Taiwanese Hokkien speakers can, however, easily communicate with Hokkien speakers in Fujian Province including those in Xiamen Amoy dialect , Quanzhou and Zhangzhou , as well as the many Hokkien speakers dispersed throughout Southeast Asia. After being repressed by the Japanese for 50 years, then by the KMT for another 50 years, it is hardly surprising that the practice of speaking Taiwanese has taken a real hit.
A shrinking number of people in Taiwan, mostly born before the s, still speak Taiwanese only. Younger people speak varying levels of Taiwanese, from fully fluent to only a small number of words and phrases. In this paper , Beaser argues that the revitalization of the language in the last few decades is just a short-term reaction to decades of marginalization, and that significant decline or even, in the worst case scenario, extinction of the language, is inevitable.
Yet Beaser also argues that the Taiwanese language may remain as a cultural legacy, but how much as a legacy depends of how hard the government strives to preserve it. One key to preserving the language is to developing a standardized script and inputting system for Taiwanese, in the same way that pinyin and zhuyin Bopomofo are used for writing Mandarin in China and Taiwan, respectively.
This comes with its own complications, though, and leads to the next series of questions. Here are some questions pertaining to the various writing systems for the languages of Taiwan. As I already mentioned above, one major difference between China and Taiwan is that Taiwan mainly uses traditional Chinese characters for writing Mandarin, while China uses simplified ones.
Taiwanese does not have a strong written tradition. What this means is that when a Hokkien speaker and Standard Chinese speaker look at the same character, they would simply pronounce it differently, but what they say carries the same meaning. It is more complicated than that, though. The Taiwan ministry of education currently publishes a list of around Chinese characters that are ideal for writing Taiwanese.
The transliteration of languages means the development of systems for writing them using other alphabets, most commonly the Roman Latin alphabet. This gets messy and complicated in Taiwan, not only because there are several different languages, but also because no one system has been universally adopted like pinyin in China. Anyone who learns Mandarin anywhere in the world including native Chinese speakers usually starts out by learning a system of phonetic symbols that represent the sounds of Chinese.
Several systems have been proposed and used over the decades for transliterating Mandarin Chinese. It is also the system most commonly preferred by non-native learners of Mandarin, as it is mostly intuitive and similar to English. Kids learn pinyin in kindergarten in China, and you can see pinyin alongside Chinese characters on signs across China.
Pinyin is also often used for typing Chinese characters on keyboards and phones in China. It often appears with accents over the vowels to indicate the four tones of Chinese.
Young kids begin formally learning Mandarin by memorizing this alphabet, and most adults use it to type Chinese characters on keyboards, the little symbols are written on the corner of the Latin alphabet keys. While some expats in Taiwan pick up zhuyin, a lot of them still prefer and use pinyin, which is also more common in language textbooks.
However, Bopomofo never appear on signs, websites, and so on, like pinyin does in China. Because Taiwan has sporadically used and at different points officially adopted a few other pinyin systems in the past notably Wade-Giles, Tongyong pinyin and Hanyu pinyin , words written using these systems do sometimes appear on public signs, often incorrectly, and the average Taiwanese person does not have a clear understanding of how to read or properly use them.
For many Taiwanese, though, it is simply a matter of habit, as they grew up learning Chinese with Bopomofo, and spelling their names using the Wade-Giles system this is why the same surname would be spelled Xu in China or Hsu in Taiwan. Learning a new system is annoying and few want to bother.
Also, most textbooks and online Chinese dictionaries use pinyin. For most of us, this preference has nothing to do with the politics of Taiwan and China.
Hakka, like Taiwanese, has roots in China and makes use of traditional Chinese characters. Hakka also has a Latin script developed by Western missionaries. The aboriginal people of Taiwan did not have writing systems.
Some missionaries developed Latin scripts for various Formosan aboriginal languages. In , the Taiwanese government developed an official alphabet for the 16 officially recognized aboriginal tribes of Taiwan. Several orthographies have been proposed for writing the Taiwanese language using the Roman alphabet. These are largely the domain of linguists and academics; none are well known or used by the general population in Taiwan.
The Taiwanese government has attempted to reconcile the differences between these systems under one common system, but it has yet to be universally adopted.
Hokkien and Hakka were the primary local languages displaced by Mandarin. Hokkien, known colloquially as Taiwanese, remains a very common language. Hakka Chinese is still spoken by a small population in Taiwan. The Hakka are an ethnic group within China in the same way Han Chinese are, and they have maintained their own language through the years. Slowly, Hakka is disappearing in Taiwan, supplanted by the twin threats of Mandarin and Taiwanese, however. The Japanese ruled Taiwan for several decades after China ceded the island to Japan in As a result, sustained efforts to introduce Japanese to the population continued until Today, there are still large numbers of older people in Taiwan who speak some amount of Japanese.
Mandarin is here to stay, and in fact many younger Taiwanese people, especially in Taipei, have a much better command of English than of Hakka or Taiwanese. As a final note, keep in mind that Hakka, Taiwanese and Mandarin all use the same writing script.
Taiwan uses traditional Chinese characters on everything. Yes and no. It depends where you go. It depends who you talk to. In the cities, more and more people speak English these days, especially the younger generation. Return from Taiwan Language to Taiwanese Culture. Taiwanese are influenced by standard Mandarin, native dialects and other languages.
Standard Mandarin is the language used in schools, which is mainly spoken by the Taiwanese under the age of Standard Mandarin is the most commonly used language in Taipei. Began in 17th century, people started to immigrate to Taiwan from the mainland China.
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