Taiwanese kana

It functioned as a phonetic guide to hanzi, much like furigana in Japanese or Zhuyin fuhao in Chinese.

The system is chiefly built for the Amoy dialect of Hokkien spoken in Taiwan, with some consideration for the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou dialects of Hokkien also spoken in Taiwan as well, which descendant speakers of all three of the historical major dialects of Hokkien thrived, developed, and intermixed in Taiwan for centuries producing modern Taiwanese Hokkien and its own specific regional dialects throughout the island (Formosa) and nearby smaller islands (e.g. Pescadores).

Linguistically speaking, however, the syllabary system was cumbersome for a language that has phonology far more complicated than Japanese.

Mapped sounds are mostly similar to katakana in Japanese, with the kana ヤ, ユ, ヨ, ワ, ヰ, and ヱ not used.

Font support for these small kana and for sensible rendering of these uncommon combining sequences is in practice limited; overlines are simulated in the tables above using markup.