Minnan phrasebook

Minnan (閩南話/闽南话 Bân-lâm-ōe) is the main language of Southern Fujian and has spread from there to other areas. It is known by several different names: in mainland China, it is Minnan hua (South Fujian speech), in Taiwan, Taiwanese (臺語 or 台語 Tâi-gí), in most of Southeast Asia, Hokkien or Hokkian (福建話 or 福建话 Hok-kiàn-ōe or Hok-kiàn-ōa, used widely in Indonesia) from the Minnan word for Fuijan, and in the Philippines, the overseas Chinese call it "Our People's Language" (咱儂話/咱侬话 Lán-lâng-ōe). Manila, Medan and Penang are examples of Southeast Asian cities with large and influential Hokkien-speaking communities, such that most ethnic Chinese (and a good number of non-Chinese) can converse in Hokkien regardless of their native language/dialect. It is one of the official languages of Taiwan.

Each of the major cities of Fujian's Minnan-speaking areas — Xiamen, Quanzhou and Zhangzhou — as well as each part of Taiwan and each overseas region where the language is spoken has its own slightly different variant. The overseas variants are influenced by other local languages; Taiwanese has some Japanese loanwords, Hokkien has some from Indonesian and Javanese, Teochew and Cantonese, and so on. All these variants, however, are mutually intelligible to a great extent. The prestige dialect of Minnan is the Xiamen dialect in mainland China, and the Tainan dialect in Taiwan.

Minnan is not mutually intelligible with Mandarin, Cantonese or other Chinese "dialects", not even with the other Min (Fujian) languages such as Mindong (Fuzhou Hua), Minbei and Puxian. Languages classified as closely related to Minnan are Teochew, which has only partial mutual intelligibility with Minnan, and Hainanese which has almost none.

All Chinese languages, in general, use the same set of characters in reading and writing in formal settings, based on standard Mandarin. This means that a Minnan speaker and a Mandarin speaker cannot talk to each other, but either can generally read what the other writes. However, when writing Minnan in a more colloquial form, there are significant lexical differences from standard Mandarin, sometimes necessitating the use to extra non-standard characters, meaning that a Mandarin speaker will not be able to make everything out. Use the Chinese phrasebook for reading most writing in Minnan-speaking areas.

Mandarin is an official language in China, Taiwan and Singapore, and widely used in education and media. Today, most Minnan speakers in mainland China and Taiwan also speak Mandarin, and most foreign residents of those areas choose to learn Mandarin rather than Minnan.

Minnan is written with simplified Chinese characters in mainland China, and with traditional Chinese characters in Taiwan. In this phrasebook, where differences exist, traditional characters are written before the slash (/), and simplified characters after the slash.