If you Google: “What language do they speak in Taiwan?” the first thing you’ll likely see is the Wikipedia article for Languages of Taiwan, which lists the distributions of Mandarin, Taiwanese (Hokkien), and Hakka speakers in the ROC. What articles like this won’t tell you, however, are the implications of these numbers, and what things actually look like “on the ground.”

What language is most useful for living in Taiwan?

Take Taiwanese, for example. Even before my arrival in Taiwan 11 years ago, the same number had been floating around: 70%. According to Wikipedia: “Around 70% of Taiwan’s population belong to the Hoklo ethnic group and are speakers of Taiwanese Hokkien as native language.” But that absolutely does not mean that 7 out of 10 of the people you speak to in a given area will speak Taiwanese like a native tongue.

Small as our island of Formosa is, you will get wildly different results both depending on the area you’re in and the demographic you talk to. And even if you live in a Taiwanese-dense area, chances are you simply won’t be able to function speaking only Taiwanese. You will be cut off from a huge percentage of the population — and not just the 30% who don’t claim to speak Taiwanese natively. Rather, you’ll likely find that many who claim to be native Taiwanese speakers aren’t able to express themselves in Taiwanese in more advanced contexts (unless they were born before or around World War II).

Instead, the language people generally speak in Taiwan — the language you should study if you want to live here as seamlessly as possible — is Mandarin. That is, Taiwan Mandarin, to be exact, but it’s as mutually intelligible with Chinese Mandarin as, say, British English is with American English, in that native Mandarin speaker from Beijing can easily communicate with a native speaker from Taipei, and visa versa.

But back to our runner-up: Taiwanese.

What is “Taiwanese,” the language?

If you ask an educated Taiwanese person about the Taiwanese language, they will tell you that it was actually the official language spoken throughout China during the Tang dynasty, around 600 – 900 AD — a renaissance-like period of cultural flourishing from which some of the greatest poetry and literature of Chinese history derives (so there are flattering implications).

If you ask an educated Taiwanese person with a degree in Chinese, however, they will likely tell you that it absolutely is not that. I mean, it’s like Tang Dynasty Chinese (Middle Chinese / 中古漢語), perhaps similar to how modern Frisian is like Old English. The classic example is that the old Chinese poems mostly no longer rhyme in Mandarin, but do in Taiwanese — and I’m sure there’s some analog to this, like that Beowulf is easier for Frisian speakers to learn. But these similarities do not mean these are the same languages — just that they diverged less from their common roots.

One proposed explanation is that modern Mandarin (based on Beijing-nese) was influenced by the languages of the nomadic hordes where tongues like Taiwanese were not — just as Modern English was influenced by Latin and French where Frisian remained distinctly German (and Dutch). But that may be controversial — and is a rabbit hole for another day.

Back to the question: Insist that those educated folks you just asked now elaborate on what Taiwanese actually is. Most will probably tell you that it is Minnanese: the Chinese “dialect” (方言) — scare quotes because its more like a separate language — associated with the Southern Min region in the Southeast, around the Fujian Province (thus also known as Fujianese). And this is a pretty accurate answer.

What’s the difference between Taiwanese and Minnanese?

Still, if you hold out for someone who really knows her stuff, she’ll push up her glasses and explain that Taiwanese is actually more like a dialect, or offshoot, of Minnanese (this is the usage of “dialect” we’re more familiar with).

That’s right, this supposed “dialect” that is Minnanese, which isn’t mutually intelligible with other dialects of Chinese, can be further subdivided into other dialects (technically called “accents,” or “腔,” but their lexicons differ too) that are actually mutually intelligible.

So which dialect of Minnanese does Taiwanese come from? Actually, it’s a mix of multiple: mostly Quanzhou and Zhangzou Minnanese (these are the names of regions), but with a little Japanese sprinkled on top as well.

“Nani?” you may be thinking. “Where does Japanese come into this?”

In time, it comes in from the end of the First Sino-Japanese War to the end of World War II, during Taiwans half-century period of Japanese Occupation; in speech, it comes in through the loan words.

While Minnanese has continued to source the latest, most fashionable new words via literal translations from Mandarin, Taiwanese replaces many of the same loan words with Taiwanese transliterations of the Japanese transliterations of English loan words (that’s a mouthful).

Take the word “lighter” (the fire-starting device) for example. The Mandarin word is “dǎ-huǒ-jī” (“打火機”) — literally: “strike-fire-machine. Likewise, the Minnanese word is “phah-hóe-ki,” which is basically a character-for-character translation of the former.

The Taiwanese word, meanwhile, is “lài-tah” (written “賴打,” though these characters are essentially meaningless) — a Taiwanese transliteration of the Japanese word raitā (ライタ) — which is the Japanese transliteration of the English word lighter.

So Taiwanese has adopted the Japanese fondness for inundating its language with foreign loan words — to name a few: radio, driver, and even the verb for backing up a car (in the second case, the word isn’t even originally from English, but straight from Japanese).

Meanwhile, Mandarin, and Minnanese by extension, tend to build new words by consulting the original meaning of a given foreign word, rather than just imitating the sound and assigning a definition to it (i.e. transliterating). The Mandarin word for “radio,” for example, literally translates to “receive-sound-machine.” And of course there’s no need to borrow an English word for “backing up a car,” it’s just the word for reverse plus the word for car!

Conclusion

I hope this article has answered whatever questions you may have had about the language landscape in Taiwan — and maybe a few questions you’d never thought of as well. And if you have any questions or suggestions, please be sure to comment below.

More than anything, I hope your interest in Taiwanese culture has been piqued. If it has, remember to subscribe below for more of my writing — and look out for my sequel article Can You Get By Only Speaking Taiwanese in Taiwan?, in which I elaborate on what it might be like if you choose to disregard my advice in this article and try to live in Taiwan as a foreigner who only speaks Taiwanese!

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