3 ms·

Calling Hokkien unwritten is a bit of a stretch. I grew up watching Hokkien shows from Taiwan, and the subtitles have always used plain chinese characters. I'm

Calling Hokkien unwritten is a bit of a stretch. I grew up watching Hokkien shows from Taiwan, and the subtitles have always used plain chinese characters. I'm not sure about Taiwan, but in Singapore and Malaysia, where the chinese community speaks a slightly different dialect, everybody can read using chinese characters just fine, even the elderly who can't really speak mandarin chinese.

danieltanfh95 4y ago
Journalists need to hype something up
larryliu 4y ago
Agree very much. Hokkien is 65 million people's language, more than Italy's population. There are Hokkien-speaking people in Hong Kong and China's Guangdong province. They write Hokkien in Chinese characters mixed with pinyin for these without a corresponding character.
amilios 4y ago
It's written, it just doesn't have a standardized written form, it's written informally in standard Chinese character but it's modified from the spoken form in order to conform better to standard Mandarin forms, AFAIK. From Wikipedia: "if "pure, unadulterated spoken vernacular Taiwanese" were written exclusively in Chinese characters, with minimal use of Mandarin phrases, over 25% of morphemes would have no character, about 25% would have arbitrarily selected (yet more or less conventionally accepted) characters that are homophones or near-homophones, 10% would be written using characters exclusive to Hokkien, and 40% would be written with characters that have the correct sound and meaning. However, in more colloquial styles of Taiwanese Hokkien, the proportion of morphemes written with conventionally accepted characters would drop even lower than 40%."
- noobermin 4y ago
  This might just be a difference between Taiwanese Hokkien and SG/Malaysia Hokkien. As with everything in Chinese dialects it varies from place to place, community to community, etc.
adastra22 4y ago
Except the language being written on the screen is written Chinese, based on Mandarin more than Hokkien. Or at least some sort of hybrid of the two. Calling languages like Hokkien “a slightly different dialect” is really underselling it. These are totally different languages, as divergent as German is from Portuguese.
canjobear 4y ago
There's also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pe%CC%8Dh-%C5%8De-j%C4%AB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pe%CC%8Dh-%C5%8De-j%C4%AB

danieltanfh95 4y ago

Journalists need to hype something up

larryliu 4y ago

Agree very much. Hokkien is 65 million people's language, more than Italy's population. There are Hokkien-speaking people in Hong Kong and China's Guangdong province. They write Hokkien in Chinese characters mixed with pinyin for these without a corresponding character.

amilios 4y ago

It's written, it just doesn't have a standardized written form, it's written informally in standard Chinese character but it's modified from the spoken form in order to conform better to standard Mandarin forms, AFAIK. From Wikipedia: "if "pure, unadulterated spoken vernacular Taiwanese" were written exclusively in Chinese characters, with minimal use of Mandarin phrases, over 25% of morphemes would have no character, about 25% would have arbitrarily selected (yet more or less conventionally accepted) characters that are homophones or near-homophones, 10% would be written using characters exclusive to Hokkien, and 40% would be written with characters that have the correct sound and meaning. However, in more colloquial styles of Taiwanese Hokkien, the proportion of morphemes written with conventionally accepted characters would drop even lower than 40%."

noobermin 4y ago
This might just be a difference between Taiwanese Hokkien and SG/Malaysia Hokkien. As with everything in Chinese dialects it varies from place to place, community to community, etc.

adastra22 4y ago

Except the language being written on the screen is written Chinese, based on Mandarin more than Hokkien. Or at least some sort of hybrid of the two. Calling languages like Hokkien “a slightly different dialect” is really underselling it. These are totally different languages, as divergent as German is from Portuguese.

canjobear 4y ago

There's also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pe%CC%8Dh-%C5%8De-j%C4%AB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pe%CC%8Dh-%C5%8De-j%C4%AB