Hokkien

The varieties of Hokkien in Southeast Asia originate from these dialects.

The Singaporeans, Southern Malaysians and people in Indonesia's Riau and surrounding islands variant is from the Quanzhou area. They speak a distinct form of Quanzhou Hokkien called Southern Peninsular Malaysian Hokkien (SPMH).

Among ethnic Chinese inhabitants of Penang, and other states in Northern Malaysia and Medan, with other areas in North Sumatra, Indonesia, a distinct form of Zhangzhou Hokkien has developed. In Penang, it is called Penang Hokkien while across the Malacca Strait in Medan, an almost identical variant is known as Medan Hokkien.

The Philippines variant is mostly from Quanzhou or Amoy (Xiamen), as most of their ancestors are from the aforementioned area.

During the Three Kingdoms period of ancient China, there was constant warfare occurring in the Central Plain of China. Northerners began to enter into Fujian region, causing the region to incorporate parts of northern Chinese dialects. However, the massive migration of northern Han Chinese into Fujian region mainly occurred after the Disaster of Yongjia. The Jìn court fled from the north to the south, causing large numbers of northern Han Chinese to move into Fujian region. They brought the Old Chinese spoken in the Central Plain of China from the prehistoric era to the 3rd century into Fujian. This then gradually evolved into the Quanzhou dialect.

In 677 (during the reign of Emperor Gaozong), Chen Zheng, together with his son Chen Yuanguang, led a military expedition to suppress a rebellion of the She people. In 885, (during the reign of Emperor Xizong of Tang), the two brothers Wang Chao and Wang Shenzhi, led a military expedition force to suppress the Huang Chao rebellion.[10] These two waves of migration from the north brought the language of northern Middle Chinese into the Fujian region. This then gradually evolved into the Zhangzhou dialect.

The Amoy dialect is the main dialect spoken in the Chinese city of Xiamen (formerly romanized and natively pronounced as "Amoy") and its surrounding regions of Tong'an and Xiang'an, both of which are now included in the greater Xiamen area. This dialect developed in the late Ming dynasty when Xiamen was increasingly taking over Quanzhou's position as the main port of trade in southeastern China. Quanzhou traders began traveling southwards to Xiamen to carry on their businesses while Zhangzhou peasants began traveling northwards to Xiamen in search of job opportunities. A need for a common language arose. The Quanzhou and Zhangzhou varieties are similar in many ways (as can be seen from the common place of Henan Luoyang where they originated), but due to differences in accents, communication can be a problem. Quanzhou businessmen considered their speech to be the prestige accent and considered Zhangzhou's to be a village dialect. Over the centuries, dialect leveling occurred and the two speeches mixed to produce the Amoy dialect.

Several playscripts survive from the late 16th century, written in a mixture of Quanzhou and Chaozhou dialects. The most important is the Romance of the Litchi Mirror, with extant manuscripts dating from 1566 and 1581.[11][12]

In the early 17th century, Spanish missionaries in the Philippines produced materials documenting the Hokkien varieties spoken by the Chinese trading community who had settled there in the late 16th century:[11][13]

• Diccionarium Sino-Hispanicum (1604), a Spanish-Hokkien dictionary, giving equivalent words, but not definitions.
• Doctrina Christiana en letra y lengua china (1607), a Hokkien translation of the Doctrina Christiana.[14][15]
• Bocabulario de la lengua sangleya (c. 1617), a Spanish-Hokkien dictionary, with definitions.
• Arte de la Lengua Chiõ Chiu (1620), a grammar written by a Spanish missionary in the Philippines.

These texts appear to record a Zhangzhou dialect, from the area of Haicheng (an old port that is now part of Longhai).[16]

Chinese scholars produced rhyme dictionaries describing Hokkien varieties at the beginning of the 19th century:[17]

• Huìyīn Miàowù (彙音妙悟 "Understanding of the collected sounds") was written around 1800 by Huang Qian (黃謙), and describes the Quanzhou dialect. The oldest extant edition dates from 1831.
• Huìjí yǎsútōng shíwǔyīn (彙集雅俗通十五音 "Compilation of the fifteen elegant and vulgar sounds") by Xie Xiulan (謝秀嵐) describes the Zhangzhou dialect. The oldest extant edition dates from 1818.

Walter Henry Medhurst based his 1832 dictionary on the latter work.

Unlike Mandarin, Hokkien retains all the final consonants corresponding to those of Middle Chinese. While Mandarin only preserves the n and ŋ finals, Southern Min also preserves the m, p, t and k finals and developed the ʔ (glottal stop).

The vowels of Hokkien are listed below:[19]

(*)Only certain dialects

• Oral vowel sounds are realized as nasal sounds when preceding a nasal consonant.
• [õ] only occurs within triphthongs as [õãĩ].

The following table illustrates some of the more commonly seen vowel shifts. Characters with the same vowel are shown in parentheses.

Southern Min has aspirated, unaspirated as well as voiced consonant initials. For example, the word khui (開; "open") and kuiⁿ (關; "close") have the same vowel but differ only by aspiration of the initial and nasality of the vowel. In addition, Southern Min has labial initial consonants such as m in m̄-sī (毋是; "is not").

Another example is da-po͘-kiáⁿ (查埔囝; "boy") and cha-bó͘-kiáⁿ (查某囝; "girl"), which differ in the second syllable in consonant voicing and in tone.

• Nasal consonants mostly occur word-initially.[21]
• Approximant sounds [w] [j], only occur word-medially, and are also realized as laryngealized [w̰] [j̰], within a few medial and terminal environments.[22]

In general, Hokkien dialects have 5 to 8 phonemic tones. Four tones can be noted as /v́ v̀ v̂ v̄/. According to the traditional Chinese system, however, there are 7 to 9 tones if the two additional entering tones (see the discussion on Chinese tone). Tone sandhi is extensive.[23] There are minor variations between the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou tone systems. Taiwanese tones follow the patterns of Amoy or Quanzhou, depending on the area of Taiwan. Many dialects have an additional phonemic tone ("tone 9" according to the traditional reckoning), used only in special or foreign loan words.[24]

The Quanzhou dialect, Xiamen dialect, Zhangzhou dialect and Taiwanese are generally mutually intelligible.[27] The overseas varieties such as Penang Hokkien and Singaporean Hokkien are slightly less intelligible to speakers of mainland Min Nan and Taiwanese dialects due to the existence of foreign loanwords.

Although the Min Nan varieties of Teochew and Amoy are 84% phonetically similar including the pronunciations of un-used Chinese characters as well as same characters used for different meanings, and 34% lexically similar,, Teochew has only 51% intelligibility with the Tong'an Xiamen dialect of the Hokkien language (Cheng 1997) whereas Mandarin and Amoy Min Nan are 62% phonetically similar and 15% lexically similar. In comparison, German and English are 60% lexically similar.[28]

Hainanese, which is sometimes considered Southern Min, has almost no mutual intelligibility with any form of Hokkien.[27]

Hokkien dialects differ in their preferred choice of pronouns. For instance, while the second person pronoun lí (汝) is standard in Taiwanese Hokkien, the Teochew loanword lú (汝) is more common among Hokkien-speaking communities in Southeast Asia. The plural personal pronouns tend to be nasalized forms of the singular ones. Personal pronouns found in the Hokkien dialects are listed below:

¹ Inclusive

² Exclusive

³ 儂 (-lâng) is typically suffixed in Southeast Asian Hokkien dialects

Possessive pronouns are marked by the particle ê (的), or its literary version chi (之). Plural pronouns are typically unmarked (the nasalized final serves as the possessive indicator):[32]

阮(gún) 翁(ang) 姓(sìⁿ) 陳(Tân)。

"My husband's surname is Tan."

Reflexive pronouns are made by appending the pronouns ka-kī (家己) or chū-kí (自己).

Hokkien dialects use a variety of differing demonstrative pronouns, which are as follows:

• this - che (這, 即), chit-ê (即個)
• that - he (許, 彼), hit-ê (彼個)
• here - chiâ (遮), chit-tau (即兜)
• there - hiâ (遐), hit-tau (彼兜)

The interrogative pronouns are:

• what - siáⁿ-mih (啥物), sīm-mi̍h (甚麼)
• when - tī-sî (底時), kuí-sî (幾時), tang-sî (當時), sīm-mi̍h-sî-chūn (甚麼時陣)
• where - to-lo̍h (倒落), tó-uī (倒位)
• who - siáⁿ-lâng (啥人) or siáⁿ (啥)
• why - ūi-siáⁿ-mih (為啥物), ūi-sīm-mi̍h (為甚物), án-chóaⁿ (按怎), khah (盍)
• how - án-chóaⁿ (按怎) lû-hô (如何) cháiⁿ-iūⁿ (怎樣)

States and qualities are generally expressed using stative verbs that do not require the verb "to be":

我(goá) 腹肚(pak-tó͘) 枵(iau)。

"I am hungry." (lit. I-stomach-hungry)

With noun complements, the verb sī (是) serves as the verb "to be".

昨昏(cha-hng) 是(sī) 八月節(poeh-ge'h-chueh)。

"Yesterday was the Mid-Autumn festival."

To indicate location, the words tī (佇) tiàm (踮), leh (咧), which are collectively known as the locatives or sometimes coverbs in Chinese linguistics, are used to express "(to be) at":

我(goá) 踮(tiàm) 遮(chia) 等(tán) 汝(lí)。

"I am here waiting for you."

伊(i) 這摆(chit-mái) 佇(tī) 厝(chhù) 裡(lāi) 咧(leh) 睏(khùn)。

"He's sleeping at home now."

Hokkien dialects have a variety of negation particles that are prefixed or affixed to the verbs they modify. There are five primary negation particles in Hokkien dialects:

1. m̄ (毋, 呣, 唔)
2. bē, bōe (袂, 未)
3. mài (莫, 勿)
4. bô (無)
5. put (不) - literary

Other negative particles include:

1. biàu (嫑) - a contraction of bô iàu (無要), as in biàu-kín (嫑緊)
2. bàng (甭)
3. bián (免)
4. thài (汰)

The particles m̄ (毋, 呣, 唔) is general and can negate almost any verb:

伊(i) 毋(m̄) 捌(bat) 字(jī)。

"He cannot read." (lit. he-not-know-word)

The particle mài (莫, 勿), a concatenation of m-ài (毋愛) is used to negate imperative commands:

莫(mài) 講(kóng)!

"Don't speak!"

The particle bô (無) indicates the past tense:

伊(i) 無(bô) 食(chia̍h)。

"He did not eat."

The verb 'to have', ū (有) is replaced by bô (無) when negated (not 無有):

伊(i) 無(bô) 錢(chîⁿ)。

"He does not have any money."

The particle put (不) is used infrequently, mostly found in literary compounds and phrases:

伊(i) 真(chin) 不孝(put-hàu)。

"He is truly unfilial."

The existence of literary and colloquial readings is a prominent feature of some Hokkien dialects and indeed in many Sinitic varieties in the south. The bulk of literary readings (文讀, bûn-tha̍k), based on pronunciations of the vernacular during the Tang Dynasty, are mainly used in formal phrases and written language (e.g. philosophical concepts, given names, and some place names), while the colloquial (or vernacular) ones (白讀, pe̍h-tha̍k) are usually used in spoken language, vulgar phrases and surnames. Literary readings are more similar to the pronunciations of the Tang standard of Middle Chinese than their colloquial equivalents.

The pronounced divergence between literary and colloquial pronunciations found in Hokkien dialects is attributed to the presence of several strata in the Min lexicon. The earliest, colloquial stratum is traced to the Han dynasty (206 BCE - 220 CE); the second colloquial one comes from the period of the Southern and Northern Dynasties (420 - 589 CE); the third stratum of pronunciations (typically literary ones) comes from the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE) and is based on the prestige dialect of Chang'an (modern day Xi'an), its capital.[34]

Some commonly seen sound correspondences (colloquial → literary) are as follows:

• p- ([p-], [pʰ-]) → h ([h-])
• ch-, chh- ([ts-], [tsʰ-], [tɕ-], [tɕʰ-]) → s ([s-], [ɕ-])
• k-, kh- ([k-], [kʰ-]) → ch ([tɕ-], [tɕʰ-])
• -ⁿ ([-ã], [-uã]) → n ([-an])
• -h ([-ʔ]) → t ([-t])
• i ([-i]) → e ([-e])
• e ([-e]) → a ([-a])
• ia ([-ia]) → i ([-i])

This table displays some widely used characters in Hokkien that have both literary and colloquial readings:[35][36]

This feature extends to Chinese numerals, which have both literary and colloquial readings.[36] Literary readings are typically used when the numerals are read out loud (e.g. phone numbers), while colloquial readings are used for counting items.

Quite a few words from the variety of Old Chinese spoken in the state of Wu, where the ancestral language of Min and Wu dialect families originated, and later words from Middle Chinese as well, have retained the original meanings in Hokkien, while many of their counterparts in Mandarin Chinese have either fallen out of daily use, have been substituted with other words (some of which are borrowed from other languages while others are new developments), or have developed newer meanings. The same may be said of Hokkien as well, since some lexical meaning evolved in step with Mandarin while others are wholly innovative developments.

This table shows some Hokkien dialect words from Classical Chinese, as contrasted to the written Chinese standard, Mandarin:

For other words, the classical Chinese meanings of certain words, which are retained in Hokkien dialects, have evolved or deviated significantly in other Chinese dialects. The following table shows some words that are both used in both Hokkien dialects and Mandarin Chinese, while the meanings in Mandarin Chinese have been modified:

Some commonly used words, shared by all Min Chinese dialects, came from the ancient Minyue languages. Jerry Norman suggested that these languages were Austroasiatic. Some terms are thought be cognates with words in Tai Kadai and Austronesian languages. They include the following examples, compared to the Fuzhou dialect, a Min Dong language:

Loanwords are not unusual among Hokkien dialects, as speakers readily adopted indigenous terms of the languages they came in contact with. As a result, there is a plethora of loanwords that are not mutually comprehensible among Hokkien dialects.

Taiwanese Hokkien, as a result of linguistic contact with Japanese[37] and Formosan languages, contains many loanwords from these languages. Many words have also been formed as calques from Mandarin, and speakers will often directly use Mandarin vocabulary through codeswitching. Among these include the following examples:

• 'toilet' - piān-só͘ (便所) from Japanese benjo (便所)

  Other Hokkien variants: 屎礐 (sái-ha̍k), 廁所 (chhek-só͘)

• 'car' - chū-tōng-chhia (自動車) from Japanese jidōsha (自動車)

  Other Hokkien variants: 風車 (hong-chhia), 汽車 (khì-chhia)

• 'to admire' - kám-sim (Chinese: 感心) from Japanese kanshin (感心)

  Other Hokkien variants: 感動 (kám-tōng)

• 'fruit' - chúi-ké / chúi-kóe / chúi-kér (水果) from Mandarin (水果; shuǐguǒ)

  Other Hokkien variants: 果子 (ké-chí / kóe-chí / kér-chí)

Singaporean Hokkien, Penang Hokkien and other Malaysian Hokkien dialects tend to draw loanwords from Malay, English as well as other Chinese dialects, primarily Teochew. Examples include:

• 'but' - tapi, from Malay

  Other Hokkien variants: 但是 (tān-sī)

• 'doctor' - 老君 lu-gun, from Malay dukun

  Other Hokkien variants: 醫生(i-sing)

• 'stone/rock' - batu, from Malay batu

  Other Hokkien variants: 石头(tsio-tau)

• 'market' - 巴剎 pa-sat, from Malay pasar from Persian bazaar (بازار)[38]

  Other Hokkien variants: 市場 (chhī-tiûⁿ)

• 'they' - 伊儂 i lâng from Teochew (i1 nang5)

  Other Hokkien variants: 𪜶 (in)

• 'together' - 做瓠 chò-bú from Teochew 做瓠 (jo3 bu5)

  Other Hokkien variants: 做夥 (chò-hóe), 同齊 (tâng-chê) or 鬥陣 (tàu-tīn)

• 茶箍 (Sap-bûn) from Malay sabun from Arabic ṣābūn (صابون).[38][39][40]

Philippine Hokkien dialects, as a result of centuries-old contact with both Philippine language and Spanish also incorporate words from these languages. Examples include:

• 'cup' - ba-su, from Spanish vaso and Tagalog baso

  Other Hokkien variants: 杯子 (poe-á)

• 'office' - o-pi-sin, from Spanish oficina and Tagalog opisina

  Other Hokkien variants: 辦公室 (pān-kong-sek)

• 'soap' - sa-bun, from Spanish jabon and Tagalog sabon

  Other Hokkien variants:

• 'but' - ka-so, from Tagalog kaso

  Other Hokkien variants: 但是 (tan-si)

  (em-ko)

Hokkien dialects are typically written using Chinese characters (漢字, Hàn-jī). However, the written script was and remains adapted to the literary form, which is based on classical Chinese, not the vernacular and spoken form. Furthermore, the character inventory used for Mandarin (standard written Chinese) does not correspond to Hokkien words, and there are a large number of informal characters (替字, thè-jī or thòe-jī; 'substitute characters') which are unique to Hokkien (as is the case with Cantonese). For instance, about 20 to 25% of Taiwanese morphemes lack an appropriate or standard Chinese character.[35]

While most Hokkien morphemes have standard designated characters, they are not always etymological or phono-semantic. Similar-sounding, similar-meaning or rare characters are commonly borrowed or substituted to represent a particular morpheme. Examples include "beautiful" (美 bí is the literary form), whose vernacular morpheme suí is represented by characters like 媠 (an obsolete character), 婎 (a vernacular reading of this character) and even 水 (transliteration of the sound suí), or "tall" (高 ko is the literary form), whose morpheme kôan is 懸.[44] Common grammatical particles are not exempt; the negation particle m̄ (not) is variously represented by 毋, 呣 or 唔, among others. In other cases, characters are invented to represent a particular morpheme (a common example is the character 𪜶 in, which represents the personal pronoun "they"). In addition, some characters have multiple and unrelated pronunciations, adapted to represent Hokkien words. For example, the Hokkien word bah ("meat") has been reduced to the character 肉, which has etymologically unrelated colloquial and literary readings (he̍k and jio̍k, respectively).[45][46] Another case is the word 'to eat,' chia̍h, which is often transcribed in Taiwanese newspapers and media as 呷 (a Mandarin transliteration, xiā, to approximate the Hokkien term), even though its recommended character in dictionaries is 食.[47]

Moreover, unlike Cantonese, Hokkien does not have a universally accepted standardized character set. Thus, there is some variation in the characters used to express certain words and characters can be ambiguous in meaning. In 2007, the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China formulated and released a standard character set to overcome these difficulties.[48] These standard Chinese characters for writing Taiwanese Hokkien are now taught in schools in Taiwan.

Hokkien, especially Taiwanese Hokkien, is sometimes written in the Latin script using one of several alphabets. Of these the most popular is POJ, developed first by Presbyterian missionaries in China and later by the indigenous Presbyterian Church in Taiwan. Use of this script and orthography has been actively promoted since the late 19th century. The use of a mixed script of Han characters and Latin letters is also seen, though remains uncommon. Other Latin-based alphabets also exist.

Min Nan texts, all Hokkien, can be dated back to the 16th century. One example is the Doctrina Christiana en letra y lengua china, presumably written after 1587 by the Spanish Dominicans in the Philippines. Another is a Ming Dynasty script of a play called Tale of the Lychee Mirror (1566), supposedly the earliest Southern Min colloquial text, although it is written in Teochew dialect.

Taiwan has developed a Latin alphabet for Taiwanese Hokkien, derived from POJ, known as Tai-lo. Since 2006, it has been officially promoted by Taiwan's Ministry of Education and taught in Taiwanese schools. Xiamen University has also developed an alphabet based on Pinyin called Bbánlám pìngyīm.

The character for the third person pronoun (they) in some Hokkien dialects, 𪜶 (in), is now supported by the Unicode Standard at U+2A736.

Hokkien is registered as "Southern Min" per RFC 3066 as zh-min-nan.[49]

When writing Hokkien in Chinese characters, some writers create 'new' characters when they consider it 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. Some of these are 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-ōe-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 Interpunct (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).