Hokkien

Hokkien (/ˈhɒkiɛn/ HOK-ee-en, US also /ˈhoʊkiɛn/ HOH-kee-en) is a variety of the Southern Min group of Chinese languages. Native to and originating from the Minnan region in the southeastern part of Fujian in southeastern China, it is also referred to as Quanzhang (Chinese: 泉漳; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Choân-chiang), from the first characters of the urban centers of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou.

Taiwanese Hokkien is one of the national languages in Taiwan. Hokkien is also widely spoken within the overseas Chinese diaspora in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar, Hong Kong, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam, and elsewhere across the world. Mutual intelligibility between Hokkien dialects varies, but they are still held together by ethnolinguistic identity.

In maritime Southeast Asia, Hokkien historically served as the lingua franca amongst overseas Chinese communities of all dialects and subgroups, and it remains today as the most spoken variety of Chinese in the region, including in Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, and Brunei. This applied to a lesser extent to mainland Southeast Asia. As a result of the significant influence and historical presence of its sizable overseas diaspora, certain considerable to ample amounts of Hokkien loanwords are also historically present in the languages it has had historical contact with in its sprachraum, such as Thai. Kelantan Peranakan Hokkien, in northern Malaya of Malaysia, and Hokaglish, spoken sporadically across the Philippines (especially Metro Manila), are also mixed languages, with Hokkien as the base lexifier.