Hokkien
dialect of Southern Min language originating in East Asia
Hokkien ( HOK-ee-en, US also HOH-kee-en) is a variety of Chinese from the Southern Min branch of the Sinitic languages, native to the Minnan region in the southern part of Fujian province in southeastern China, as well as the island of Taiwan. It is also referred to as Quanzhang, named after the prefecture-level cities of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou.
Taiwanese Hokkien is one of the national languages of Taiwan, and is also widely spoken within the overseas Chinese diaspora in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar, Hong Kong, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam, and elsewhere across the world. Mutual intelligibility between Hokkien dialects varies, but they are still held together by ethnolinguistic identity.
In maritime Southeast Asia, Hokkien historically served as the lingua franca amongst overseas Chinese communities of all dialectal subgroups due to the prominence of Hokkien sailors in the Nanyang maritime trade networks since the Ming dynasty, and it still remains as the most spoken variety of Chinese in the region today, including in Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, and Brunei. This applied to a lesser extent to mainland Southeast Asia. As a result of the significant influence and historical presence of its sizable overseas diaspora, certain considerable to ample amounts of Hokkien loanwords are also historically present in the languages it has had historical contact with in its sprachraum, such as nearby varieties of English, Tai languages, and other varieties of Chinese. Kelantan Peranakan Hokkien, in northern Malaya of Malaysia, and Hokaglish, spoken sporadically across the Philippines (especially Metro Manila), are also mixed languages, with Hokkien as the base lexifier.
Names
Hokkien speakers in different regions refer to the language as:
Bân-lâm-gú / Bân-lâm-gí / Bân-lâm-gír / Bân-lâm-ú (闽南语; 閩南語 'Southern Min language') in China, Taiwan, and Malaysia
Bân-lâm-ōe / Bân-lâm-ōa / Bîn-lâm-ōe (闽南话; 閩南話 'Southern Min speech') in China, Taiwan, Philippines, and Malaysia
Tâi-gí / Tâi-gú (臺語 'Taiwanese speech') or Ho̍h-ló-ōe / Hô-ló-ōe (福佬話 'Hoklo speech') in Taiwan
Lán-lâng-ōe / Lán-nâng-ōe / Nán-nâng-ōe (咱人話／咱儂話 'our people's speech') in the Philippines
Hok-kiàn-ōe / Hok-kiàn-ōa (福建話 'Hokkien language') in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, and the Philippines
In parts of Southeast Asia and in the English-speaking communities, the term Hokkien ([hɔk˥kiɛn˨˩]) is etymologically derived from the Hokkien pronunciation of Fujian (Hok-kiàn), the province from which the language hails. In Southeast Asia and the English press, Hokkien is used in common parlance to refer to the Southern Min dialects of southern Fujian, and does not include reference to dialects of other Sinitic branches also present in Fujian such as the Fuzhou language (Eastern Min), Pu-Xian Min, Northern Min, Gan Chinese or Hakka.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Hokkien” is dialect of Southern Min language originating in East Asia. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Hokkien, dialect and Southern, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hokkien” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.