Written Hokkien

Hokkien, a variety of Chinese that forms part of the Southern Min family and is spoken in Southeastern China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, does not have a unitary standardized writing system, in comparison with the well-developed written forms of Cantonese and Standard Chinese (Mandarin).

Nevertheless, vernacular works written in Hokkien are still commonly seen in literature, film, performing arts and music.

During the initial stages of Kuomintang rule in Taiwan, the official Kuomintang language policy was to promote the use of Mandarin Chinese in everyday speech, and to discourage the use of other dialects such as Hokkien and Hakka; this was done in an attempt to promote national linguistic unity, and to promulgate a Chinese identity over that of a Taiwanese one for political reasons.

Pe̍h-ōe-jī (白話字) is a Latin alphabet developed by Western missionaries working in Southeast Asia in the 19th century to write Hokkien.

Current usage of Pe̍h-ōe-jī is restricted to some Taiwanese Christians, non-native learners of Hokkien, and native-speaker enthusiasts in Taiwan.

POJ remains the Taiwanese script with "the richest inventory of written work, including dictionaries, textbooks, literature [...] and other publications in many areas".

Within Robert Cheng's publication of a Han character edition of the Taiwanese Hokkien novella Khó-ài ê Sîu-jîn ('Beloved Enemy') by Lai Jinsheng, the word lô͘-môa, meaning 'gangster' and cognate with Standard Chinese liúmáng (流氓)), is transcribed as 鱸鰻; these two phonetically used characters literally translate to 'perch' and 'eel'.

For example, the Hokkien word bah ('meat') has been reduced to writing via 肉, which has etymologically unrelated colloquial and literary readings (he̍k and jio̍k, respectively).

Another case is the word 'to eat', chia̍h, which is often transcribed in Taiwanese newspapers and media as 呷 (a Mandarin transliteration, xiā, to approximate the Hokkien term), even though its recommended character in dictionaries is 食.

However, in more colloquial styles of Taiwanese Hokkien, the proportion of morphemes written with conventionally accepted characters would drop even lower than 40%.

[1] Likewise, Carstairs Douglas, who has compiled a historical comprehensive 1873 Dictionary on Hokkien as well that later formed the basis of many other dictionaries for Hokkien in the subsequent decades, regarding Chinese characters would argue as well that:[9] There are a very large number of the words for which we have not been able to find the corresponding character at all, perhaps a quarter or a third of the whole; [...] many of them rare, and many difficult to recognize from the great variations that take place between the written and spoken forms of the language.Moreover, unlike Cantonese, Hokkien does not have a universally accepted standardized character set.