Hokkien ( ) is a variety of Chinese. It is a Southern Min language native to and originating from the Minnan region, in the southeastern part of Fujian in southeastern mainland China. It is also referred to as Quanzhang (), from the first characters of the urban centers of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou.
Taiwanese Hokkien is one of the national languages in Taiwan. Hokkien is also widely spoken within the overseas Chinese diaspora in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar, Hong Kong, Thailand, Brunei and elsewhere across the world. The mutual intelligibility between Hokkien dialects varies, but they are still held together by ethnolinguistic identity.
In maritime Southeast Asia, Hokkien historically served as the lingua franca amongst overseas Chinese communities of all dialects and subgroups, and it remains today as the most spoken variety of Chinese in the region, including in Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia. This applied to a lesser extent to mainland Southeast Asia. The Betawi Malay language, spoken by some five million people in and around the Indonesian capital Jakarta, includes numerous Hokkien loanwords due to the significant influence of the Chinese Indonesian diaspora, most of whom are of Hokkien ancestry and origin.
Names
Various populations of Hokkien speakers refer to the language as:
(, literally 'Southern Min language') in China and Taiwan
(, literally 'Taiwanese language') or (, literally 'Hoklo Speech') in Taiwan
(, literally 'Our people's language') in the Philippines
/ (, literally 'Hokkien language') in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Brunei
In parts of Southeast Asia and in the English-speaking communities, the term Hokkien () is etymologically derived from the Southern Min pronunciation for Fujian (), the province from which the language hails. In Southeast Asia and the English press, Hokkien is used in common parlance to refer to the Southern Min dialects of southern Fujian, and does not include reference to dialects of other Sinitic branches also present in Fujian such as the Fuzhou language (Eastern Min), Pu-Xian Min, Northern Min, Gan Chinese or Hakka.
The word Hokkien first originated from Walter Henry Medhurst when he published the Dictionary of the Hok-këèn Dialect of the Chinese Language, According to the Reading and Colloquial Idioms in 1832. This is considered to be the earliest English-based Hokkien Dictionary and the first major reference work in POJ, although the romanization within was quite different from the modern system. In this dictionary, the word "Hok-këèn" was used. In 1869, POJ was further revised by John Macgowan in his published book A Manual Of The Amoy Colloquial. In this book, "këèn" was changed to "kien" as "Hok-kien" and from then on, the word "Hokkien" began to be used more often.
Historically, Hokkien was also known as Amoy, after the Hokkien name for Xiamen, the principal port in southern Fujian during the Qing dynasty, as one of the five ports opened to foreign trade by the Treaty of Nanking. By 1873, Rev. Carstairs Douglas would publish his "Chinese–English Dictionary of the Vernacular or Spoken Language of Amoy, With the Principal Variations of the Chang-chew and Chin-chew Dialects." where he would call the language the "Language of Amoy" or "The Amoy Vernacular" and by 1883, Rev. John Macgowan would publish another dictionary, the "English and Chinese Dictionary of the Amoy Dialect". Due to confusion with differentiating the Amoy dialect of Hokkien from Xiamen with the general language itself, many proscribe this usage though many old books and media may still be observed to be labeled with "Amoy" to refer to the language in general, besides the specific dialect of Hokkien from Xiamen.
Geographic distribution
Hokkien is spoken in the southern seaward quarter of Fujian, southeastern Zhejiang, as well as the eastern part of Namoa in China; Taiwan; Metro Manila, Metro Cebu, Metro Davao and other cities in the Philippines; Singapore; Brunei; Medan, Riau and other cities in Indonesia; and from Perlis, Kedah, Penang and Taiping in Malaysia.