Taiwan Language

Tsou language

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The Tsou language is the language of the , a tribe of indigenous people on Taiwan . It is a Formosan language of the family.

Truku language

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Truku language, or Taroko language, one of the Taiwanese aboriginal languages, is spoken by the Truku people. It has many alternative names, such as "Taroko", which is used in ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World''. There are 4,750 speakers.

The language has 19 consonants and 5 vowels. It is written in Latin alphabet.

Bibliography

*Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. , 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com/.

Thao language

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Thao is the language of the , a tribe of Taiwanese aborigines in the region of Sun Moon Lake in central Taiwan. In 2000 there were approximately 5 or 6 speakers, all but one of whom were over the age of sixty. It is a Formosan language of the family. Thao dialect is related to Ilocano, the dialect in the north of the Philippines. Some words and phrases are the same as the dialect use in the Philippines.

Phonology

Reduplication

Thao has two or arguably three patterns of reduplication: Ca-reduplication, full reduplication, and rightward reduplication .

Tao language

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The Tao language
|-
|Christ||Kizisto||kirisuto
|-
|Doctor||koysang||o-isha-san?
|-
|Flashlight||dingki||denki
|-
|Holy Spirit||seyzi||seirei
|-
|Key||kagi||kagi
|-
|Medicine||kosozi||kusuri
|-
|Motorcycle||otobay||ootobai
|-
|Police||kisat||keisatsu
|-
|School||gako||gakkō
|-
|School bag||kabang||kaban
|-
|Teacher||sinsi||sensei
|-
|Ticket||kipo||kippu
|-
|Truck||tozako||torakku
|}

Chinese loanwords

Taiwanese Sign Language

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Taiwanese Sign Language is the sign language most commonly used in Taiwan. It is the of some 50,000 people in the Republic of China.

TSL was heavily influenced by Japanese Sign Language during and thus has some with both Japanese Sign Language and Korean Sign Language. After , Taiwan absorbed an influx of sign language users from mainland China who influenced TSL through and loanwords.

There are two main dialects of TSL centered around two of the three major sign language schools in Taiwan: one in Taipei, the other in Tainan City .

Serious linguistic research on TSL began in the 1970s and is continuing at present. The first International Symposium on Taiwan Sign Language Linguistics was held on March 1-, 2003, at in Minhsiung, , Taiwan.

Sinckan Manuscripts

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The Sinckan Manuscripts refers to a series of leases, mortgages, and other commerce contracts written in the Sinckan language; they are commonly referred to as the "fanzi contracts." Some are written only in a romanized script, while others were bilingual with adjacent Han writing. Currently there are approximately 140 extant documents written in Sinckan; they are important in the study of culture and Taiwanese history in general although there are only a few scholars who can understand them.

History and Background

The Sinckan language was spoken by the Siraya tribe that lived in what is now . During the time when Taiwan was under the administration of the Dutch East India Company, Dutch missionaries learned Sinckan to facilitate both missionary work and government affairs. They also created a romanized script and compiled a dictionary of the language, teaching the natives how to write their own language.

In 1625, Maarten Sonck, the Dutch governor of Taiwan, requested that the Netherlands send two to three missionaries to Taiwan for the purpose of converting the natives. However, the first group to arrive were visiting missionaries who did not have the authority to perform baptism rites. It was not until June of 1627 that the first real minister, Rev. Georgius Candidius, arrived, upon which missionary work in Taiwan began in earnest. The first area to be targeted, the Sinckan settlement, had many converts by 1630.

In 1636, the Dutch started a school for the Sinckan that not only featured religious instruction, but also provided schooling in Western literature. Because the Dutch advocated missionary work to be done in the native language, the school was taught in the Sinckan language. The missionary Robertus Junius recorded in his 1643 education report that the Sinckan school had enrolled 80 students, of which 24 were learning to write and 8 to 10 had solid penmanship, while in neighboring Baccaluan school there were 90 students, of which 8 knew how to write.

Aside from proselytizing, the missionaries also compiled dictionaries and books of religious doctrine; they translated Gospel of Matthew into Sinckan and also compiled a vocabulary of Favorlang, another aboriginal language. These would become important sources for later research. The most important Sinckan documents were the contracts between the Sinckan and the Han settlers, commonly known as the Fanzi contracts.

Although the Dutch only governed Taiwan for 38 years, they greatly influenced the development of indigenous culture. To take the Sinckan Manuscripts as an example, the latest extant documents in the Sinckan script date back to 1813, more than 150 years after the Dutch left Taiwan in 1662.

Origins of the Sinckan Manuscripts

Shortly after the founding of Taihoku Imperial University in 1928, one of the scholars in the linguistics department, Naoyoshi Ogawa , gathered together a number of old texts in Tainan. In 1931, Naojiro Murakami edited and published them under the title ''The Sinckan Manuscripts''. The compilation contained 109 "fanzi contracts," of which 87 were from the Sinckan settlement; 21 of those were bilingual in Han characters and Sinckan.

Saisiyat language

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Saisiyat is the language of the , a tribe of indigenous people on Taiwan . It is a Formosan language of the family. It has approximately 4,750 speakers.

Classification

* Austronesian languages
** Northwest Formosan languages
*** Saisiyat

Language area

The language area of Saisiyat is small, situated in the northwest of the country between the and regions in the mountains .

Usage

Today, one thousand Saisiyat people do not use the Saisiyat language. Many young people use or instead, and few children speak Saisiyat. Hakka Chinese speakers, Atayal speakers and Saisiyat speakers live more or less together. Many Saisiyat are able to speak Saisiyat, Hakka, Atayal, , and, sometimes, Min Nan as well. Although Saisiyat has a relatively large number of speakers, the language is .

Dialects

*
*

Saaroa language

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Saaroa is the language of the Saaroa, a tribe of indigenous people on Taiwan . It is a Formosan language of the family. In 1690, Saaroa was nearly extinct. Few children speak the language. The Bunun language is becoming the main language of the Saaroa people, and many of the elders in the tribe speak Taiwanese. The shift to the Bunun language occurred when the Bunun tribe migrated into the area inhabited by the Saaroa people.

Rukai language

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Rukai is the mother tongue of the , a tribe of indigenous people on Taiwan . It is a Formosan language of the Austronesian languages language family.

Puyuma language

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The Puyuma language is the language of the Puyuma people, a tribe of indigenous people on Taiwan . It is a Formosan language of the family.

Pe-oe-ji

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Ph-ōe-jī , published 1913, is still in use today in Taiwan.

While Ph-ōe-jī was originally a missionary tool for Christian missions, it also has the practical benefits of being easy to read, learn and write. According to Tiu Hk-khiam, Ph-ōe-jī even helps the learning of Chinese characters.

Books in Ph-ōe-jī

Due to its Christian origins, Christian works make up a significant proportion of all works in Ph-ōe-jī. The first New Testament in Ph-ōe-jī was published in 1873. The Old Testament was published later in 1884. The publication of these books was a driving force for the spread of the Church. The first of the Prefecture of Taiwan Church Newsletter, published 1885, was also written in Ph-ōe-jī.

Apart from Christianity, works in such areas as Literature, Mathematics, Medicine have also been published in Ph-ōe-jī. See Lai-goa-kho Khan-ho-hak.

Suppression under Japanese rule

The 1880s was the peak period of Ph-ōe-jī's development, with ten thousands of users. An important contributing factor was that the Qing Dynasty government did not suppress its usage. So great was its growth was that at the end of Qing rule, usage of Ph-ōe-jī was not limited to the Presbyterians only, but also attained much usage in the general population.

Nevertheless, as Taiwan became a Japanese colony, the use of Ph-ōe-jī was suppressed in preference to . In 1922, anti-Japanese movements led to the establishment of the Taiwanese Cultural Association. Following which, Chhoà Poê-hoé enthusiastically proposed to the association to designate promoting of Ph-ōe-jī as one of its main tasks, which it took up in 1924. The associate decided to publish books in Ph-ōe-jī. However, Chhoà met a setback when he went up to the Japanese colonial government to apply for a permit start study classes on Ph-ōe-jī. Not only was the proposal rejected by the Japanese, but the Japanese police undertook violent measures to silence and ban it.

From then on the Japanese attitude toward the Taiwanese tongue became all too obvious. The Taiwan Church Newsletter , written in Ph-ōe-jī, was banned during World War Two. This was because the spread of Japanese was hampered by the use of Ph-ōe-jī. When World War Two broke out, Japan finally took greater steps to suppress the use of even the Taiwanese tongue itself.

Suppression under Chinese rule

When the took over China, it took similar steps to enforce use of the national language, , while suppressing use of Ph-ōe-jī. Numerous examples illustrate the KMT's attack on the use of Ph-ōe-jī. In 1969, it forbade its use in the Church Newsletter. In 1973, copies of Embree's Taiwanese-English Dictionary were confiscated and banned. In 1975, new translations of the Bible into Ph-ōe-jī were also banned. In 1984 the Ministry of Education wrote a letter to Internal Affairs to prohibit its use when preaching. Other material in Ph-ōe-jī was soon outlawed too.

Development since the 1990s

After the lifting of martial law, Ph-ōe-jī began to experience a revival as a result of efforts made by supporters of the "Mother Tongue Movement." In 1990 a few counties governed by the Democratic Progressive Party began to use texts written in Ph-ōe-jī for teaching elementary school children Taiwanese. This represented the first official instance of Ph-ōe-jī entering the public schools. At this time, the KMT changed its strategy against Ph-ōe-jī, and the Kuomintang-supported Mandarin Promotion Council promoted an alternate romanization scheme, the Taiwanese Language Phonetic Alphabet in direct opposition to Ph-ōe-jī. The result was internal conflict among Taiwanese language supporters.

However, the mother tongue movement continued to experiment with Taiwanese writing utilizing different romanization schemes, including Ph-ōe-jī, printing various items including the news. Moreover, as digital text became more and more important, Taiwanese supporters began a push to modernize Taiwanese and make it more suitable for digital use. For instance, there are already a number of software packages related to Ph-ōe-jī, and additionally there is an online Ph-ōe-jī dictionary and encyclopedia. In June of 2004, the International Organization for Standardization inserted all of the symbols of Ph-ōe-jī into Unicode following an application by Tè Khái-sū, T?n Pek-tiong, and T?n-Tē H?ng-gi?u, with help from Michael Everson.

Pazeh language

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Pazeh is the language of the , a tribe of indigenous people on Taiwan . It is a Formosan language of the Austronesian languages language family. As there is only one speaker, the language is .

Phonology

# and do not actually share the same place of articulation; is or prealveolar and is . Other coronal consonants tend to be prealveolar or post-dental.
#The distribution for the glottal stop is allophonic, appearing only between like vowels, before initial vowels, and after final vowels. It is also largely absent in normal speech
# is intervocalically
# is actually an alveolar/prealveolar and only occurs as a syllable onset.
# varies between glottal and realizations and is sometimes difficult to distinguish from

While Pazeh contrasts voiced and voiceless obstruents, this contrast is neutralized in final position for labial and velar plosives, where only and occur respectively . and are also neutralized to the latter. Voiceless plosives are unreleased in final position.

Mid vowels are allophones of close vowels .
* Both lower when adjacent to .
* lowers before . and are in free variation before
* morphemes carry the phonetic vowel even when the reduplicated vowel is not in the phonological context for lowering.
** → .

is somewhat advanced and raised when adjacent to . Prevocally, high vowels are semivocalized. Most coronal consonants block this, although it still occurs after . Semivowels also appear post-vocally.

Phonotactics

The most common morpheme structure is CVCVC where C is any consonant and V is any vowel. Consonant clusters are rare and consist only of a nasal plus a homorganic obstruent or the glide element of a diphthong.

intervocalic voiceless stops are voiced before a morpheme boundary . Stress falls on the ultimate syllable.

Morphology

Pazeh makes ready use of affixes, infixes, suffixes, and circumfixes, as well as reduplication. Pazeh also has "focus-marking" in its verbal morphology. In addition, verbs can be either stative or dynamic.

Bibliography

Paiwan language

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Paiwan is a native language of Taiwan, spoken by the , one tribe of the Taiwanese aborigines. Paiwan is a of the . The number of speakers is estimated to be 66,000.

Modern Literal Taiwanese

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Modern Literal Taiwanese , also known as Modern Taiwanese Language , is an orthography in the Latin alphabet for based on the Taiwanese Modern Spelling System . MLT is able to use the ASCII character set to indicate the proper variation of pitch without any subsidiary scripts or diacritic symbols.

MLT Examples

The current system

The MLT alphabet adopts the Latin alphabet of 26 letters to express the basic sounds of Taiwanese:

:a b c ch e f g h i j k kh l m n ng ? o p ph q r s t th u v y z zh

A MLT word, like each English word, can be formed by only one syllable or several syllables, with the two syllables being the most typical. Each syllable in MLT follows either one of the two underlying patterns :

* + + vowel +
* + vowel + +

Consonants

* Bilabial: b, p, ph, m
* Alveolar: t, th, n, l
* Velar: g, k, kh, h
* Palatal: c, ch, s, j
* Dental: z, zh, s, j

Vowels

* Simple: a, i, u, e, o, ?, m, ng
* Compound: ai, au, ia, iu, i?, iau, ui, oa, oe, ?e, oai
* Special High Tone : y, w
* Special Shouting-Out Tone : ae, ie, uo, ea, ao
* Front Nasal : v
* Rear Nasal: m, n, ng

The nasals ''m'', ''n'', and ''ng'' can be appended to any of the vowels and some of the diphthongs.
In addition, ''m'' and ''ng'' can function as independent syllables by themselves.

The stops ''h/q'', ''k/g'', ''p/b'' and ''t/d'' can appear as the last letter in a syllable, in which case they are pronounced as unreleased stops.

TMSS originally prescribed two special characters: the Greek letter and an ''o'' crossed by a backslash. These were replaced with the Latin letter ''v'' and number ''0'', respectively. Because mixing numbers into words is problematic for spell checkers, ''0'' was subsequently replaced by ?. However, ? is not part of the ASCII character set. To avoid the use of "?", Modern Taiwanese Language replaces it with a "Q" in smaller font and replaces ''?e'' with ''oe'' .

Tones

The tones are encoded by appending and modifying spellings with attention to the rules of the MLT system. The basic tone has no modification.

High Tone

A high tone is derived from raising a basic tone, and is represented by adding a tone indicator "f" after a vowel, except “i” and “u”, in a syllable. The high tone of "i" and "u" are "y" and "w" respectively. Note that the tone indicator "f" is voiceless.

Shouting-out Tone

A shouting-out tone is derived from shouting out a basic tone, and is represented by adding a tone indicator "r" after a vowel. Exceptions “ai”, “i”, “u”, “e”, and “au”, in a syllable, for which "ae", "ie", "uo", "ea", and "ao" are substituted, respectively.

Low-falling tone

The low-falling tone is always marked by appending an "x" to the rearmost vowel.

Rising tone

The rising tone is denoted by the following rules:
* Simple vowel: simply repeat the vowel.
* Compound vowel: repeat the last vowel letter except when it contains an “a”, then repeat “a”. In the case of ?, use ?o rather than ??.

Short tone

The low stopping tones are indicated by switching the final stops with the high stopping tones' as follows: h->q, t->d, p->b, k->g.

Examples

Examples for the seven tones:
* 1 : ty
* 2 : bea
* 3 : pax
* 4 : aq
* 5 : zoaa
* 7 : chviu
* 8 : lok

Special Symbols

The apostrophe is used to demarcate syllables when there is ambiguity. A hyphen is used to join two, or more isolated words to make a new compound word with its own meaning. When a word contains a back-quote , all the syllables after the back-quote are accented in the low tone .

History of MLT

The Pe?h-ōe-jī system, introduced in the 19th century, provides a basis for the phonetic transcription of the Taiwanese language using the Latin alphabet and developed a significant user base. However this user base declined during the , when the use of POJ was suppressed in preference to katakana, and during the Kuomintang era of martial law, during which Standard Mandarin was promoted.

Prof. Liim Keahioong, formerly of the National Cheng Kung University in , Taiwan, pioneered the Taiwanese Modern Spelling System in 1943, with the intent to avoid the diacritic markings of POJ and the cumbersomeness of inputting Chinese characters with the technology available. TMSS served as the basis for Modern Literal Taiwanese , also known as Modern Taiwanese Language .

Languages of Taiwan

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A large majority of people on Taiwan speak Standard Mandarin, which has been the only officially sanctioned medium of instruction in the schools for more than four decades. As a result of the half century of , many people born before 1940 also can speak fluent .

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.

Kavalan language

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Kavalan was formerly spoken in the Northeast coast area of Taiwan by the Kavalan people . It is a Formosan language of the family.

Kavalan is no longer spoken in its original area. As of 1930, it was used only as a home language. As of 1987, it was still spoken in territories. Today, this language is still spoken but considered , with 24 speakers.

Kanakanabu language

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Kanakanabu is the language of the Kanakanabu, a tribe of indigenous people on Taiwan . It is a Formosan language of the family.

Hakka Chinese

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Hakka is one of the main of the Chinese language spoken predominantly in southern China by the and descendants in diaspora throughout and Southeast Asia and .

The Hakka language has numerous s or dialects, spoken in Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangxi, Guangxi, Sichuan, Hunan, Guizhou provinces, including Hainan island and Taiwan. Hakka is not mutually intelligible with , , Minnan and most of the significant spoken variants of the Chinese language.

There is a pronunciation difference between Taiwanese Hakka dialect and Guangdong Hakka dialect. Amongst the dialects of Hakka, the dialect of northeast Guangdong has typically been viewed as a prime example of the Hakka language, forming a sort of standard dialect.

The Guangdong Provincial Education Department created an official romanisation of Meixian Hakka dialect in 1960, one of four languages receiving this status in Guangdong.

''See Identification of the varieties of Chinese for more on the dispute whether Hakka and other Chinese linguistic groups should be properly considered languages or dialects.''

Etymology

The name of the Hakka people who are the predominant original native speakers of the language literally means "guest families" or "guest people": ''Hak'' 客 means "guest", and ''ka'' 家 means "family". Amongst themselves, Hakka people variously called their language Hak-ka-fa 客家話, Hak-fa , 客話, Tu-gong-dung-fa 土廣東話, literally, "Native Guangdong language," and Ngai-fa ?話, "My/our language".

History

Early history

The have their origins in several episodes of migration from northern China into southern China during periods of war and civil unrest. The forebears of the Hakka came from present-day Henan and Shaanxi provinces, and brought with them features of Chinese languages spoken in those areas during that time. The presence of many archaic features occur in modern Hakka, including final consonants , as are found in other modern southern Chinese languages, but which have been lost in Mandarin.

Due to the migration of its speakers, the Hakka language may have been influenced by other language areas through which the Hakka-speaking forebears migrated. For instance, common vocabulary are found in Hakka, and Chinese languages.

Some people consider Hakka to have mixed with other languages, such as the language of the , throughout its development.

Linguistic development

A regular pattern of sound change can generally be detected in Hakka, as in most Chinese languages, of the derivation of lexemes from earlier forms of Chinese. Some examples:
*The lexeme represented by the characters 武 or 屋 , pronounced ''mvio'' and ''uk'' in Middle Chinese is ''vu'' and ''vuk'' in Hakka respectively .
*Lexemes corresponding with characters 人 and 日, among others, are pronounced with a ''ng'' consonant in Hakka , and have a corresponding reading in Mandarin as an initial r- consonant.
*The consonant initial of the lexeme corresponding with the character 話 is pronounced ''f'' or ''v'' in Hakka .
*The initial consonant of 學 '''' usually corresponds with a ''h'' approximant in and a voiceless alveo-palatal fricative or velar fricative in Mandarin .

Phonology

Moiyen dialect initials

There are no voiced plosives in Hakka, but it exhibits two sets of voiceless stops, an unaspirated set , and the other aspirated .

* When the initials , , , and , are followed by a , they become , , , and , respectively.

Moiyen rimes

Moiyen Hakka has six vowels, , that are romanised as i, i, ê, a, e, o and u, respectively. The palatisation medial is represented by i and the labialisation medial is represented as u.

Moreover, Hakka s exhibits the final consonants found in Middle Chinese, namely which are romanised as m, n, ng, b, d, and g respectively in the official Moiyen romanisation.

Moiyen tones

The Middle Chinese fully voiced initial characters have become aspirated voiceless initial characters in Hakka. The four Middle Chinese tones Ping, Shang, Qu, Ru have developed in the Moiyen dialect to exhibit a yin-yang splitting in the Ping tone, and a yin-yang splitting in the Ru tone, giving it six tones.

These so called yin-yang tonal splittings developed mainly as a consequence of the type of initial a Chinese character had during the Middle Chinese stage in the development of Chinese languages, with voiceless initial characters tending to become of the yin type, and the voiced initial characters developing into the yang type. In modern Moiyen Hakka however, part of the Yin Ping tone characters have sonorant initials originally from the Middle Chinese Shang tone characters and fully voiced Middle Chinese Qu tone characters, so the voiced/voiceless distinction should be taken only as a rule of thumb.

Hakka tone contours differs more as one moves away from Moiyen. For example the Yin Ping contour is in Changting and in Sixian , Taiwan.

Tone sandhi in Moiyen Hakka

For Moiyen Hakka, the ''yin ping'' and ''qu'' tone characters exhibit sandhi when the following character has a lower pitch. The pitch of the ''yin ping'' tone changes from to when sandhi occurs. Similarly, the ''qu'' tone changes from to under sandhi. These are shown in red in the following table.

The neutral tone occurs in some postfixes used in Hakka. It has a mid pitch.

Other dialects of Hakka

The Hakka language has as many regional dialects as there are counties with Hakka speakers in the majority. Surrounding Meixian are the counties of Pingyuan 平遠, Dabu 大埔, Jiaoling 蕉嶺, Xingning 興寧, Wuhua 五華, and Fengshun 豐順. Each is said to have its own special phonological points of interest. For instance, the Xingning does not have rimes ending in or . These have merged into and ending rimes, respectively. Further away from Meixian, the Hong Kong dialect lacks the medial, so whereas Meixian dialect pronounces the character 光 as , Hong Kong Hakka dialect pronounces it as , which is similar to the Hakka spoken in neighbouring Shenzhen.

As much as endings and vowels are important, the tones also vary across the dialects of Hakka. The majority of Hakka dialects have six tones, as typified by Meixian dialect above. However, there are dialects which have lost all of their Ru Sheng , and the characters originally of this tone class are distributed across the non-Ru tones. Such a dialect is Changting 長汀 which is situated in the Western Fujian province. Moreover, there is evidence of the retention of an earlier Hakka tone system in the dialects of Haifeng 海豐 and Lufeng 陸豐 situated on coastal south eastern Guangdong province. They contain a yin-yang splitting in the Qu tone, giving rise to seven tones in all .

The Hoi-liuk Hakka dialect speakers found on Taiwan originated from this region. This particular dialect contains , usually not found in other Chinese languages. Taiwan's other main population of Hakka speakers, the Sixian speakers come from Jiaying 嘉應 and surrounding Jiaoling, Pingyuan, Xingning, and Wuhua dialects. Jiaying county later changed its name to Meixian.

Vocabulary

Like other southern Chinese languages, Hakka retains single syllable words from earlier stages of Chinese; thus it can differentiate a large number of working syllables by tone and rime. This reduces the need for compounding or making words of more than one syllable. However, it is also similar to other Chinese languages in having words which are made from more than one syllable.

Examples of Single Syllable Words

人 person

碗 bowl

狗 dog

牛 cow

屋 house

嘴 mouth

涯 me/I

Example of Multiple-Syllable Words

日頭 sun

月光 moon

屋下/屋家 home

電話 telephone

學堂 school

Hakka prefers the verb 講 when referring to ''speaking'' rather than the Mandarin ''shuo'' 說 .

Hakka uses 食, like Cantonese for the verb "to eat" and 飲 "to drink", unlike Mandarin which prefers ''chi'' 吃 as "to eat" and ''he'' 喝 as “to drink".

Writing systems

Various dialects of Hakka have been written in a number of Latin orthographies, largely for religious purposes, since at least the mid-19th century.

Currently the single largest work in Hakka is the ''New Testament and Psalms'' , although that is expected to be surpassed soon by the publication of the ''Old Testament''. These works render Hakka in both romanization and Han characters and are based on the dialects of Taiwanese Hakka speakers. The work of Biblical translation is being performed by missionaries of the Presbyterian Church in Canada.

The popular ''Le Petit Prince'' has also been translated into Hakka , specifically the dialect of Taiwan . This also was dual-script, albeit using the Tongyong Pinyin scheme.

Formosan languages

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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 four are , and several others are to some degree .

The aboriginal languages of Taiwan have significance in historical linguistics, since in all likelihood Taiwan was the place of origin of the entire family. According to linguist Robert Blust the Formosan languages form nine of the ten principal branches of the Austronesian language family, while the one remaining principal branch contains nearly 1,200 Malayo-Polynesian languages found outside of Taiwan. Although linguists disagree with some details of Blust's analysis, a broad consensus has coalesced around the conclusion that the Austronesian languages originated in Taiwan. This theory has been strengthened by recent studies in human population genetics.

Recent history

All Formosan languages are slowly being replaced by the culturally dominant Mandarin Chinese. In recent decades the Republic of China government started an aboriginal reappreciation program that included the reintroduction of Formosan first language in Taiwanese schools. However, the results of this initiative have been disappointing.

List of languages

''For classification, see .''

It is often difficult to decide where to draw the boundary between a language and a dialect, causing some minor disagreement among scholars regarding the inventory of Formosan languages. There is even more uncertainty regarding many extinct or Formosan tribes, since our knowledge of these is often sketchy at best. Frequently cited examples of Formosan languages are given below, but the list should not be considered exhaustive.

Living languages

*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*

Extinct languages

*
*
* Hoanya
* Ketagalan
* Makatao
* Popora
* Siraya
* Taivoan
* Taokas

Further reading

*Tsuchida, S. . ''Kanakanavu texts ''. .
*Zeitoun, E. . ''Nominalization in Formosan languages''. Taipei: Institute of Linguistics , Academia Sinica.
*Mackay, G. L. . ''Chinese-Romanized dictionary of the Formosan vernacular''. Shanghai: Printed at the Presbyterian Mission Press.
*Happart, G., & Hedhurst, W. H. . ''Dictionary of the Favorlang dialect of the Formosan language''. Batavia: printed at Parapattan.

Bunun language

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The Bunun language is spoken by the Bunun people of Taiwan. It belongs to the Formosan languages, a subgroup of the , and is subdivided in five dialects: Isbukun, Takbunuaz, Takivatan, Takibaka and Takituduh. Isbukun, the dominant dialect, is mainly spoken in the south of Taiwan. Takbunuaz and Takivatan are mainly spoken in the center of the country. Takibaka en Takituduh both are northern dialects. A sixth dialect, Takipulan, went extinct in the 1970s.

The Saaroa and Kanakanabu, two smaller minority groups who share their territory with an Isbukun Bunun group, have also adopted Bunun as their vernacular.

Linguistic profile

Bunun is a verb-initial language and has an Austronesian alignment system or focus system. This means that Bunun clauses do not have a nominative-accusative or absolutive-ergative alignment, but that arguments of a clause are ordered according to which participant in the event described by the verb is 'in focus'. In Bunun, four distinct roles can be in focus:
* the agent: the person or thing that is doing the action or achieving/maintaining a state;
* the undergoer: the person or thing that is somehow participating in the action without being an agent; there are three kinds of undergoers:
** patients: persons or things to whom an action is done or an event happens
** instruments: things which are used to perform an action
** beneficiaries : the persons for whom an action is done or for whom an event happens
* the locative participant: the location where an action takes place; in languages with a Philippine-style voice system, spatial location is often at the same level in a clause as agents and patients, rather than being an adverbial clause, like in English .
Which argument is in focus is indicated on the verb by a combination of prefixes and suffixes .
* a verb in agent focus is often unmarked, but can get the prefix ''ma-'' or - more rarely - ''pa-'' or ''ka-''
* a verb in undergoer focus gets a suffix ''-un''
* a verb locative focus gets a suffix ''-an''
Many other languages with a focus system have different marking for patients, instruments and beneficiaries, but this is not the case in Bunun. The focussed argument in a Bunun clause will normally always occur immediately after the verb and is in the Isbukun dialect marked with a post-nominal marker ''a''.

Bunun has a very large class of auxiliary verbs. Concepts that are expressed by auxiliaries include:
* negation
* modality and volition
* relative time
* comparison
* question words
* sometimes numerals
In fact, Bunun auxiliaries express all sorts of concepts that in English would be expressed by adverbial phrases, with the exception of time and place, which are normally expressed with adverbial phrases.

Bunun is an agglutinative language and has a very elaborate set of derivational affixes , most of which derive verbs from other word classes. Some of these prefixes are special in that they do not only occur in the verb they derive, but are also foreshadowed on a preceding auxiliary. These are called lexical prefixes or anticipatory prefixes and only occur in Bunun and a small number of other Formosan languages.

Basay language

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Basay was formerly spoken in the plains area of Northern Taiwan by the . The language is most closely related to the East Formosan group. The language is an extinct Formosan language of the family.

Babuza language

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Babuzah is an language of Babuza people, a tribe of indigenous people on Taiwan . It is a Formosan language of the Austronesian languages language family.

Atayal language

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The Atayal language is spoken by the people of Taiwan. Squliq and C’uli’ are two major dialects.

There is a dictionary of the language and a grammar. In 2002 a Bible text was published. Atayal is written in the Latin alphabet.

Phonology

Vowels

Consonants

Reference grammars

*Huang, Lillian . "泰雅語參考語法" . Taipei: Yuanliou. Describes Mayrinax Atayal.
*Rau, D. V. . "A grammar of Atayal". Cornell University dissertation. Describes Squliq Atayal.
*Valle, G. D. . ''Handbook of Atayal, as it is spoken in Wufeng ''. Taichung: Kuangchi Press

Amis language

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Amis is the language of the Amis or , a tribe of indigenous people on Taiwan . It is a Formosan language of the family.

The public spaces of the counties where many Amis people live in Taiwan, like Hualien Train Station, Taitung Train Station, and Jhihben Train Station, broadcast in Amis Language also.

Dialects

There are some dialects of Amis language: , Northern Amis dialect, Middle Amis dialect, Seashore Amis dialect, Malan Amis dialect and Hengchun Amis dialect.

Phonology

*"z" is only occurred in Sakizaya language. except the /s/ and /z/ in Sakizaya language, every dialect of Amis language doesn't distinguish the voiceless consonants and voiced consonants.
*"f" and "d" have allophones: "f" can be pronounced as /b/, /f/ or /v/, and "d" can be pronounced as /d/, /?/ or /?/.

Examples of words

* Compare with Tagalog baboy , tatlo , apat, lima, anim, pito, walo
* Compare with Kapampangan asu, pusa, atlo, apat, lima, anam, pitu/pito, walu/walo, siyam, apulu/apulo and ama and ima

*ma olah kako mimali = I like to play sports.
*takaraw ko pi ta’kod = I jump very high.
*kalamkam ko kacomikay = I run very fast.
*Ira ko tata’angay a mata a ko = I have big eyes
*mamangay a ngapa ’= A small mouth
*takaya’ay a fokes = long hair
*sowalsan ko kahaccay a tamdaw makapahay kako = Everyone tells me that I am beautiful.
*ma fana’ay mi asik，misawsaw to kaysing，milidong to fodoy = I can sweep the floor, wash dishes and clothing.
*ma olah midmak kako to tayal no loma’ = I love to do household chores.
*nawhani ma olah kako to loma’no mako = Because I love my home.

Grammar

There are some inflections of verbs exist in Amis language, like Existential clause, Active voice, Passive voice, disposal sentence, Imperative mood, Optative mood, Prohibitive mood, and etc.

There are two Word Orders in Amis language, called "General" Word Order and "Special" Word Order.

Below are some examples of Amis sentence:

"General" Word Order Sentence I : Verb-Subject

Example

*Maomahay ko wama.
**mimaomahay: Working
**wama: Father

*Misaholoay ko wina.
**misaholoay: Cooking
**ina/wina: Mother

"General" Word Order Sentence II : Verb Subject Object

Example

*Mifaca' ko kaying to riko'.
*Mifaca' koya kaying to riko'.
**mifaca': wash
**kaying: young woman
**riko'/fudoy: cloth