien is influenced by other languages or dialects spoken in Singapore. For instance, Singaporean Hokkien is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philippine Hokkien
Philippine Hokkien is a dialect of the Hokkien language of the Southern Min branch of Min Chinese descended directly from Old Chinese of the Sinitic languages, Sinitic family, primarily spoken vernacularly by Chinese Filipinos in the Philippines, where it serves as the local Chinese language, Chinese ''lingua franca'' within the overseas Chinese community in the Philippines and acts as the heritage language of a majority of Chinese Filipinos. Despite currently acting mostly as an oral language, Hokkien as spoken in the Philippines did indeed historically have a written language and is actually one of the earliest sources for written Hokkien using both Chinese characters (traditionally via Classical Chinese () worded from and read in Hokkien) as early as around 1587 or 1593 through the ''Doctrina Christiana, Doctrina Christiana en letra y lengua china'' and using the Latin script as early as the 1590s in the Boxer Codex and was actually the earliest to systematically Romanization, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Penang Hokkien
Penang Hokkien ( zh, c=庇能福建話, tl=Pī-néeng Hok-kiàn-uā, poj=Pī-né͘ng Hok-kiàn-ōa; IPA: ) is a local variant of Hokkien spoken in Penang, Malaysia. It is spoken natively by 63.9% of Penang's Chinese community, and also by some Penangite Indians and Penangite Malays. It was once the ''lingua franca'' among the majority Chinese population in Penang, Kedah, Perlis and northern Perak. However, since the 1980s, many younger speakers have shifted towards Malaysian Mandarin under the Speak Mandarin Campaign in Chinese-medium schools in Malaysia, even though Mandarin was not previously spoken in these regions. Mandarin has been adopted as the only language of instruction in Chinese schools and, from the 1980s to mid-2010s, these schools penalised students and teachers for using non-Mandarin varieties of Chinese. A 2021 study found that Penang Hokkien was a 'threatened' language in the Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale, due to the encroachm ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Taiwanese Hokkien
Taiwanese Hokkien ( , ), or simply Taiwanese, also known as Taigi ( zh, c=臺語, tl=Tâi-gí), Taiwanese Southern Min ( zh, c=臺灣閩南語, tl=Tâi-uân Bân-lâm-gí), Hoklo and Holo, is a variety of the Hokkien language spoken natively by more than 70 percent of the population of Taiwan. It is spoken by a significant portion of those Taiwanese people who are descended from Hoklo immigrants of Minnan region, southern Fujian. It is one of the national languages of Taiwan. Taiwanese is generally similar to Hokkien spoken in Amoy dialect, Amoy, Quanzhou dialect, Quanzhou, and Zhangzhou dialect, Zhangzhou, as well as dialectal forms used in Southeast Asia, such as Singaporean Hokkien, Penang Hokkien, Philippine Hokkien, Medan Hokkien, and Southern Peninsular Malaysian Hokkien. It is mutually intelligible with the Amoy and Zhangzhou varieties at the mouth of the Jiulong River in mainland China, and with Philippine Hokkien to the south in the Philippines, spoken altogether by a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Written Hokkien
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 developed by the Ministry of Education including its '' Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwan Minnan'', but there are a wide variety of different methods of writing in Vernacular Hokkien. Nevertheless, vernacular works written in Hokkien are still commonly seen in literature, film, performing arts and music. History Prior to the modern era, the main written language of China was Classical Chinese, which has grammar and vocabulary based on Old Chinese used in ancient times. Whilst the written form of Chinese mostly remained static, the spoken varieties of Chinese diverged from Old Chinese. In the early 20th century, reformers in China saw the need fo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hoklo People
The Hoklo people () are a Han Chinese subgroup who speak Hokkien, a Southern Min language, or trace their ancestry to southeastern Fujian in China, and known by various related terms such as Banlam people (), Minnan people, Fujianese people or more commonly in Southeast Asia as the Hokkien people (). The Hokkien people are found in significant numbers in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei, Myanmar, and the United States. The Hokkien people have a distinct culture and architecture, including Hokkien shrines and temples with tilted sharp eaves, high and slanted top roofs, and finely detailed decorative inlays of wood and porcelain. The Hokkien language, which includes Taiwanese Hokkien, is the mainstream Southern Min, which is partially mutually intelligible to other Southern Min varieties such as Teochew, Zhongshan, Haklau, and Zhenan. Etymology In Southern Fujian, the Hokkien speakers refer to themselves as Banlam peopl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Southern Min
Southern Min (), Minnan ( Mandarin pronunciation: ) or Banlam (), is a group of linguistically similar and historically related Chinese languages that form a branch of Min Chinese spoken in Fujian (especially the Minnan region), most of Taiwan (many citizens are descendants of settlers from Fujian), Eastern Guangdong, Hainan, and Southern Zhejiang. Southern Min dialects are also spoken by descendants of emigrants from these areas in diaspora, most notably in Southeast Asia, such as Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei, Southern Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Southern and Central Vietnam, as well as major cities in the United States, including in San Francisco, in Los Angeles and in New York City. Minnan is the most widely-spoken branch of Min, with approximately 34 million native speakers as of 2025. The most widely spoken Southern Min language is Hokkien, which includes Taiwanese. Other varieties of Southern Min have significant differences from Hok ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Medan Hokkien
Medan Hokkien is a local variety of Hokkien spoken amongst Chinese Indonesians in Medan, North Sumatra, Indonesia. It is the ''lingua franca'' in Medan as well as the surrounding cities in the state of North Sumatra. It is also spoken in some Medan Chinese migrant communities such as in Jakarta. Medan Hokkien is a subdialect of the Zhangzhou (漳州) Hokkien, particularly of Haicheng (海澄) subdialect. It borrows heavily from Teochew, Deli Malay and Indonesian. It is predominantly a spoken dialect: Vernacular Hokkien, including Medan Hokkien, is traditionally passed down orally and is rarely transcribed in written Hokkien. Moreover, Indonesia's New Order Era imposed martial laws to suppress and ban display of Chinese characters and Chinese tradition in public. However, with the rise of social media, Medan Hokkien is often transcribed in EYD, ignoring tone markings altogether. When comparing Medan Hokkien to other Hokkien dialects spoken in countries such as Malaysia and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Southern Peninsular Malaysian Hokkien
Southern Malaysian Hokkien ( zh, t=, s=, p=Nán Mǎ Fújiànhuà, poj=''Lâm-Má Hok-kiàn-oē'') is a local variant of the Min Nan Chinese variety spoken in Central and Southern Peninsular Malaysia ( Klang, Melaka, Muar, Tangkak, Segamat, Batu Pahat, Pontian and Johor Bahru). Due to geographical proximity, it is heavily influenced by Singaporean Hokkien. This dialect is based on Quanzhou-accented varieties of Min Nan, including the Eng Choon (Yongchun) dialect. It is markedly distinct from Penang Hokkien and Medan Hokkien, which are based on the Zhangzhou dialects. Similar to the situation in Singapore, the term ''Hokkien'' is generally used by the Chinese in South-east Asia to refer to Min Nan Chinese (). Southern Malaysian Hokkien is based on the Quanzhou dialects with some influence from the Amoy dialect. The dialect also contains loan words from Malay. Phonology This section is based on Eng Choon (Yongchun) Hokkien spoken in Melaka. Vowels There are eight phon ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Amoy Dialect
The Amoy dialect or Xiamen dialect (), also known as Amoyese, Amoynese, Amoy Hokkien, Xiamenese or Xiamen Hokkien, is a dialect of Hokkien spoken in the city of Xiamen (historically known as "Amoy") and its surrounding metropolitan area, in the southern part of Fujian province. Currently, it is one of the most widely researched and studied varieties of Southern Min. It has historically come to be one of the more standardized varieties. Amoyese and Taiwanese are both historically mixtures of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou dialects. As such, they are very closely aligned phonologically. There are some differences between the two, especially lexical, as a result of physical separation and the differing histories of mainland China and Taiwan during the 20th century. Amoyese and Taiwanese are mutually intelligible. Intelligibility with other Hokkien, especially inland, is more difficult. By that standard, Amoyese and Taiwanese may be considered dialects of a single language. Ethnolinguist ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Min Chinese
Min ( zh, t=, s=闽语, p=Mǐnyǔ, poj=Bân-gú / Bân-gír / Bân-gí; Bàng-uâ-cê, BUC: ''Mìng-ngṳ̄'') is a broad group of Sinitic languages with about 75 million native speakers. These languages are spoken in Fujian province and Chaoshan, as well as by the descendants of Min-speaking colonists on the Leizhou Peninsula, Hainan, parts of Zhongshan, three counties in southern Wenzhou, the Zhoushan archipelago, Taiwan, and scattered in pockets or sporadically across Hong Kong, Macau, and several countries in Southeast Asia, particularly Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Brunei. The name is derived from the Min River (Fujian), Min River in Fujian, which is also the abbreviated name of Fujian Province. Min varieties are not mutually intelligible with one another nor with any other variety of Chinese (such as Mandarin Chinese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu Chinese, Wu, Gan Chinese, Gan, Xiang Chinese, Xiang, or Hakka Chinese, Hak ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Coastal Min
Min ( zh, t=, s=闽语, p=Mǐnyǔ, poj=Bân-gú / Bân-gír / Bân-gí; BUC: ''Mìng-ngṳ̄'') is a broad group of Sinitic languages with about 75 million native speakers. These languages are spoken in Fujian province and Chaoshan, as well as by the descendants of Min-speaking colonists on the Leizhou Peninsula, Hainan, parts of Zhongshan, three counties in southern Wenzhou, the Zhoushan archipelago, Taiwan, and scattered in pockets or sporadically across Hong Kong, Macau, and several countries in Southeast Asia, particularly Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Brunei. The name is derived from the Min River in Fujian, which is also the abbreviated name of Fujian Province. Min varieties are not mutually intelligible with one another nor with any other variety of Chinese (such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, Gan, Xiang, or Hakka). There are many Min speakers among overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. The most widely spoken varie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
