Southern Min
Min méridional
Résumé
Southern Min is a major Chinese language of wider communication in many countries of Southeast Asia with a conservative estimate of seven million speakers in this region, the result of a gradual, centuries-long diaspora from China. This estimate includes the three main varieties of Hokkien, Teochew and Hainanese.
Historically, the core of the Min languages is located in modern day Fujian, a coastal province in the southeast of China. It represents one of the ten branches of the Sinitic taxon within the Sino-Tibetan language family, and accounts for approximately 4%–5% of Sinitic speakers in China, that is, approximately 52 million speakers (Zhang 2012). Southern Min, is in fact, the largest and most widely distributed subgroup of dialects within the Min supergroup, as it is known, extending south into Guangdong province, and over the straits to Taiwan. There are 27 million speakers of varieties of Southern Min on the mainland and a further 15 million in Taiwan.
In Southeast Asia, sizeable communities of these three main varieties of Southern Min speakers are located principally in the countries of Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Hokkien or Fújiànhuà 福建话 has traditionally been the main overseas Chinese language in all these countries, except for Thailand, where the Chaozhou 潮州 or Teochew speakers predominate, reportedly making up more than 80% of the Chinese community.
In this chapter, we thus present an overview of the main features of the grammar of Hokkien, focusing on aspects of its phonology, morphology and syntax which are distinct from standard Mandarin, while highlighting features that it shares with other languages of the Southeast Asian area.
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