Taiwan Language Information The question of Taiwan's linguistic situation can be a bit confusing to some travelers, foreigners and newcomers. Do they speak Chinese? Is it the same as Mandarin? Is Taiwanese different from Chinese? What about Hokkien? Hakka? Let's dive in. language in taiwan History of languages in Taiwan A bit of historical demography: Though it is a broadly-defined ethnic group, Han Chinese people make up 98% of the population of Taiwan. This is mostly due to centuries of migration from mainland China, which began in the 17th century. Surprisingly, that puts the indigenous population at only 2%. This is a bit misleading. Han Chinese includes within it many other ethnic and linguistic variations, the most prominent of which with regard to Taiwan being the Hakka and Fujianese. Read some facts about Mandarin Chinese. taiwanese language Now we're getting somewhere. The 17th century settlers of Taiwan belonged primarily to these two groups, and linguistically early Taiwan was a blend of indigenous languages, Hakka and Hokkien, the dialect belonging originally to southern Fujian Province just across the Taiwan Strait. Hokkien is colloquially referred to in English and Mandarin as "Taiwanese Language" (though not so in mainland China).

A collection of useful phrases in Taiwanese with Romanization and some recordings. The Romanization system used here is Pe̍h-ōe-jī. See the Taiwanese language page for more details. Click on any of the phrases that are links to hear them spoken. If you can provide recordings, corrections or additional translations, please contact me. To see these phrases in many other languages click on the English versions. If you'd like to see these phrases in any combination of two languages, try the Phrase Finder. Key to abbreviations: sg = said to one person, pl = said to more than one person.

Is Taiwanese a dialect or a language? That is a moot question. What we call Taiwanese is Hoklo or Amoy or Min Nan Yu (Ban Lam Wue), the mother tongue of about 80 percent of the people in the Republic of China on Taiwan. Hoklo, incidentally, means "men from Fukien or Fujian, with Hok representing Fu (Hoklo lacks the"f" sound but has a guttural stop at the end) and "lo" standing for lau (old as well as man). Amoy is used by Western missionaries to identify the language spoken in Singapore when Great Britain took possession of it. The ethnic Chinese in Singapore then came from Zhangzhou, with an "international seaport" at Amoy, which is now officially called Xiamen. Min Nan Yu means the language spoken in southern Fujian. Linguists cannot tell languages and dialects apart. Languages are dialects and vice versa. Generally, however, the academics consider a dialect is a variety of a language. Modern nationalism, as developed since the French Revolution, has made the distinction between language and dialect an issue of importance. A separate "language" is often seen as having a greater claim to being a separate "people" and thus to be more deserving of its own independent state, while a group speaking a "dialect" tends to be seen not as "a people" in its own right, but as a sub-group, which must content itself with regional autonomy. The distinction is therefore inevitably made at least as much on a political basis as on a linguistic one. It can lead to great political controversy, like the one at Guangzhou and Hong Kong where the people are demanding that Cantonese be used in TV broadcasts, particularly during the forthcoming Asian Games at the capital of the province of Guangdong.