Min has greater dialectal diversity than any other division of Chinese. It is typically divided, on the basis of mutual intelligibility, into five to nine languages, such as Min Dong (Eastern Min) and Min Nan (Southern Min). Min Dong is centered around the city of Fuzhou (Fuzhou dialect is the standard dialect of Min Dong), capital of Fujian province, while Min Nan is dominant in the south of Fujian and into Guangdong. Qiongwen, spoken in Hainan, is sometimes classed as a separate language, but it is in fact a dialect 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 and Taiwan, with Teochew also being an important variety.
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.
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,[3] 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, as well as a substantial number of loan words from Japanese. In Singapore and Malaysia, the Min variants spoken have borrowed heavily from Malay and to a lesser extent, from English and other languages.
Some Min speakers use the Church Romanization (Chinese: 教會羅馬字; pinyin: Jiaohui Luomazi). 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.
References
^The double ii represents the dipping tone in Mandarin, as in the province of Shaanxi.
Branner, David Prager (2000). Problems in Comparative Chinese Dialectology — the Classification of Miin and Hakka. Trends in Linguistics series, no. 123. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN31-101-5831-0.
