Taiwanese Hokkien - Classification

Classification

Taiwanese Hokkien is a variant of Min Nan, closely related to the Amoy dialect. It is often seen as a Chinese dialect within the larger Sinitic language family. On the other hand, it may also be seen as an independent language since it is not mutually intelligible with Standard Chinese. As with most “language/dialect” distinctions, how one describes Taiwanese depends largely on one's personal views (see the article “varieties of Chinese”).

Some scholars claim Min is the only branch of Chinese that cannot be directly derived from Middle Chinese, whereas others argue that the Min Nan (or "Hokkien") language can trace its roots through the Tang Dynasty. Some Min Nan vocabulary is not derived from Chinese and does not have corresponding Chinese characters. This contributes to the mutual unintelligibility with spoken Mandarin or other Chinese dialects.

There is both a colloquial version and a literary version of Taiwanese Hokkien. Spoken Taiwanese Hokkien is almost identical to spoken Amoy Hokkien. Regional variations within Taiwanese may be traced back to Hokkien variants spoken in Southern Fujian (Quanzhou and Zhangzhou). Taiwanese Hokkien also contains loanwords from Japanese and the Formosan languages. Recent work by scholars such as Ekki Lu, Sakai Toru, and Lí Khîn-hoāⁿ (also known as Tavokan Khîn-hoāⁿ or Chin-An Li), based on former research by scholars such as Ông Io̍k-tek, has gone so far as to associate part of the basic vocabulary of the colloquial Taiwanese with the Austronesian and Tai language families; however, such claims are controversial.

The literary form of Minnan once flourished in Fujian and was brought to Taiwan by early emigrants. Tale of the Lychee Mirror (Nāi-kèng-kì), a manuscript for a series of plays published during the Ming Dynasty in 1566, is one of the earliest known works. This form of the language is now largely extinct. However, literary readings of the numbers are used in certain contexts such as reciting telephone numbers (see Literary and colloquial readings of Chinese characters).