Another Taiwanese Tutorial/Introduction

Taiwanese (Tâi-gí), also known as "Taiwanese Hokkien" or "Taiwanese Min Nan" (Tâi-uân Bân-lâm-gí), is a Sinitic vernacular spoken in Taiwan that is considered to belongs to Hokkien, a language originated from Southern Fujian Province, China, linguistically. It is closed to Hokkien in Min Nan, Philippine, Malaysia, and Singapore, and even Teochewese in Guangdong Province and Southeast Asia. Like Hakka, the third biggest language in Taiwan and Mandarin which is the most widely spoken language in Taiwan, Taiwanese belongs to Sinitic languages. It is spoken on the coast side of Taiwan, especially on the plants in the west side widely after imported and developed in Taiwan for more than 300 years. It is the widely spoken language in Taiwan beside Standard Mandarin, which were not imported in Taiwan until 1945, but is the dominating language after the Mandarin-only policies executed under the martial-law period before.

Even though its status is being replaced with Mandarin, it is still the native language of most Taiwanese senior citizens and many middle adults and still has more than 10 million speakers. It also influences on Mandarin's Taiwanese dialect strongly, and the language revival movement including the flourising of literature work, podcasts, etc. continues. Hence, it's worth to learn for those who are interested in Taiwanese culture.

Spellings

Like American English, there are many accents in Taiwanese. Taiwanese phonological characteristics are derived from the Quanzhou (Tsuân-tsiu) and Zhangzhou (Tsiang-tsiu) (2 cities in Southern Fujian) vernaculars of Hokkien, and some dialects is similar to Quanzhou accent while others have more Zhangzhou's properties. Along with the unifying of accents, many people are spoken a so-called "Mainstream Accent" (Iu-sè-khiunn) which locates near the center of the accent spectrum. The accent shown below is from the IPA shown in the Taiwanese Min Nan Romanization (TL)'s Handbook published by the Ministry of Education in Taiwan.

vowels

monophthong

They are 6 monophthongs in Mainstream Taiwanese, while some accents have more, or have phonetic values different.

TL	English Approximation	IPA	Example	Explanation
a	"o" in "hot"	[a]	ta [ta˦˦]	dry
e	"ay" in "hay"	[e]	ke [ke˦˦]	chicken
i	"ey" in "key"	[i]	i [˦˦]	s/he
o	"a" in "about", just a schwa	[ə]	to [tə˦˦]	knife
oo	"or" in Received Pronunciation	[ɔ]	oo [˦˦]	dake
u	"o" in "who"	[u]	khu [kʰu˦˦]	district