The Taiwanese Language
Taiwanese is a Chinese language spoken by two-thirds of the population of Taiwan. It forms one dialect of the group known as Southern Min, which has a total of around forty-nine million native speakers, making it the twenty-first most widely-spoken language in the world.
However, there is very little information in English available on the internet (or in print, for that matter) about Southern Min in general, and Taiwanese in particular - a lack that Tailingua is designed to remedy, at least in part.
The standard romanization used for Taiwanese throughout this site is tone-marked Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ) - Taiwanese words appear in purple. Some computers may not be set up to automatically display POJ correctly - an option is on the way soon to offer visitors a choice of romanizations and make sure everyone can get the most out of the site.
Some Mandarin words are also used on this site, which are in orange to distinguish them from the Taiwanese words. The international Hanyu Pinyin system of romanization is used for all Mandarin words.
