Min Nan Chinese

Last Updated: 2020-08-25

Background

Language Family: Sino-Tibetan / Chinese / Min

• Min Nan Chinese is known by many names, including: Southern Min, Hokkien, Fujianese, Taiwanese, and Taiyu. It is spoken primarily in Fujian (a province in Mainland China), Taiwan, and in Chinese diaspora communities throughout Southeast Asia.
• I will primarily focus on Min Nan Chinese spoken in Taiwan, as it is more well-documented than some other varieties.

Phonology

Consonants

• Some dialects have voiced alveolar fricative /z/ instead of voiced alveolar affricate /dz/ (Chuang and Fon 2017, 3).
• Some sources treat /ʔ/ as an allophone of /k/ in coda positions (Chiung 2013, 17–18; Chen 2018, 163). The majority of sources, however, do distinguish between /ʔ/ and /k/, so I have opted to keep the distinction as well.

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Bilabial	Alveolar	Velar	Glottal
Stops (plain)	p b	t	k ɡ	ʔ
Stops (aspirated)	pʰ	tʰ	kʰ
Affricates (plain)		ts dz
Affricates (aspirated)		tsʰ
Fricatives		s		h
Nasals	m	n	ŋ
Approximants		l
Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are voiceless, whereas those on the right are voiced.

Vowels

• There is some ambiguity around /o/, /ə/, and /ɔ/ in Southern Min. Tsay (2014) predominantly argues for /o/ and /ɔ/, with /ə/ appearing in place of /o/ in some dialects (p. 583). Based on this, depending on the dialect, we’d expect the inventory to either include /o/ and /ɔ/ or /ə/ and /ɔ/, but not /o/ and /ə/. However, Chiung (2013) does argue for /o/ and /ə/, with no mention of /ɔ/ (pp. 17-18). Interestingly enough, the vowel inventory table in Ratte (2009), which includes an expected /o/ and /ɔ/, appears to better reflect /o/ and /ə/ (p. 5). This might suggest that /ə/ alternates with /ɔ/ rather than /o/. Regardless, I have chosen to include /o/ and /ɔ/, omitting /ə/.
• Some of the diphthongs listed below don’t appear in the Crúbadán corpus (Shih 2012, 21).

	Front	Central	Back
High	i ĩ		u ũ
Mid	e ẽ		o
Low-Mid			ɔ ɔ̃
Low		a ã
Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are oral, whereas those on the right are nasal.

Diphthongs
/ai/, /au/, /ia/, /io/, /iɔ/, /iu/, /ua/, /ue/, /ui/, /ãĩ/, /ãũ/, /ĩã/, /ĩɔ̃/, /ĩũ/, /ũã/, /ũẽ/, /ũĩ/
Triphthongs
/iau/, /uai/, /ũãĩ/, /ĩãũ/

Alphabet

• Min Nan Chinese can be written both with Chinese characters and Latin script. The Crúbadán corpus appears to prioritize Latin script, specifically the Pe̍h-ōe-jī orthography, which I have chosen to represent below. However, I have included some supplementary notes in the table below on the differences between Pe̍h-ōe-jī and the other most common orthographies.
• ⟨h⟩ represents /ʔ/ in syllable codas and /h/ elsewhere (Tsay 2007, 420). Hyphens indicate syllable boundaries, so representing coda positions in the rules is manageable (Chiung 2013, 17).
• Min Nan Chinese uses diacritics to indicate lexical tone. There are 7 tones, often numbered 1 through 8 (with the number 6 omitted) (Lin 1999, appendix):
  • The 1st tone ˥ is unmarked and indicated by the absence of a following ⟨h⟩, ⟨p⟩, ⟨t⟩, or ⟨k⟩.
  • The 2nd tone ˥˩ is marked with an acute accent (e.g. ⟨ó⟩).
  • The 3rd tone ˨ is marked with a grave accent (e.g. ⟨ò⟩).
  • The 4th tone ˨ is unmarked but indicated with a following (silent) ⟨h⟩, ⟨p⟩, ⟨t⟩, or ⟨k⟩.
  • The 5th tone ˨˦ is marked with a circumflex (e.g. ⟨ô⟩).
  • The 7th tone ˧ is marked with a macron (e.g. ⟨ō⟩).
  • The 8th tone ˥˧ is marked with vertical line (e.g. ⟨o̍⟩).
• Though the 3rd and 4th tones appear to be the same, they are distinct when tone sandhi rules are applied (Chen 2018, 4–5).
• /ɔ/ is represented by either ⟨o⟩ or ⟨o͘⟩. ⟨o⟩ generally precedes ⟨k⟩, ⟨p⟩, ⟨m⟩, and ⟨ng⟩ and ⟨o͘⟩ generally appears everywhere else (“Taiwan Minnanyu Luomazi Pinyin Fang’an Shiyong Shouce” 1997, 54).
• Diphthongs beginning with /u/ are typically written using the grapheme ⟨o⟩ but ⟨u⟩ is also used sometimes. I have accounted for this in the rules.
• Due to the inclusion of a large amount of loanwords in the Crúbadán corpus, bear in mind that much of the transcription is not possible or incorrect (i.e. loanwords may fully transcribe with the rules, but they really shouldn’t).

Grapheme	Phoneme	Comment
a	/a/
b	/b/
e	/e/
g	/ɡ/
h	/h/; /ʔ/	/ʔ/: in syllable codas
i	/i/
j	/dz/
k	/k/
l	/l/
m	/m/
n	/n/
o	/o/; /u/; /ɔ/	/ɔ/: when followed by a stop or nasal; /u/: in some diphthongs and triphthongs
p	/p/
s	/s/
t	/t/
u	/u/
Multigraph
ch	/ts/	written as ⟨ts⟩ in some other orthographies
chh	/tsʰ/	written as ⟨tsh⟩ in some other orthographies
kh	/kʰ/
ng	/ŋ/
ph	/pʰ/
th	/tʰ/
o͘	/ɔ/	written as ⟨oo⟩ in some other orthographies
aⁿ	/ã/
eⁿ	/ẽ/
iⁿ	/ĩ/
oⁿ	/ɔ̃/
uⁿ	/ũ/
aiⁿ	/ãĩ/	written as ⟨ainn⟩ in some other orthographies
iaⁿ	/ĩã/	written as ⟨iann⟩ in some other orthographies
iuⁿ	/ĩũ/	written as ⟨iunn⟩ in some other orthographies
uaⁿ	/ũã/	written as ⟨uann⟩ in some other orthographies
uiⁿ	/ũĩ/	written as ⟨uinn⟩ in some other orthographies
iauⁿ	/ĩãũ/	written as ⟨iaunn⟩ in some other orthographies
uaiⁿ	/ũãĩ/	written as ⟨uainn⟩ in some other orthographies

Syllables Structure

• All consonants except for the glottal stop /ʔ/ occur in syllable onsets. Only nasal consonants, unaspirated voiceless stops, and /ʔ/ are found in syllable codas (Ratte 2009, 4).
• /m/ and /ŋ/ can be realized as syllabic consonants (Tsay 2014, 583).

Misc. Rules

• /l/ is realized as [l] before /a/ and as [d] elsewhere (Chiung 2013, 18).
• Before high front vowel /i/, some affricates and fricatives are realized as their palatal equivalents (Ratte 2009, 4). For example, /s/ and /dz/ are realized as [ɕ] and [dʑ], respectively (Chung 1996 as cited in Shih (2012), p. 12; Chuang and Fon 2017, 3).

References

Chen, Mao-Hsu. 2018. “Tone Sandhi Phenomena in Taiwan Southern Min.” PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania.

Chiung, Wi-vun. 2013. “Missionary Scripts in Vietnam and Taiwan.” Journal of Taiwanese Vernacular.

Chuang, Yu-Ying, and Janice Fon. 2017. “On the Dialectal Variation of Voiced Sibilant /Dz/ in Taiwan Min Young Speakers.” Lingua Sinica.

Chung, R. 1996. “The Segmental Phonology of Southern Min in Taiwan.” The Crane Publishing Co.

Lin, Alvin. 1999. “Writing Taiwanese: The Development of Modern Written Taiwanese.” In. Sino-Platonic Papers 89. University of Pennsylvania.

Ratte, Alexander T. 2009. “A Dialectal and Phonological Analysis of Penghu Taiwanes.” PhD thesis, Williams College.

Shih, Ya-ting. 2012. “Taiwaese-Guoyu Bilingual Children and Adults’ Sibilant Fricative Production Patterns.” PhD thesis, The Ohio State University.

“Taiwan Minnanyu Luomazi Pinyin Fang’an Shiyong Shouce.” 1997. Taiwan Ministry of Education.

Tsay, Jane S. 2007. “Construction and Automatization of a Minnan Child Speech Corpus with Some Research Findings.” Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing.

———. 2014. “A Phonological Corpus of L1 Acquisition of Taiwan Southern Min.” In The Oxford Handbook of Corpus Phonology, edited by Jacques Durand, Ulrike Gut, and Gjert Kristoffersen, 576–87. Oxford University Press.