Writing systems for Taiwanese

A widely held belief about written Chinese is that it is the unified language which brings together the disparate 'dialects' of Chinese. In fact, written Chinese is a form of standardized Mandarin and consequently is like learning a foreign language for speakers of Chinese variants other than Mandarin.

Over the years a number of methods have been devised for writing in Taiwanese. These systems fall in to three basic categories: character-based, romanizations, and other phonetic scripts. Historically the most popular has been romanization, particularly the Peh-oe-ji system. However, many modern authors now use mixed-orthography Taiwanese, which combines Chinese characters and romanization.

Within these categories there are a number of different systems. If you'd like to go directly to the individual pages on particular systems, you can choose them from this list: