What is Taiwanese?
As part of my return to posting on this blog, I want to start posting a bit more about Taiwanese! It's not really a language I've seen discussed much on langblr blogs, so I'm going to start with some basics.
Where is Taiwanese spoken?
Unsurprisingly, Taiwan! It's most commonly spoken in the central and southern parts of Taiwan, and less commonly spoken in the northern and eastern parts, but you can hear it spoken pretty much anywhere.
What else is Taiwanese called?
台語 tâi-gí and 台灣話 tâi-uân-uē "Taiwanese" are the most common names colloquially. Officially, (台灣)閩南語 (tâi-uân) bân-lâm-gí "Taiwanese Southern Min" is used as the name of the language. You'll also occasionally see terms like 福建 hok-kiàn or 福佬 hô-ló used. I've given the transcriptions of these terms in Taiwanese, but the same terms are used with their Mandarin pronunciations in Mandarin.
Where does Taiwanese come from?
Taiwanese is a member of the Southern Min branch of the Sinitic language family. During the late Ming and Qing dynasties, Han settlers came over from the Fujian province of China, especially the Zhangzhou and Quanzhou areas, and brought their own languages with them. For a while, there was conflict between Zhangzhou and Quanzhou speakers, but eventually the two varieties coalesced into one language, with dialectal differences causing some dialects to be closer to one or the other. This means that Taiwanese is mutually intelligible with Xiamen/Amoy and Zhangzhou Southern Min, and related to other varieties of Southern Min, also called Hokkien, spoken in China and Southeast Asia. Taiwanese also has loanwords from Japanese due to the island's having undergone 50 years of Japanese colonization, and younger people's Taiwanese has also been influenced by Mandarin.
Is Taiwanese a language or a dialect?
Though some people will refer to Taiwanese as a dialect, it's generally an argument based in a denigration of the language and not really defensible on linguistic or social grounds. I've come to believe that the distinction between language and dialect is mostly social, with some influence from factors such as mutual intelligibility. Taiwanese is treated as a language by the Taiwanese government and taught as a language in public schools. Taiwanese is also not mutually intelligible with Mandarin or other languages outside of the Southern Min family. Some people point to the mutual intelligibility of Chinese characters as evidence that all Sinitic languages are in fact dialects, but even that doesn't hold-- Taiwanese is frequently written in romanization, and even when it isn't, there are plenty of sentences that would be pretty much unintelligible to a Mandarin speaker. For example, the Mandarin sentences 那個女人很美 ("that woman is beautiful") could theoretically be read aloud with Taiwanese pronunciation, but the more natural way to translate and write that sentence is 彼个查某真媠, which is very hard to parse in Mandarin.
How many people speak Taiwanese?
This is a shockingly hard question to answer! Taiwanese is often considered endangered, though it is in a much more stable position than languages such as Hakka and Taiwanese indigenous languages. One common estimate is that 70% of people in Taiwan speak Taiwanese. The 2020 census listed Taiwanese as the primary language of 32% Taiwan's population and the secondary language of 54% of Taiwan's population. This would add up to over 80%, which may seem high, but many people are partial or non-fluent speakers of Taiwanese.
What are the dialects of Taiwanese?
The prestige dialect of Taiwanese is the variety spoken in Kaohsiung and Tainan, which has a mixture of Zhangzhou and Quanzhou features. The Taiwanese spoken in coastal Taiwan, Penghu and Taipei tends to have more Quanzhou features, while the Taiwanese spoken in inland central Taiwan and Yilan tends to have more Zhangzhou features. However, Taiwanese dialectology is complicated, and some people have argued for other forms of classification. The Southern and Taipei dialects are going to be most relevant and salient to most learners.
Why should I learn Taiwanese?
Taiwanese is definitely worth learning if you're planning to spend a significant amount of time in Taiwan, especially central/southern or rural Taiwan. In my experience, I almost never needed Taiwanese to get around in Taiwan, but studying even just a little helped me form relationships with the people around me. Taiwanese has impacted the way that people in Taiwan speak Mandarin, and is commonly seen in culture and politics. Taiwanese-language culture includes traditional art forms like 布袋戲 pòo-tē-hì puppet theater or 歌仔戲 kua-á-hì opera, and modern music, literature and entertainment.
What resources are available for learning Taiwanese?
At some point, I'll make a full post about resources for Taiwanese. But for now, I'll mention that Bite-Size Taiwanese makes some easily accessible resources. There are textbooks out there in both English and Mandarin, as well as books in/about Taiwanese that can be purchased from books.com.tw and shipped internationally. Most language learning apps don't have Taiwanese, but glossika does. Unfortunately, most of these materials assume some knowledge of (but not necessarily total fluency in) Mandarin. There are also podcasts, youtube videos, music, tv/movies, literature, and more materials made for native speakers of Taiwanese that can serve as learning materials.
