What language is spoken in Taiwan: features and interesting facts

Taiwan is a Pacific island with a complex yet interesting history. The population of Taiwan for 2017 is estimated at about twenty-four million people.

At this point, Taiwan is one of the countries withadvanced economy and developed infrastructure. When planning to visit this island or move there for permanent residence, it is necessary to find out what language is spoken in Taiwan, because, as you know, the island is part of China, and used to be part of Japan.

Features of Chinese

Ninety-eight percent of Taiwan's population -they are Chinese by nationality (the self-name of the people is Han). To understand what the Taiwanese language is, one must start from a huge number of dialects of Chinese.

When people pronounce the phrase "Chinese language", they usually mean the North Chinese adverb. This is the official standard both in China and Taiwan.

Most Chinese dialects are almost incomprehensiblefor the speaker on the other. Thus, "Chinese" is really a family of languages, for example, as a Romanic language family (which includes French, Portuguese, Romanian, Italian). Inside this "Chinese family" there are several languages, some scholars claim that eight or nine, and some, much more. Inside these languages there are real dialects, as well as language dialects that differ from each other, but for the most part are understandable to each other.

What languages are spoken in Taiwan

For Taiwan, the situation is relatively simple: here there are three Chinese dialects. The Mandarin language (North Chinese) is the official national language, and it is owned by almost all residents. The second dialect, often referred to as the Taiwanese language, is widespread, especially outside of Taipei, the island's capital. The third dialect - hakka - is owned by a separate group of people (also called hakka), who live mainly around Hsinchu, Taoyuan County and rural Kaohsiung. The overwhelming majority of Taiwanese communicate in their daily lives in Taiwanese and Hakka.

Writing of Taiwan

It is important to note that Taiwanese usetraditional Chinese characters, in contrast to mainland China, where a simplified system of writing characters is common. Many Chinese believe that the conventional writing system is quite difficult to use. Traditional hieroglyphics is used outside of China, mainly in Taiwan, Singapore, Macao and other overseas communities. It is known that the Chinese language has more than three thousand different hieroglyphs.

Austronesian languages

If you ask yourself which language in Taiwanis the most ancient, it is certainly a group of languages of the Taiwanese aborigines. Two percent of Taiwan's population is the indigenous indigenous native population of the island. Their native languages are a lot of adverbs belonging to the Austronesian language family. Aborigines lived in Taiwan, perhaps already 10,000 years ago. While the Chinese just started arriving in large numbers a hundred years ago. Today, indigenous people constitute a minority of the population, and their languages are threatened with total extinction.

Aborigines of the eastern coast of the island are widelyare known as "Gao Shan", they constitute the majority of the indigenous population. In some cases, only a few surviving native speakers remain, and even the most common local dialects are threatened with extinction unless steps are taken to encourage young people to study them. The languages of the people of Taiwan, who belong to the Austronesian language family, are gradually getting out of use and do not have government support.

Taiwanese

Sometimes the dialect of most TaiwaneseMnnan, hokkien, fujiane, hoklo are called. In addition, Taiwanese is the mother tongue of the holo, groups of Han Chinese, which constitute about 70% of Taiwan's population. On most of the island is the language of everyday communication, trade, home and hearth. It is the language of friendship and struggle of the inhabitants of this mysterious island.

It has no official status. On it are written some ads in the Moscow metro. Printed non-state newspapers, online publications, books are published. Used as traditional Chinese characters, and developed by Western researchers writing on the basis of the Latin alphabet.

Hakka language

Hakka is a clan group of Chinese, whose nametranslated as "guest". Long travel from their home in northern China, caused by hostility from other groups, turned them into hardy and arrogant people. Their language is also different from the standard Chinese, although to the casual listener it may seem a bit like Cantonese. While there are still several million speakers of this dialect of Chinese, there is a threat that the hakka will become just a village dialect and disappear from the pages of magazines, books and television. At the moment there is only one TV channel that broadcasts in this dialect.

The official Chinese (Mandarin)

In 1945, after the end of World War IIwar, standard Chinese (Mandarin) was introduced as an official language and became mandatory in schools. Until 1945, the Japanese language was the official language and was taught in schools.

Since then, the Mandarin dialect has been used inThe quality of the lingua franca among the different population groups in Taiwan, that is, the language that is understandable for the majority of the population. Thus the Mandarin dialect is the basis of mutual understanding for:

Most of the carriers of the Taiwanese language (or, as it is also called, Hoclo (hokkien)).
Groups of Chinese speaking the dialect of Hakka.
Visitors from mainland China, whose native language can be any Chinese dialect.
Aborigines who speak the native languages of the Gashoa group.

The influence of the official Chinese

The Mandarin dialect is fluent in almost everyoneTaiwanese population, with the exception of some elderly people who were educated under Japanese rule. In Taipei, where there is a high concentration of visiting Chinese, whose native language is not Taiwanese, official Chinese is used more often than in southern Taiwan and in rural areas where there are fewer visitors. Many of them, especially under the age of 45, speak a tangerine better than hakka or hokkien. The Taiwanese mandarin is spoken at different levels in accordance with the social situation and situation. Official cases require a high level of command of the standard Chinese dialect speaking. Less formal situations can allow communication at a basic level that has more unique Taiwanese characteristics.

Bilingual Taiwanese residents can switchfrom one language to another during a conversation, sometimes in the same sentence. By the unique tone of each dialect of Chinese, one can immediately guess which ethnic group the person belongs to and on which language speaks. In Taiwan, great importance is given to the teaching of the official language.

Conclusion

Answering the question, what languages are spoken in Taiwan, we can briefly say that the overwhelming majority of the population communicates in different versions of the Chinese language.