Amoy 廈門話 / 厦门话 Ē-mn̂g-ōe
Spoken in:	People's Republic of China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Philippines, Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese), Japan (due to large Taiwanese community in Tokyo-Yokohama Metropolitan Area), and other areas of Min Nan and Hoklo settlement
Region:	Southern Fujian province
Total speakers:	over 10 million (no recent data)
Language family:	Sino-Tibetan  Chinese   Min    Min Nan     Amoy
Official status
Official language in:	None
Regulated by:	None
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	zh
ISO 639-2:	chi (B)	zho (T)
ISO 639-3:	nan
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Amoy (Xiamen) is a language/dialect which originally comes from Southern Fujian province (in Southeast China), in the area centered around the city of Xiamen. It is highly similar to Taiwanese, and is widely known as Hokkien in Southeast Asia. Amoy is widely considered to be the prestige dialect within Min Nan. For this reason, Amoy is often simply called Min Nan.

Spoken Amoy and Taiwanese are both mixtures of Zhangzhou and Quanzhou speech. As such, they are very closely aligned phonologically. However, there are some subtle differences between the two, as a result of physical separation and other historical factors. The lexical differences between the two are slightly more pronounced. Generally speaking, Amoy, Quanzhou, Zhangzhou, Taiwanese, and the Hokkien spoken in Southeast Asia are mutually intelligible.

History

In 1842, as a result of the signing of the Treaty of Nanking, Xiamen (Amoy) was designated as a trading port. Xiamen and Gulangyu islands rapidly developed, which resulted in a large influx of people from neighboring areas such as Quanzhou and Zhangzhou. The mixture of these various accents have formed the basis for Amoy. Over the last several centuries, there have been a large number of descendents from these areas who have migrated to Taiwan. Eventually, Amoy became popularly known as Taiwanese among the locals living there. Just like British and American English, there are subtle lexical and phonologic differences between Taiwanese and Amoy, however these differences do not generally pose any barriers to communication. Amoy speakers also spread to Southeast Asia, where it became widely known as Hokkien.

Special characteristics

Spoken Amoy preserves many of the sounds and words from Middle Chinese. However, the vocabulary of Amoy was also influenced in its early stages by the languages of the Minyue peoples.^[1] Spoken Amoy is known for its use of nasalization. Unlike English or Mandarin, Amoy also distinguishes between unaspirated voiceless and unaspirated voiced initial consonants. In less technical terms, native Amoy speakers have little difficulty in hearing the difference between the following syllables:

Accents

Amoy pronunciation is based on two main accents: Quanzhou and Zhangzhou. The following table provides five words that illustrate some of the more commonly seen sound shifts:

Tones

Amoy is similar to other Min Nan dialects/languages in that it makes use of 5 tones, which are reduced to 2 in checked syllables. The tones are traditionally numbered from one through eight, but those numbered 2 and 6 are identical in most regions.

Tone sandhi

Amoy has extremely extensive tone sandhi (tone-changing) rules: in an utterance, only the last syllable pronounced is not affected by the rules. What an 'utterance' is, in the context of this language, is an ongoing topic for linguistic research. For the purpose of this article, an utterance may be considered a word, a phrase, or a short sentence. The diagram illustrates the rules that govern the pronunciation of a tone on each of the syllables affected (that is, all but the last in an utterance):

Literary versus vernacular readings

Like other varieties of Min Nan, Amoy has complex rules for literary and vernacular readings of Chinese characters. For example, the character for big 大 has a vernacular reading of tōa (IPA: [tua˧˧]), but a literary reading of tāi (IPA: [tai˧˧]). Because of the loose nature of the rules governing when to use a given pronunciation, a student of the language must often simply memorize the appropriate reading for a word on a case by case basis. For single syllable words, it is more common to use the vernacular pronunciation. This situation is comparable to the on and kun readings of Japanese.

The vernacular readings are generally thought to predate the literary readings; the literary readings appear to have evolved from middle Chinese. The following chart illustrates some of the more commonly seen sound shifts:

Vocabulary

For further information, read the article: Swadesh list

The Swadesh word list, developed by the linguist Morris Swadesh, is used as a tool to study the evolution of languages. It contains a set of basic words which can be found in every language.

• The Amoy Min Nan Swadesh list
• The Sino-Tibetan Swadesh lists (Standard Mandarin, Cantonese, Amoy, Teochew, Hakka, Burmese)

Grammar

Amoy grammar shares a similar structure to other Chinese dialects, although it is slightly more complex than Standard Mandarin. Moreover, equivalent Amoy and Mandarin particles are usually not cognates.

Complement constructions

As the following example shows, Amoy complement constructions are roughly parallel to Standard Mandarin, with some exceptions (in red).

• view chart in simplified Chinese script
• view chart in traditional Chinese script

Negative particles

Negative particle syntax is parallel to Standard Mandarin about 70% of the time. Here is a fairly complete description (parallel usage to Mandarin is bolded):

1. m̄ - is not + noun (Mandarin: bù)

   i m̄-sī gún lāu-bú. She is not my mother.

2. m̄ - does not + verb/will not + verb (Mandarin: bù)

   i m̄ lâi. He does not come./He will not come.

3. verb + bē + particle - is not able to (Mandarin: bù)

   góa khòaⁿ-bē-tio̍h. I am not able to see it.

4. bē + helping verb - can not (opposite of ē is able to/Mandarin: bù)

   i bē-hiáu kóng Eng-gú. He can't speak English.

   • helping verbs that go with bē

     bē-sái - is not permitted to (Mandarin: bù kěyǐ)

     bē-hiáu - does not know how to (Mandarin: búhuì)

     bē-tàng - not able to (Mandarin: bùnéng)

5. mài - do not (imperative) (Mandarin: bié)

   mài kóng! Don't speak!

6. bô - do not + helping verb (Mandarin: bù)

   i bô beh lâi. He is not going to come.

   • helping verbs that go with bô:

     beh - want to + verb; will + verb

     ài - must + verb

     èng-kai - should + verb

     kah-ì - like to + verb

7. bô - does not have (Mandarin: méiyǒu)

   i bô chîⁿ. He does not have any money.

8. bô - did not (Mandarin: méiyǒu)

   i bô lâi. He did not come.

9. bô - is not + adjective (Mandarin: bù)

   i bô súi. She is not beautiful.

   • An exception can be made for hó (good), m̄-hó = bô-hó - not good.

• view negative particles in simplified Chinese script
• view negative particles in traditional Chinese script

Cheat sheet

Here is an English/Amoy/Mandarin conversion list for some of the more commonly seen particles:

• view chart in simplified Chinese script
• view chart in traditional Chinese script

Romanization

• A number of Romanization schemes have been devised for Amoy. Pe̍h-ōe-jī is one of the oldest and best established. However, the Taiwanese Language Phonetic Alphabet has become the Romanization of choice for many of the recent textbooks and dictionaries from Taiwan.

• Note: The bopomofo extended characters in the zhuyin row require a UTF-8 font capable of displaying Unicode values 31A0–31B7 (ex. Code2000 true type font).

See also

• Languages of China
• Min Nan
• Quanzhou
• Zhangzhou
• Taiwanese
• Penang Hokkien
• Lan-nang
• Languages of Taiwan
• Chinese in Singapore
• Amoy Min Nan Swadesh list
• Sino-Tibetan Swadesh lists

References

1. ^ "The Ancient Minyue People and the Origins of the Min Nan Language" (in Mandarin). Jinjiang Government website. Retrieved on 2008-04-12.

Sources

• To understand the beauty of Taiwanese (愛說台語五千年 -- 台語聲韻之美) (in Mandarin/Taiwanese). ISBN 9789867101471. 
• A vocabulary and sentence structure comparison between Mandarin, Taiwanese and English (華台英詞彙句式對照集) (in Mandarin/Taiwanese/English). ISBN 9571138223. 
• Papers on Southern Min Syntax (閩南語語法研究試論) (in Mandarin/Min Nan/English). ISBN 9571509485. 

External links

Amoy (linguistics) edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• 台語-華語線頂辭典, Amoy-Mandarin on-line dictionary
• 臺灣本土語言互譯及語音合成系統, Amoy-Hakka-Mandarin on-line conversion
• listen to the news in Amoy Min Nan (site is in Chinese script)
• Database of Pronunciations of Chinese Dialects (in English, Chinese and Japanese)
• Glossika - Chinese Languages and Dialects
• Voyager - Spacecraft - Golden Record - Greetings From Earth - Amoy, includes translation and sound clip

  (The voyager clip says: Thài-khong pêng-iú, lín-hó. Lín chia̍h-pá--bē? Ū-êng, to̍h lâi gún chia chē--ô·! 太空朋友，恁好。恁食飽未？有閒著來阮遮坐哦!)