Min Nan

Min Nan, Minnan, or Min-nan (Simplified Chinese: 闽南语; Traditional Chinese: 閩南語; Hanyu Pinyin: Mǐnnányǔ; POJ: Bân-lâm-gú; "Southern Min" or "Southern Fujian" language) is the Chinese language/dialect spoken in southern Fujian province, China and neighboring areas, and by descendants of emigrants from these areas in diaspora. Hokkien, Taiwanese, and Teochew are all common names for several prominent variants of Min Nan.

Min Nan (Southern Min) forms part of the Min language group, alongside several other divisions. The Min languages/dialects are part of the Chinese language group, itself a member of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Min Nan is mutually intelligible with neither Eastern Min, Cantonese, nor Mandarin, the official Chinese language, spoken (at least as a second language) by the majority of those in mainland China and Taiwan, as well as large numbers of overseas Chinese.

Min Nan is spoken in the southern part of Fujian province, two southern counties of Zhejiang province, the Zhoushan archipelago off Ningbo in Zhejiang, and the eastern part of Guangdong province (Chaoshan region). The Qiong Wen variant spoken in the Leizhou peninsula of Guangdong province, as well as Hainan province, is classified in some schemes as part of Min Nan and in other schemes as separate. A form of Min Nan akin to that spoken in southern Fujian is also spoken in Taiwan, where it has the native name of Tâi-oân-oē or Hō-ló-oē. The (sub)ethnic group for which Min Nan is considered a native language is known as the Holo (Hō-ló) or Hoklo, one of the main ethnicities of Taiwan. The correspondence between language and ethnicity is not absolute, however, as some Hoklo have very limited proficiency in Min Nan while some ethnic Chinese of non-Hoklo origin speak Min Nan fluently.

There are many Min Nan speakers also among overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. Many ethnic Chinese emigrants to the region were Hoklo from southern Fujian, and brought the language to what is now Indonesia (the former Dutch East Indies) and present day Malaysia and Singapore (the former British Straits Settlements and Malaya). In general, Min Nan from southern Fujian is known as Hokkien, Hokkienese, or Fukien in Southeast Asia, and is extremely similar to Taiwanese. Many Southeast Asian ethnic Chinese also originated in Chaoshan region of Guangdong province and speak Teochew, the variant of Min Nan from that region. Min Nan is reportedly the native language of up to 98.5% of the community of ethnic Chinese in the Philippines, among whom it is also known as Lan-nang or Lán-lâng-oē ("Our people’s language").

As with other varieties of Chinese, there is significant dispute as to whether Min Nan is a language or a dialect. (See Identification of the varieties of Chinese for greater detail.)

Classification

Southern Fujian is home to three main dialect systems of Min Nan. They are known by the geographic locations to which they correspond:

• Amoy (Xiamen)
• Changchew (Zhangzhou)
• Chinchew (Quanzhou)

As Xiamen (Amoy) is the principal city of southern Fujian, the Amoy dialect is considered the most important, or even prestige variant. Xiamen and the Amoy dialect have played an influential role in history, especially in the relations of Western nations with China, and was one of the most frequently learned of all Chinese languages/dialects by Westerners during the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century.

The variants of Min Nan spoken in Zhejiang province are most akin to that spoken in Quanzhou.

The variants spoken in Taiwan are similar to the three Fujian variants, and are collectively known as Taiwanese. Taiwanese is actively used by a large population and bears much importance from a socio-political perspective, forming the second (and perhaps today most significant) major pole of the language.

Those Min Nan variants that are collectively known as "Hokkien" in Southeast Asia also originate from these variants.

The variants of Min Nan in the Chaoshan region of eastern Guangdong province are collectively known as Teochew or Chaozhou. Teochew is of great importance in the Southeast Asian Chinese diaspora, particularly in Malaysia (where Teochew people form a substantial part of the ethnic Chinese population), Vietnam, Thailand and other locations.

In southwestern Fujian, the local variants in Longyan and Zhangping form a separate division of Min Nan on their own.

Among ethnic Chinese inhabitants of Penang, Malaysia, a distinct form, called Penang Hokkien, has developed.

Tones

In general, Min Nan variants have seven to eight tones, and tone sandhi is extensive.

See Taiwanese and Teochew dialect for examples of Min Nan tone systems.

Scripts and orthographies

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Like most ethnic Chinese, whether from mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, or other parts of Southeast Asia, when writing Chinese, Min Nan speakers use Chinese characters as in Standard Mandarin, although there are a number of special characters which are unique to Min Nan and sometimes used in informal writing (as is the case with Cantonese). Where standard Chinese characters are used, they are not always etymological or genetic; the borrowing of similar-sounding or similar-meaning characters is a common practice.

Romanization

Min Nan, in particular, Taiwanese, can be written with the Latin alphabet using an Romanized orthography called Pe̍h-oē-jī (POJ; meaning "vernacular writing"). POJ was developed first by Presbyterian missionaries and later by the indigenous Presbyterian Church in Taiwan; use of the orthography as been actively promoted since the late 19th century. The use of a mixed orthography of Han characters and romanization is also seen, though remains uncommon. Other Latin-based orthographies also exist.

Earlier scripts in Min Nan can be dated back to the 16th century. One example is the "Doctrina Christiana en letra y lengua china," presumably written after 1587 by the Spanish Dominicans in the Philipines. Another is a Ming script of a play called Romance of the Lychee Mirror (1566 AD), supposedly the earliest Southern Min colloquial text.

• vowels

• consonants

• tones

Computing

The language Min Nan is registered per RFC 3066 as zh-min-nan [1]. Taiwanese can be represented as zh-min-nan-TW.

When writing Min Nan in Chinese characters, some writers create 'new' characters when they consider it is impossible to use directly or borrow existing ones; this corresponds to similar practices in character usage in Cantonese, Vietnamese chữ nôm, Korean hanja and Japanese kanji. These are usually not encoded in Unicode (or the corresponding ISO/IEC 10646: Universal Character Set), thus creating problems in computer processing.

All Latin characters required by Pe̍h-oē-jī can be represented using Unicode (or the corresponding ISO/IEC 10646: Universal character set), using precomposed or combining (diacritics) characters. Prior to June 2004, the vowel akin to but more open than o, written with a dot above right, was not encoded. The usual workaround was to use the (stand-alone; spacing) character middle dot (U+00B7, ·) or less commonly the combining character dot above (U+0307). As these are far from ideal, since 1997 proposals have been submitted to the ISO/IEC working group in charge of ISO/IEC 10646 – namely, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 – to encode a new combining character dot above right. This is now officially assigned to U+0358 (see documents N1593, N2507, N2628, N2699, and N2713). Font support is expected to follow.

External links

Min Nan edition of Wikipedia

• 台語-華語線頂辭典, Taiwanese-Mandarin on-line dictionary
• 臺灣本土語言互譯及語音合成系統, Taiwanese-Hakka-Mandarin on-line conversion

See also

• Hakka language
• Languages of China
  • Languages of Taiwan
• Chinese in Singapore