Southern Min

About Southern Min

Minnan (/ Bân-lâm-ōe) is the main language of Southern Fujian and has spread from there to other areas. It is known by several different names: in mainland China, it is Minnan hua (South Fujian speech), in Taiwan, Taiwanese (or Tâi-gí), in most of Southeast Asia, Hokkien or Hokkian from the Minnan word for Fuijan, and in the Philippines, the overseas Chinese call it "Our People's Language" (/ Lán-lâng-ōe). Manila, Medan and Penang are examples of Southeast Asian cities with large and influential Hokkien-speaking communities, such that most ethnic Chinese (and a good number of non-Chinese) can converse in Hokkien regardless of their native language/dialect. It is one of the official languages of Taiwan.

Each of the major cities of Fujian's Minnan-speaking areas — Xiamen, Quanzhou and Zhangzhou — as well as each part of Taiwan and each overseas region where the language is spoken has its own slightly different variant. The overseas variants are influenced by other local languages; Taiwanese has some Japanese loanwords, Hokkien has some from Indonesian and Javanese, Teochew and Cantonese, and so on. All these variants, however, are mutually intelligible to a great extent. The prestige dialect of Minnan is the Xiamen dialect in mainland China, and the Tainan dialect in Taiwan.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Photography via Wikimedia Commons.