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Min (linguistics)

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Min (POJ: Bân hong-giân; BUC: Mìng huŏng-ngiòng) is a general term for a group of dialects of the Chinese language spoken in the southeastern Chinese province of Fujian as well as by migrants from this province in Guangdong (around Chaozhou-Swatou, or Chaoshan area, and the Leizhou peninsula), Hainan, three counties in southern Zhejiang, and Zhoushan archipelago off Ningbo, and Taiwan. There are many Min speakers also among overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia.

Min is typically divided, on the basis of mutual unintelligibility, into Min Dong (Eastern Min), Min Nan (southern Min), and other sub-groups. Min Dong is centered around the city of Fuzhou, capital of Fujian province, while Min Nan is dominant in most other locations. Qiong Wen, spoken in Hainan, is sometimes classed as a separate sub-group, but often viewed as part of Min Nan. Min Nan is also called by the name of its regional variants in the places it is spoken, especially Taiwanese. The Amoy dialect of Xiamen is the prestige dialect of Min Nan in mainland China, with Teochew also being an important sub-variant. Teochew has low intelligibility with other Minnan dialects, having fewer words in common with them than German has with English.

More complex division is suggested by SIL: Northern Min (Min-Bei, around Jian'ou in Fujian), Central Min (Min-Zhong, around Shaxian, Sanming), Eastern Min (Min-Dong in Fuzhou and Fu'an), Xinghua (in Puxian and Xianyou counties) and Southern Min (Min-Nan, in Zhangzhou, Quanzhou, Xiamen). Southern Min is also spoken by Fujian or Hoklo people who have settled in Guangdong, Taiwan, Hainan, etc.

The Southern Min language in Guangdong is known as Hoklo, in Hainan as Qiong Wen or Qiongzhou hua (though some class Qiong Wen as a separate sub-group). Min Nan is the dominant Chinese dialect spoken by the Chinese minority in the Philippines, where it is known as Lan-nang. In Taiwan, Minnan is known as Hō-ló-oē and is spoken by the majority of the population as their native language. In Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and other areas in Southeast Asia, Minnan is known as Hokkien, in addition to the Teochew variant, originating in the Chaoshan region, which is the ancestral home of many ethnic Chinese in Singapore.

Writing system

When using Chinese characters to write Min, the writing system is largely identical to that of Standard Mandarin, with the addition of some specialized characters. Given that Min is the only branch of Chinese that cannot be directly derived from Middle Chinese, one may have trouble finding the appropriate Chinese characters for some Min vocabulary. In the case of Taiwanese, there are also indigenous words loaned from the Taiwanese aborigines.

Some Min speakers use the Church Romanization (). For Min Nan the romanization is called Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ) and for Min Dong called Bàng-uâ-cê (BUC). Both systems were created by foreign missionaries in the 19th century (see Min Nan and Min Dong Wikipedia). There are some uncommon publications in mixed writing, using mostly Chinese characters but using the Latin alphabet to represent words that cannot easily be represented by Chinese characters.

Further reading

ru: Миньские языки

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Last updated on Saturday February 09, 2008 at 08:27:45 PST (GMT -0800)
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