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: See alternative meanings for other possible definitions.
Taiwanese (Tâi-oân-oe or Ho-ló-oe; Chinese: 台語 or 台灣話; Hanyu Pinyin: Táiyǔ or Táiwānhuà) is a language spoken fluently by about 60% of the population of Taiwan. The subethnic group in Taiwan for which Taiwanese is considered a native language is known as Holo (Ho-ló) or Hoklo, although the correspondence between language and ethnicity is not total, as some Holo speak Taiwanese badly while some non-Holo speak Taiwanese fluently.
1 Classification
Taiwanese is the variant of Min-nan which is spoken in Taiwan. Taiwanese is often seen as a Chinese dialect within a larger Chinese language. On the other hand, it may also be seen as a languageAs with any complex, emergent concept, language is somewhat resistant to definition; however, most would agree that language is a system of communication or reasoning using representation along with metaphor and some manner of logical grammar. Many langua in the Sino-Tibetan family. As with most "language or dialect?" distinctions, how one describes Taiwanese depends largely on one's political views (see ). In any case, the classification may be represented hierarchically as:
- Sino-Tibetan ⊃ Chinese ⊃ Min (Fujian) ⊃ Min-nan (southern Fujian) ⊃ Taiwanese
Taiwanese is similar to the speech of the southern part of Fujian because most Taiwanese have ancestors who migrated from there in the 17th to 19th centuries. As a branch of Min-nan, there are both a colloquial version and a literary version of Taiwanese. The literary version, which was originally developed in the 10th century in Fujian and based on Middle Chinese, was brought to Taiwan by the migrants. Literary Taiwanese was used at one time for formal writing, but is now largely extinct.
Recent work by scholars such as Ekki Lu, Sakai Toru, and Lí Khîn-hoāⁿ (of Harvard University; also known as Tavokan Khîn-hoāⁿ or Chin-An Li), based on former research by scholars such as Ông Io̍k-tek, has gone so far as to associate part of the deep structure (see Noam Chomsky) and basic vocabulary of the colloquial language with the Austronesian and Tai language families; however, such claims are not without controversy.
