My wife grew up speaking Taiwanese (Taiwan dialect of southern Min Chinese language) at home, and then attended school entirely in the medium of Mandarin. She s

My wife grew up speaking Taiwanese (Taiwan dialect of southern Min Chinese language) at home, and then attended school entirely in the medium of Mandarin. She says that school pupils used to be fined for speaking Taiwanese in class. The pupils responded by learning sentences that sounded like legitimate Mandarin sentences, but were actually sound-alikes for sentences that made crude insults in Taiwanese. The last time we lived in Taiwan (1998-2001), the government had relaxed its former stringent prohibitions on public use of Taiwanese, and we would see handwritten signs in Chinese characters in markets with obviously Taiwanese vocabulary and phrasing. Similarly, when I have traveled to Hong Kong, I have seen printed official signs that are quite baffling to someone who has only studied standard modern written Chinese, but are perfectly understandable to readers who know how Cantonese is written in Chinese characters.