Taiwanese, also known as Taigi, Hoklo, and Holo, among many other names, is the native language of about 70% of the population of Taiwan - the remainder speak Austronesian languages, Guóyǔ (the local name for Standard Chinese), or other Chinese languages like Hakka or Teochew. Taiwanese is a form of Hokkien, a widespread grouping of Southern Min dialects that is also the most common form of Chinese in Fujian province, in Hainan, and in Southeast Asia, as well as in the Chinese diaspora worldwide. Because of the popularity of Taiwanese Hokkien films, television, and music, Taiwanese is well-known outside of Taiwan, which is why I've chosen it as a representative of the Min languages, which have a total of about 75 million speakers.

Even though Fujian, along with Zhejiang and Guangdong, was among the last parts of China to be settled by the Han, the Min dialects are said to be among the most conservative, with features of Old Chinese that have been lost elsewhere. They're also among the most diverse, with very low mutual intelligibility. The mountainous geography and the ease of maritime contact have undoubtably contributed to this. Another point worth noting is that Min dialects have the biggest diglossia: the biggest difference between literary and colloquial language. Finally, Hokkien is the most endowed variety of Chinese, with about 800 syllables, not counting tones, and up to 2450 different syllables counting tones, many more than any other Chinese language. The charts below show the sounds of Taiwanese, but also include some sounds from other Hokkien dialects.

Phonetically, Taiwanese differs from Standard Chinese in several ways:

• Plosives and affricates make a three-way voicing distinction between voiced, tenuis, and aspirated.
• There are no retroflex sounds in Hokkien.
• While the Standard Chinese palatals are palatalized velars, the Hokkien palatals are palatalized alveolars.
• The Hokkien phoneme /l/ has a staggering variety of allophones, including [l] [ɾ] [d] [ɗ] [dz] and even [z]!
• There are only five vowels plus schwa, but they have both oral and nasal variants, and some have lax allophones.
• The "syllabic consonants" m ng can function as vowels following an initial.
• There are both rising and falling diphthongs, as well as triphthongs.
• There are nasal finals m n ng which become applosive p t k with a checked tone.
• There are seven tones plus no tone, plus a "ninth" tone with very restricted use.
• There is extensive tone sandhi: the tones change based on the context. Within a tone group as short as two syllables, every syllable except the last changes its tone!

Fortunately for Musa, all of these phonetic realizations are written: if ʦ is palatalized to ʨ before i, if u is laxed to ʊ before t, if tone 1 is pronounced as tone 7, we write all those changes - we write it as it's pronounced!

The charts below show the standard Tâi-lô romanization, the IPA transcription, and the Bopomofo for each Musa letter.

Initial Consonants

	Labial	Coronal	Hissing	Humming	Velar/Glottal
Nasal	 m [m] ㄇ	 n [n] ㄋ			 ng [ŋ] ㄫ
Voiced Plosive/ Affricate	 b [b] ㆠ	 d [d] ㄌ	 j [ʣ] ㆡ	 ji [ʥ] ㆢ	 g [g] ㆣ
Unvoiced Plosive/ Affricate	 p [p] ㄅ	 t [t] ㄉ	 ts [ʦ] ㄗ	 tsi [ʨ] ㄐ	 k [k] ㄍ
Aspirated Plosive/ Affricate	 ph [pʰ] ㄆ	 th [tʰ] ㄊ	 tsh [ʦʰ] ㄘ	 tshi [ʨʰ] ㄑ	 kh [kʰ] ㄎ
Unvoiced Fricative			 s [s] ㄙ	 si [ɕ] ㄒ	 h [h] ㄏ
Liquid		 l [l] ㄌ	 r [ɾ] ㄌ

Rimes

Everything after the initial consonant in a Chinese syllable is called the rime. In the case of Hokkien, that could include a vowel, a coda, and a tone. Only the vowel is mandatory.

We'll talk more about tones below, but I want to mention something unusual. In Standard Chinese and most other dialects, any syllable can have any tone. But in Hokkien, two of the seven tones are "entering tones" or "checked tones": they end in a glottal stop (written as -h in romanization), and that changes the rime. For example, when the simplest rime -a is given a checked tone, it would be pronounced with a final glottal stop and romanized -ah. These checked tones can also apply to syllables with diphthongs and/or nasal vowels, resulting in complicated rimes like -uãih, which has a medial, a nasal vowel, a diphthong offglide, and a glottal stop! When a syllable ending in -m -n -ng is given a checked tone, they become -p -t -k. For other checked rimes, we write the glottal stop as the coda.

The vowel may be a diphthong or even a triphthong. The diphthongs are easy to describe: they all begin with i or u, or end with i or u. In between, there may be another vowel, but the diphthongs iu and ui also occur. In Musa, we write i and u as semivowels y and w if they're not the main vowel.

Here are the vowels of Taiwanese:

 i [i] ㄧ		 u [u] ㄨ
 e [e] ㄝ	 o [ə] ㄜ	 oo [ɔ] ㄛ
	 a [a] ㄚ

The central vowel above is pronounced [ə] in the south, and [o] in the north, where we'd write it in Musa as .

All but the central vowel can also be nasalized:

 inn [ ĩ ] ㆪ		 unn [ ũ ] ㆫ
 enn [ ẽ ] ㆥ		 onn [ ɔ̃ ] ㆧ
	 ann [ ã ] ㆩ

Now we can write a chart with all the rimes of Taiwanese, bearing in mind that a checked tone would replace the final Break with a glottal suffix , or convert a final m n ng to p t k. I've also included some rimes from other Hokkien dialects, on gray. In this chart, I'm using a romanization with some IPA symbols, since Tâi-lô doesn't make all the distinctions that Musa does.

-	 i	 ɯ	 u	 e	 ə	 o	 ɛ	 ɔ	 a	 ai	 au
y-			 iu			 io		 iɔ	 ia		 iau
w-	 ui			 ue					 ua	 uai
-̃	 ĩ			 ẽ			 ɛ̃	 ɔ̃	 ã	 ãi	 ãu
y-̃			 iũ					 iɔ̃	 iã		 iãu
w-̃	 uĩ			 uẽ					 uã	 uãi
-m	 im				 əm			 ɔm	 am	 iam	 uam	 m
-n	 in	 ɯn	 un						 an	 ian	 uan
-ng	 ing	 ɯng				 iɔng		 ɔng	 ang	 iang	 uang	 ng
Checked tones
-	 ih	 ɯh	 uh	 eh	 əh	 oh	 ɛh	 ɔh	 ah
-p	 ip				 əp			 ɔp	 ap	 iap	 uap	 p
-t	 it	 ɯt	 ut						 at	 iat	 uat
-k	 ik	 ɯk				 iɔk		 ɔk	 ak	 iak	 uak	 k

Tones

The tones of Taiwanese aren't as clear as those of some other Chinese languages, even beyond the typical variation in the actual tone contours. As I mentioned above, the two "entering" tones are distinguished not by pitch but by the glottal stop at the end. Two of the other tones have merged for most speakers. And there's a special "ninth tone", as well as a neutral tone: both are used to mark particular syntactic structures.

The illustration above shows the five tone contours of Taiwanese. You can see that the light blue dotted line at right (tone 8) imitates the light blue solid line at left (tone 1) until it's interrupted by a glottal stop before finishing. We write them both with a Level accent below a high vowel, and in the case of tone 8, a final Glottal suffix  instead of a Break .

There are two falling tones: one that starts high (tones 2 and 6), and another that only starts mid-range (tone 3). We write tone 2 with a Falling accent below a high vowel, and tone 3 with a Falling accent above a low vowel. We use the same Falling accent above a low vowel but with a Glottal suffix to spell tone 4 (dotted yellow line - hard to see). Tones 4 and 8 are the checked tones.

Tone 5 is a rising tone, and we write it with a Rising accent below a high vowel. Tone 7 is a low level tone, and we write it with a Level accent above a low vowel. The neutral tone is written as a low vowel with no accent, and the "ninth tone" is written as a high vowel with no accent.

								
Tone 0	Tone 1	Tones 2 & 6	Tone 3	Tone 4	Tone 5	Tone 7	Tone 8	Tone 9

Writing Taiwanese in Hanzi

Theoretically, any Chinese language or dialect can be written in Hanzi characters - that's one of its big advantages. In practice, it doesn't always work that way.

For example, let's consider the phrase really tasty. In Guoyu, it's zhēn hǎo chī in Pinyin, written 真好吃 in Hanzi. In Taiwanese, it's tsin hó tsia̍h in Tai-lo, officially written 真好食 - Taiwanese uses "food" instead of "eat" for the last word. But in fact, that's not how Taiwanese people write it. They might write it 金賀甲, which means "gold congratulations first", or 金喝呷, which means "gold drink sip"!

What's going on? Well, 金賀甲 is pronounced jīn hè jiǎ in Guoyu, while 金喝呷 is pronounced jīn hē xiá. Those two sound like the Taiwanese tsin hó tsia̍h - the pronunciations are closer than the different romanizations would lead you to believe - even though their meanings have nothing to do with it, and people would understand what you meant, just as if someone wrote "won too free for" in English: those are correctly spelled words, but they're being used for their sounds, not their meanings. The meanings of these substitute characters aren't completely arbitrary: people try to choose words that resonate with the intended meaning, kind of adding an allusion via word play. But they also try to avoid words that are so well-known in Guoyu that it seems odd to pronounce them in Taiwanese: 好 hǎo / hó is an example.

What's more, they would write those phrases using Zhuyin, because that's what they're used to for writing Guoyu. There are Zhuyin extensions for Taiwanese, and there is an official romanization for Taiwanese, Tai-lo: the government even publishes a good Tai-lo→Taiwanese IME. But they're not used very much. Instead, people use their familiar Zhuyin→Guoyu IME, but they don't use it to write the same characters as they would in Guoyu: they use characters like the examples above that sound in Guoyu like their intended meaning in Taiwanese. Essentially, they are using Guoyu as a phonetic alphabet for Taiwanese! Complicated, and it only works because everyone is bilingual in Guoyu and Taigi.

Musa is much simpler :)

Gait

Taiwanese is written in Fangzi gait, with dots between words but not between syllables within a word. A medial i or u is written as a ligature with the initial. The vowel, tone, and coda are written as a block whose distribution depends on the tone. There's a full explanation on the Gaits page.

Samples



歡歡喜喜一工，煩煩惱惱也一工。



食人一口，報人一斗。



風雨起，乘風破浪，咱攏是無名的英雄。