Taiwanese Voice Over Agency

Everything you never wanted to know about the Taiwanese language

The Taiwanese alphabet
The Taiwanese alphabet is called Hokkien. It has 26 letters from Chinese Mandarin and another 23 letters created for the Taiwanese language. That makes 49 letters in total.

National Languages
Taiwan has four national languages. They are Taiwanese, Chinese Mandarin, Hakka and an aboriginal language called Formosan. You’ll also hear English in Taiwan, it’s not an official language but it is widely spoken.

Feng Shui
Taiwanese people are strong believers of Feng Shui. When they purchase a new property, they often pay for a specialist Feng Shui expert to come round and advise them where they should orientate their doors and furniture for good Feng Shui.

Tick Tock
It is bad luck to buy a person a clock in Taiwan. It is said to indicate that you want the person dead. If you do buy a clock by mistake you can retract the bad luck by letting the receiver ‘buy’ the clock from you for a token amount. That way the clock has been purchased and isn’t a gift.

Out with the rubbish
If you are staying in Taiwan, you will be expected to take out your rubbish and place it in the rubbish truck yourself. You can hear the truck coming into your area because it plays Beethoven’s Fur Elise as it travels along the street.

The Ghost Festival
In Taiwan they believe that there island is haunted during the month of August and so they hold the Ghost Festival, or Zhongyuan Festival. Rituals are performed to venerate their ancestors and sometimes food is served at an empty place where a dead relative once sat.

Old Lighthouses
There are five lighthouses dotted around the Taiwanese island. The oldest is in Wai’an village, Xiyu township on Penghu. It was constructed as a military outpost in 1776. It is only 11 meters tall but when it was a working lighthouse it protected ships travelling between China and Taiwan. It’s now a visitor attraction.

The Black Bear
Taiwan has its own type of bear. It’s called the black bear and it’s an endangered species. It lives amongst the forests of the Taiwan mountainous regions. It is the largest land animal and the only native bear in Taiwan.

A rainy country
The average rainfall in Taipei is 94 inches a year, compare that to London which only has 23 inches a year. During the rainy season the Taiwanese joke that they have raindrops the size of plums and they call this season plum rain season.

Pick the date
It is unusual for a Taiwanese couple to choose their own wedding date. Normally the consult an astrologer to tell them what date is best for their wedding so that they can avoid bad luck.

A short history on the Taiwanese language

Taiwanese (also known as Taiwanese Hokkien) is a variety of Hokkien – a Chinese dialect – that is spoken in Taiwan. As such, it belongs to the Min Nan group of the Chinese branch of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Whether Taiwanese is a separate language within this family is a matter of some debate.

Taiwanese is close to Amoy, and similarly based on a mixture of Zhangzhou and Quanzhou speech. It is largely mutually intelligible with other dialects of Hokkien spoken in China and other parts of Southeast Asia, and to a lesser extent with other Min Nan languages such as Teochew. It is not mutually intelligible with Mandarin Chinese.

From the early 17th century onwards, Taiwan has been settled by waves of Chinese people migrating from mainland China. Many of the earlier settlers came from regions of Min Nan (southern Fujian), and they brought their native Hokkien language with them.

The Taiwanese language evolved over the years from a mixture of Hokkien, Hakka (another Chinese dialect), and the Formosan languages that are indigenous to Taiwan. A number of Japanese loanwords have also been incorporated, as a result of half a century of Japanese rule (beginning in 1895).

Which countries have Taiwanese as a national language?

Taiwanese is not an official language in Taiwan – however it does have de facto status as it is a statutory language for public transport announcements. Taiwan’s official language is Mandarin Chinese.

How many people speak Taiwanese as their first language?

It is estimated that over 15 million people speak Taiwanese as their first language – around 70% of the population of Taiwan.

Did you know…

• Because of the widespread popularity of Taiwanese-produced media, Taiwanese Hokkien has become the most influential of all the Hokkien dialects. Along with Amoy, the Taiwanese prestige dialect is regarded as standard Hokkien.
• Many elderly people in Taiwan still speak Japanese (along with Taiwanese), as a result of going through the Japanese-led education system in the first half of the 20th century.

The Taiwanese economy

Taiwan is one of the ‘Tiger’ economies of Southeast Asia, along with Singapore, South Korea and Hong Hong – all countries with high-growth economies.

It has a developed capitalist economy ranked as the 18th largest in the world based on GDP, and the 19th largest based on PPP. The service sector makes up 73% of Taiwan’s economy, and the country is a major exporter of electronics and other high-tech products.

Taiwan is a member of the Asian Development Bank, the World Trade Organisation and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation.