Min Nan
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
| Min Nan / 闽南语 (Bân-lâm-gú) | |
|---|---|
| Spoken in: | People's Republic of China, Republic of China (Taiwan), Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, and other areas of Min Nan and Hoklo settlements around the world |
| Region: | Southern Fujian province; the Chaozhou-Shantou (Chaoshan) area and Leizhou Peninsula in Guangdong province; extreme south of Zhejiang province; most of Taiwan; much of Hainan (if Hainanese or Qiong Wen is included); |
| Total speakers: | 49 million |
| Ranking: | 21 (if Qiong Wen is included) |
| Genetic classification: | Sino-Tibetan |
| Official status | |
| Official language of: | none (legislative bills have been proposed to have Taiwanese be a 'national language' in the Republic of China but these are unlikely to pass) |
| Regulated by: | none (ROC Ministry of Education and some NGOs are influential in Taiwan) |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-1 | zh |
| ISO 639-2 | chi (B) / zho (T) |
| SIL | CFR |
| See also: Language – List of languages | |
Min Nan, Minnan, or Min-nan (Simplified Chinese: 闽南语; Traditional Chinese: 閩南語; pinyin: Mǐnnányǔ; POJ: Bân-lâm-gú; "Southern Min" or "Southern Fujian" language) or Hokkien is the Chinese language/dialect spoken in southern Fujian province, China and neighboring areas, and by descendants of emigrants from these areas in diaspora. Taiwanese is the Min Nan variant spoken on Taiwan. Teochew or Teochiu is also a prominent variant, especially among the ethnic Chinese of Southeast Asia, originating in the Chaoshan region of Guangdong province.
Min Nan (Southern Min) forms part of the Min language group, alongside its counterpart Northern Min (Min Bei). The Min languages/dialects are part of the Chinese language group, itself a member of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Min Nan is mutually intelligible with neither Northern Min, Cantonese, nor Mandarin, the official Chinese language, spoken (at least as a second language) by the majority of those in mainland China and Taiwan, as well as large numbers of overseas Chinese.
Min Nan is spoken in the southern part of the southeastern Chinese province of Fujian by the Hoklo as well as their descendants who emigrated from this province to Taiwan, Guangdong (to the Chaoshan region and the Leizhou peninsula), Hainan (where it is known as Qiong Wen), and to Zhejiang province, in two southern counties and the Zhoushan archipelago offshore Ningbo. In Taiwan, Min Nan also has the native name of Tâi-oân-oē or Hō-ló-oē. The (sub)ethnic group for which Min Nan is considered a native language is known as the Holo (Hō-ló) or Hoklo. The correspondence between language and ethnicity is not absolute, however, as some Hoklo have very limited proficiency in Min Nan while some ethnic Chinese of non-Hoklo origin speak Min Nan fluently.
There are many Min Nan speakers also among overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. Many ethnic Chinese emigrants to the region were Hoklo, and brought the language to what is now Indonesia (the former Netherlands East Indies) and present day Singapore and Malaysia (the former British Straits Settlements and Malaya). In the region it is commonly known as Hokkien or Hokkienese. Many Southeast Asian ethnic Chinese also originated in Chaozhou or the Chaoshan region and speak the Teochew variant of Min Nan. Min Nan is reportedly the native language of up to 98.5% of the community of ethnic Chinese in the Philippines, among whom it is also known as Lan-nang or Lán-lâng-oē ("Our people’s language").
As with other varieties of Chinese, there is significant dispute as to whether Min Nan is a language or a dialect. (See Is Chinese a Language or a Dialect? for greater detail.)
Contents |
Classification
Southern Fujian is home to three main dialect systems of Min Nan, known by the geographic locations to which they correspond:
As Xiamen (Amoy) is the principal city of southern Fujian, the Amoy dialect is considered the most important, or even prestige variant. Xiamen and the Amoy dialect have played an influential role in history, especially in the relations of Western nations with China, and was one of the most frequently learned of all Chinese languages/dialects by Westerners during the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century.
Outside Fujian, Min Nan exists in these major variants:
- Taiwanese or Taigu
- Hainanese or Qiong Wen (on Hainan province)
- Teochew or Chaozhou (from Chaozhou and the Chaoshan region, Guangdong province)
The variants spoken in Taiwan, though similar to the three Fujian variants and Teochew, are grouped separately, and collectively known as Taiwanese. Taiwanese is actively used by a large population and bears much importance from a socio-political perspective, forming the second (and perhaps today most significant) major pole of the language.
Teochew is of great importance in the Southeast Asian Chinese diaspora, particularly in Singapore (where Teochew people form a substantial part of the ethnic Chinese population), Vietnam, Thailand and other locations.
Among ethnic Chinese inhabitants of Penang, Malaysia, a distinct form, called Penang Hokkien, has developed.
Tones
Min Nan retains seven of the eight Middle Chinese tones, namely:
- 陰平 Yin-ping |44|
- 上聲 Shang-sheng |51|
- 陰去 Yin-qu |31|
- 陰入 Yin-ru |3|
- 陽平 Yang-ping |24|
- 陽去 Yang-qu |33|
- 陽入 Yang-ru |5|
The numbers given in | | are tone contours (in the Amoy sub-dialect), where 1 is the lowest and 5 is highest. Unlike some Chinese languages, such as Cantonese, all tones in Min Nan are subject to tone sandhi, that is, a given syllable’s tone changes when it appears in front of another syllable.
The tone system of the Teochew dialect is very different from that of other Min Nan variants. It retains eight Middle Chinese tones.
Scripts and orthographies
Like most ethnic Chinese, whether from mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, or other parts of Southeast Asia, when writing Chinese, Min Nan speakers use Chinese characters as in Standard Mandarin, although there are a number of special characters which are unique to Min Nan and sometimes used in informal writing (as is the case with Cantonese. Where standard Chinese characters are used, they are not always etymological or genetic; the borrowing of similar-sounding or similar-meaning characters is a common practice.
Romanization
Min Nan, in particular, Taiwanese, can be written with the Latin alphabet using an Romanized orthography called Pe̍h-oē-jī (POJ; meaning "vernacular writing"). POJ was developed first by Presbyterian missionaries and later by the indigenous Presbyterian Church in Taiwan; use of the orthography as been actively promoted since the late 19th century. The use of a mixed orthography of Han characters and romanization is also seen, though remains uncommon. Other Latin-based orthographies also exist.
Computing
The language Min-nan is registered per RFC 3066 as zh-min-nan [1]. Taiwanese can be represented as zh-min-nan-TW.
When writing Min Nan in Chinese characters, some writers create 'new' characters when they consider it is impossible to use directly or borrow existing ones; this corresponds to similar practices in character usage in Cantonese, Vietnamese chữ nôm, Korean hanja and Japanese kanji. These are usually not encoded in Unicode (or the corresponding ISO/IEC 10646: Universal Character Set), thus creating problems in computer processing.
All Latin characters required by Pe̍h-oē-jī can be represented using Unicode (or the corresponding ISO/IEC 10646: Universal character set), using precomposed or combining (diacritics) characters. Prior to June 2004, the vowel akin to but more open than o, written with a dot above right, was not encoded. The usual workaround was to use the (stand-alone; spacing) character middle dot (U+00B7, ·) or less commonly the combining character dot above (U+0307). As these are far from ideal, since 1997 proposals have been submitted to the ISO/IEC working group in charge of ISO/IEC 10646 – namely, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 – to encode a new combining character dot above right. This is now officially assigned to U+0358 (see documents N1593, N2507, N2628, N2699, and N2713). Font support is expected to follow.
External links
See also
| Chinese: spoken varieties | |
| Categories: |
Gan | Hakka | Hui | Jin | Mandarin | Min | Pinghua | Xiang | Wu | Yue |
| Subcategories of Min: | Min Bei | Min Dong | Min Nan | Min Zhong | Pu Xian | Qiong Wen | Shao Jiang |
| Note: The above is only one classification scheme among many. The categories in italics are not universally acknowledged to be independent categories. |
|
| Comprehensive list of Chinese dialects | |
| Official spoken varieties: | Standard Mandarin | Standard Cantonese |
| Historical phonology: | Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Proto-Min | Proto-Mandarin | Haner |
| Chinese: written varieties | |
| Official written varieties: | Classical Chinese | Vernacular Chinese |
| Other varieties: | Written Vernacular Cantonese |
