Hokkien is also widely spoken within the overseas Chinese diaspora in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar, Hong Kong, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam, and elsewhere across the world.

The term Hokkien was first used by Walter Henry Medhurst in his 1832 Dictionary of the Hok-këèn Dialect of the Chinese Language, According to the Reading and Colloquial Idioms, considered to be the earliest English-based Hokkien dictionary and the first major reference work in POJ, though its romanization system differs significantly from modern POJ.

[13] Due to possible conflation between the language as a whole with its Xiamen dialect, many proscribe referring to the former as "Amoy", a usage that is more commonly found in older media and some conservative institutions.

Hokkien originated in the southern area of Fujian province, an important center for trade and migration, and has since become one of the most common Chinese varieties overseas.

There are many Min Nan speakers among overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, as well as in the United States (Hoklo Americans).

Many ethnic Han Chinese emigrants to the region were Hoklo from southern Fujian, and brought the language to what is now Myanmar, Vietnam, Indonesia (the former Dutch East Indies) and present day Malaysia and Singapore (formerly Malaya and the British Straits Settlements).

The Modern Representative form of Hokkien spoken around the Taiwanese city of Tainan heavily resembles the Tung'an dialect.

Douglas (1873/1899) also noted that Formosa (Taiwan) has been settled mainly by emigrants from Amoy (Xiamen), Chang-chew (Zhangzhou), and Chin-chew (Quanzhou).

Several parts of the island are usually found to be specially inhabited by descendants of such emigrants, but in Taiwan, the various forms of the dialects mentioned prior are a good deal mixed up.

Douglas (1873) notes that Singapore and the various Straits Settlements [such as Penang and Malacca], Batavia [Jakarta] and other parts of the Dutch possessions [Indonesia], are crowded with emigrants, especially from the Chang-chew [Zhangzhou] prefecture; Manila and other parts of the Philippines have great numbers from Chin-chew [Quanzhou], and emigrants are largely scattered in like manner in Siam [Thailand], Burmah [Myanmar], the Malay Peninsula [peninsular Malaysia], Cochin China [Southern Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos], Saigon [Ho Chi Minh City], &c. In many of these places there is also a great mixture of emigrants from Swatow [Shantou].

There are also Hokkien speakers scattered throughout other parts of Indonesia—including Jakarta and the island of Java—Thailand, Myanmar, East Malaysia, Brunei, Cambodia, and Southern Vietnam, though there is notably more Teochew and Swatow background among descendants of Chinese migrants in Peninsular Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Southern Vietnam.

The Jìn court fled from the north to the south, causing large numbers of Han Chinese to move into Fujian region.

[23][24] In the early 17th century, Spanish friars in the Philippines produced materials documenting the Hokkien varieties spoken by the Chinese trading community who had settled there in the late 16th century:[23][25] These texts appear to record a primarily Zhangzhou-descended dialect with some attested Quanzhou and Teo-Swa features, from the old port of Yuegang (modern-day Haicheng, an old port that is now part of Longhai).

[32] Chinese scholars produced rhyme dictionaries describing Hokkien varieties at the beginning of the 19th century:[33] Rev.

On the other hand, the variants spoken in Singapore and Malaysia have a substantial number of loanwords from Malay and to a lesser extent, from English and other Chinese varieties, such as the closely related Teochew and some Cantonese.

[47] Although the Min Nan varieties of Teochew and Amoy are 84% phonetically similar including the pronunciations of un-used Chinese characters as well as same characters used for different meanings,[citation needed] and 34% lexically similar,[citation needed], Teochew has only 51% intelligibility with the Tong'an Hokkien|Tung'an dialect (Cheng 1997)[who?]

Hokkien dialects preserve certain grammatical reflexes and patterns reminiscent of the broad stage of Archaic Chinese.

"伊i這摆chit-mái佇tī厝chhù裡lāi咧leh睏。khùn.伊 這摆 佇 厝 裡 咧 睏。i chit-mái tī chhù lāi leh khùn.

"The particle mài (莫，【勿爱】), a concatenation of m-ài (毋愛) is used to negate imperative commands: 莫mài講！kóng莫 講！mài kóng"Don't speak!

"The particle put (不) is used infrequently, mostly found in literary compounds and phrases: 伊i真chin不孝。put-hàu伊 真 不孝。i chin put-hàuThey are really unfilial.

The bulk of literary readings (文讀; bûn-tha̍k), based on pronunciations of the vernacular during the Tang dynasty, are mainly used in formal phrases and written language (e.g. philosophical concepts, given names, and some place names), while the colloquial (or vernacular) ones (白讀; pe̍h-tha̍k) are usually used in spoken language, vulgar phrases and surnames.

The pronounced divergence between literary and colloquial pronunciations found in Hokkien dialects is attributed to the presence of several strata in the Min lexicon.

From the mid-19th century onwards, Xiamen slowly developed to become the political and economical center of the Hokkien-speaking region in China.

From the mid-19th century until the end of World War II, [citation needed] western diplomats usually learned Amoy as the preferred dialect if they were to communicate with the Hokkien-speaking populace in China or Southeast Asia.

The retreat of the Republic of China to Taiwan in 1949 drove party leaders to seek to both culturally and politically assimilate the islanders.

A number of universities in Taiwan also offer Taiwanese degree courses for training Hokkien-fluent talents to work for the Hokkien media industry and education.

One example is the Doctrina Christiana en letra y lengua china, written around 1593 by the Spanish Dominican friars in the Philippines.

Another is a Ming dynasty script of a play called Tale of the Lychee Mirror (1566), the earliest known Southern Min colloquial text, which mixes both Hokkien and Teochew.

In 2007, the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China formulated and released a standard character set to overcome these difficulties.

[70] In 2002, the Taiwan Solidarity Union, a party with about 10% of the Legislative Yuan seats at the time, suggested making Taiwanese a second official language.