Native Taiwanese and many others also speak a variant of Min Nan generally known as . Recently there has been a growing use of Taiwanese in the broadcast media. The Hakka, who are concentrated in several counties throughout Taiwan, have their own . The Formosan languages are the languages of the aboriginal tribes of Taiwan, comprising about 2% of the island's population.
National language
Mandarin
In 1945 when the island of Taiwan came under the control of the Republic of China Kuomintang, Mandarin was introduced as the official language and made compulsory in schools. Since then, Mandarin has been established as a lingua franca among the various groups in Taiwan: the majority -speaking , the Hakka who have their own , Mainlanders whose native tongue may be any Chinese variant in mainland China, and the who speak aboriginal languages.
Until the 1980s the Kuomintang administration heavily promoted the use of Standard Mandarin and discouraged the use of Taiwanese and other vernaculars, even portraying them as inferior. Mandarin was the only sanctioned language for use in the media. This produced a backlash in the 1990s. Although some more extreme supporters of Taiwan independence tend to be opposed to standard Mandarin in favor of Taiwanese, efforts to replace standard Mandarin either with Taiwanese or with a multi-lingual standard have remained stalled. Today, Mandarin is taught by immersion starting in elementary school. After the second grade, the entire educational system is in Mandarin, except for local language classes that have been taught for a few hours each week starting in the mid-1990s.
Taiwanese Mandarin is spoken at different levels according to the social class and situation of the speakers. Formal occasions call for the level of ''Guoyu'', which in practice differs little from ''Putonghua''. Less formal situations often result in the basilect form, which has more uniquely Taiwanese features. Bilingual Taiwanese speakers often code-switch between Mandarin and Taiwanese, sometimes in the same sentence.
Mandarin is spoken fluently by almost the entire Taiwanese population, except for some elderly people who were educated under Japanese rule. In the capital Taipei, where there is a high concentration of Mainlanders whose native language is not Taiwanese, Mandarin is used in greater frequency than in southern Taiwan and more rural areas where there are fewer Mainlanders.
Chinese alphabet
Zhuyin Fuhao , or "Symbols for Annotating Sounds", often abbreviated as Zhuyin, or known as Bopomofo after the first four letters of this alphabet , is the national phonetic system of the Republic of China for teaching the Chinese languages, especially Standard Mandarin, to people learning to read and write and/or to people learning to speak Mandarin. . The system uses 37 special symbols to represent the Mandarin sounds: 21 consonants and 16 vowels. Each symbol represents a group of sounds without much ambiguity.
These phonetic symbols sometimes appear as ruby characters printed next to the Chinese characters in young children's books, and in editions of classical texts . In advertisements, these phonetic symbols are sometimes used to write certain particles ; other than this, one seldom sees these symbols used in mass media adult publications except as a pronunciation guide in dictionary entries. Bopomofo symbols are also mapped to the ordinary Roman character keyboard used in one for inputting Chinese text when using the computer.
Unlike pinyin, the sole purpose for Zhuyin in elementary education is to teach Standard Mandarin pronunciation to children. Grade one textbooks of all subjects are entirely in zhuyin. After that year, Chinese character texts are given in annotated form. Around grade four, presence of Zhuyin annotation is greatly reduced, remaining only in the new character section. School children learn the symbols so that they can decode pronunciations given in a Chinese dictionary, and also so that they can find how to write words for which they know only the sounds.
Pinyin, on the other hand, is dual-purpose. Besides being a pronunciation notation, pinyin is used widely in publications in mainland China. Some books from mainland China are published purely in pinyin with not even a single Chinese character. Those books are targeted to tribal groups or ers who know spoken Mandarin but have not yet learned written Chinese characters.
Zhuyin will probably never replace Traditional Chinese just as ''hiragana'' has never replaced characters in Japanese texts even though substituting ''hiragana'' for characters is always an option. Not only are the characters valued for esthetic and other axiological reasons, but reading characters requires fewer eye fixations and eliminates the ambiguities in any alphabetic or syllabic writing system caused by the immense number of homonyms in Chinese.
Romanization
Although the Wade-Giles system is commonly used for romanization of Chinese in Taiwan, romanization tends to be highly inconsistent. Unlike mainland China, Taiwan does not use the Latin alphabet in teaching Mandarin pronunciation in schools but rather uses a system called Zhuyin. There have been efforts by the educational system to move toward a Roman-based system, but these have been slow due to bureaucratic inertia, political reluctance to follow mainland China's footsteps and the huge cost in teacher retraining. The central government adopted Tongyong Pinyin as the official romanization in 2002 but local governments are permitted to override the standard as some have adopted Hanyu Pinyin and retained old romanizations that are commonly used.
Other languages
Taiwanese
Taiwanese is a variant of spoken in Taiwan. Taiwanese is often seen as a ''Chinese dialect'' within a larger Chinese language. On the other hand, it may also be seen as a ''language'' in the family. As with most "language or dialect?" distinctions, how one describes Taiwanese may depend largely on one's political views .
There are both colloquial and literary of Taiwanese. Colloquial Taiwanese has roots in Old Chinese. Literary Taiwanese, which was originally developed in the 10th century in Fujian and based on Middle Chinese, was used at one time for formal writing, but is now largely extinct. A great part of the Taiwanese language is mutually intelligible with Hokkien and other dialects of Min Nan. It is, however, mutually unintelligible with Mandarin or other Chinese dialects.
Recent work by scholars such as , , and , based on former research by scholars such as , has gone so far as to associate part of the basic vocabulary of the colloquial language with the and language families; however, such claims are not without controversy.
Hakka
is mainly spoken on Taiwan by people who have Hakka ancestry. Hakka is often seen as a ''Chinese dialect'' within a larger Chinese language. On the other hand, it may also be seen as a ''language'' in the family. As with most "language or dialect?" distinctions, how one describes Hakka may depend largely on one's political views .
Formosan
The Formosan languages are the languages of the of Taiwan. Taiwanese aborigines currently comprise about 2% of the island's population. However, far fewer can still speak their ancestral language, after centuries of language shift. Of the approximately 26 languages of the Taiwanese aborigines, at least ten are , another five are , and several others are to some degree .
All Formosan languages are slowly being replaced by the culturally dominant Mandarin-Chinese. In recent decades the started an aboriginal reappreciation program that included the reintroduction of Formosan in Taiwanese schools. However, the results of this initiative have been disappointing.
Japanese
The Japanese language was compulsorily taught while . Although fluency is now largely limited to the elderly, much of Taiwan's youth who look to Japan as the trend-setter of the region's youth pop culture now might know a bit of Japanese through the or their grandparents.
Further reading
*Weingartner, F. F. . ''Survey of Taiwan aboriginal languages''. Taipei: . ISBN 9579185409
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