 Hi, this is Fujian. So today I'm honored to do a brief introduction to Hokkien, one of my mother tongue. I grew up in Fujian province, especially the southern part of the province, which is the orange of Hokkien. And I was educated in the UK for my undergrad and master both in linguistics and applied linguistics. At the moment, I'm a public relation manager in Ireland, so really great to share my experience. So today's presentation will briefly cover the four parts in the review of Hokkien. It's phonology and some examples from morphology and syntax. And lastly, I wrote touch based on the current status of Hokkien from social linguistic point of view. Hokkien, it's also called Minnan language. So Minnan here means the southern part of Fujian. Broadly, a lot of varieties are actually derived from Hokkien with immigrants who migrate from Fujian province to the other province in Minnan, China. For example, in Hainan province, the small island in southern part of China. And then Zhuzhan province, the province, Nostooth, Fujian province. One thing is that if you cross over a mountain and then you meet with another person who speaks Hokkien, you have difficulty understanding him because your accents across the two sides of the mountain will be very different. But in today's presentation, I'm not going to cover all the varieties. I'm just going to cover Hokkien across Fujian province and Taiwan, across Taiwan streets. In the map, the zone here represents Fujian province. The three cities, Zhangzhou, Xuanzhou and Xiamen, strictly speaking, are the orange of Hokkien. And then three more cities Taipei, Tainan and Kaohsiung from Taiwan. So people from Zhangzhou and Xuanzhou are the first two communities that develop Hokkien. My parents are from Zhangzhou, so I spent the majority of my childhood there. But I moved to Xiamen after secondary school, so basically I think my accents are a mix of Zhangzhou accent and Xiamen accent. This year, Hokkien ranks 35 of most spoken languages in the world with 49 million speakers covering both first language speakers and second language speakers. And it's also the most spoken lingua franca among overseas Chinese communities in Asia-Pacific countries like Singapore and Malaysia. So many of my relatives, my andies or my brothers moved over to Singapore without even learning English because they could rely on Hokkien for their daily life. And I think you could come up with the Amoy stir fry sauce in Asian markets here or in Tesco or even dance. So this is a brand from Xiamen. So you can see A-M-O-Y Amoy here is the Hokkien pronunciation of Xiamen. So the food company here uses the Hokkien pronunciation of the city. So actually many linguists or many Hokkien speakers have been debating around the status of Hokkien being classified as a language or as a dialect of Chinese. And one reason that such conversation, such argument is still going on is that actually Hokkien lacks unified or standardized region forms. At the moment, how to write Hokkien is still like a mixture of traditional Chinese characters plus the Taiwanese Juin system. So Juin system is the system that Taiwanese people use to spell Mandarin Chinese spoken in Taiwan. Although there are like lack of unified written forms of Hokkien, in 2009, Taiwan Ministry of Education still published a brochure of Taiwanese thousand mean recommended characters which include 700 high frequency characters as recommendation. And so you could see on the right side, this just saying example that I take from the brochure published by ministry. So you could see, for example, the word here Xia, which means car. Then Qinchong here, which means very much like something or almost like something. And then, for example, Tepang here means sent some characters nailed down by Ministry of Education to be used as the formal characters for Hokkien. The characters are basically selected based on the three principles. Either they borrow traditional characters from Chinese that both the meaning and the pronunciation are the same. For example, Jui here means water. So the character is same as more than Chinese or Tiananmen here means blind. So the two characters are actually borrowed from ancient Chinese characters instead of more than Chinese characters cause like more than Chinese use shi being the two characters here to represent the status of the line. And the two the other two categories are either borrowed Chinese characters of similar meanings, but different pronunciations or similar pronunciations but different meanings. For example, nothing here in Mandarin it's well in Hokkien it's bow, but the meanings are the same or Ma here. So in Hokkien it means also but in Mandarin, I mean it's a modal particle to be put at the end of a sentence. So these are some examples of how the Ministry is choosing the characters to represent Hokkien. Move over to phonology, although there are several systems developed to be used for Hokkien. The mainstream system used at the moment is Taiwanese romanization system which is derived from Taiwan language phonetic alphabet it is published by Taiwan Ministry of Education in 2006. So the timeline here is quite clear the Ministry published the romanization system first in 2006 and three years after they published the characters recommendation brochure. And the other system for example mean then romanization system developed by a professor from Stammen University in 1983 wasn't actually put into massive use in Hokkien, according to TRS. So we have 18 consonants covered basic consonants like bilabial, vela, blotto, and dento. And we have six basic vowels, they are a, i, u, e, u, o. And then in similar to Cantonese like Hokkien also use some consonants as the backs of vowels and even the glotto h to be put at the end at the back position of vowels. And then there are eight tones in Hokkien, but you could see that while this again is taken directly from the brochure published by the Ministry of Education. So you could see here the sixth tone is blank here because like the sixth tone is very much assimilated to the second tone. So basically the two sort of merged a bit of the syllable structures. The common syllable structures again will be consonants to be put in the initial position of the syllables and plus vowels. And then there are three positions of vowels like front, central, and back. You can be put as front and then the other vowels put that central position and then you can see that there are different groupings of vowels like an or an, which is nasalized. And then the other some of the vowels and some consonant vowels will be put at the back position of vowel then plus tones. And two examples of how the vowels are grouped to the word big, so the diverse on here will be plus and then the character for horizontal is and then for tribes on the word which represents magnificent or hero is. So for the eight tones, as we mentioned, the sixth tone is basically the same as the second tone on the right side. You can see there are two examples of the eight tones. So the two examples, the two sentences are actually including like eight tones within one sentence, for example, the whole sentence is. So these are tones from one to a here you can see this means high, high pitch, medium pitch and low pitch. So the first one is a high level. The second tone it falls from high to medium. So day and call is lower. It's short and medium long. So a little bit rise from medium low to medium high and a is very much like day. Again, you can see that tone to and six basically the same and then P is medium and longer and then it's like the higher version of tone for the sentence itself doesn't mean much. So shirt, short, trousers, wide, person, short, nose, straight. The second interesting example here is about animal, eight kinds of animals represent eight kinds of tones. So lion is a tiger, leopard, bull, turtle, the turtle is right above the head of monkey, turtle is bee and monkey, cow, dog, cow. And then elephant, chong, and then deer is lot put it together it will be side, whole, bull, bee, cow, cow, chong, lot. So again, if you refer to illustration here, the differences between tones noticeable. So if there are basic tones, then of course there will be change of tones. I will touch three principles from the Sunday of Tones in Hopkins. So the basic principle is that the last syllable will remain as its basic tones, but the preceding syllable will be changed to higher pitches. So over within a sentence or within a word, then usually the tones, the tone flows are changed from higher pitches to medium or even lower pitches. So let's take the duplicated adjectives as an example. So tone one, move over to seven, seven, move over to three, to two, and to one. And there are two divisions for five, so tone five is either changed to seven, or three. It depends. For example, like the northern part of Taiwan being Taipei. So the accent there will be, tone five will be changed over to three. But in southern part of Taiwan, like the more traditional communities like Thailand or Kaohsiung, tone five will changed over to seven. And then the rest of the tones being like tone four will change to A, A to four, especially with consonant vowels or glottal stop H here. So I'll take these two as example. Smiley in single adjective or in basic tone is chill. So it's tone three, but if you duplicated them, it will be chill, chill. So the preceding syllable, it's tone three has changed to tone two similarly. The change from two to one. So the basic tones of code in Hocken, Ling, so it's tone two. But the preceding, the first Ling is changed to tone one. So it's Ling Ling, again, higher pitch to medium to lower pitch. So the second principle of Sunday will be that pronouns will be assimilated to preceding syllables, which are either one, tone one, three, or seven. For example, here to give you. So the basic tone of you is the and then together it will be only so here the other pronunciation is assimilated to Hocken. The third principle is double sending for syllables ending in the glottal age and having tone four you apply the normal sending twice. So in the diagram here it will be four and change to two and change to one. So for example, that that's it. So it means one to read books. So again, here, the basic tones of that is tone four. And then the principle is applied twice. So it becomes tone one. So a bit of the lexicon. So two famous borrow words in English will be ketchup and tea. So these two words are actually from Hocken. So ketchup in Hocken, it's pronounced as kejong. So kejong. Yeah, it's very much like ketchup in English. But in Mandarin it's qiejiang or fan qiejiang in the word tea. In Hocken it's dae and in Mandarin it's cha. So of course you could tell that the borrowed words in English tea is closer to Hocken dae. Another feature that is more noticeable are the Japanese long words into Hocken spoken in Taiwan, but not Hocken spoken in Fujian province. According to a report from Ministry of Education, there are 170 long words from Japanese, for example. So Hocken borrows like basu from Japanese. But in Hocken spoken in Fujian province it's gong cha. Next I'm going to mention about the logical side. So for example here, so one of the two functions I refer to here. The second example here. So gua e che. So the possessive meaning here. Or it could be representing like peace. So like lun ne lang. So two persons. And then another interesting example is the function words ho. So in it's the traditional meaning like the very like the essence meaning is to give something. For example teacher Lim gives me books. Lim lo su ho gua che. So here ho means to give. But the other two functions will be passive or the preposition of verb. For example, I was beaten by him. Gua ho yi pa. Or I will let you die. Gua ho li si. I illustrated an interesting Taiwan film here. It's a gangster film called Munga. Munga is one of the districts in Taiwan. And then back to like 1970s 80s a lot of young gangsters are united there and then they usually like before fighting they usually like shot out each other saying that I will let you die. It's also another interesting example, a function of ho. And then another example is the plurality of Hocken. So how does Hocken fulfill the function of plurality. So it would be singular pronounced plus plural reference and in Hocken it's in. So the nasalization vowel. So in Hocken, me or I is gua. When it's nasalized guan that means we in plural forms, but excluding you. And then if it's long, again it's nasalized, but it's we including you if you would like to say you in singular form, it's Lee. And then when it's nasalized so lean in plural forms. And then the third pronoun will be E. So when it's nasalized in it means play. Lastly, how is Hocken used in the two main streets in Fujian province in mainland China Mandarin of course is the only official language in 2001. There was a official Mandarin promotion campaign issued by the Ministry of Education in China so basically to promote Mandarin over any other dialects and I think this is somehow linked towards the government's ambition to raise the level of literacy among the population. 2001 was the year I enter primary school and since that year I wasn't allowed to speak Hocken in campus because that's one of the assessments for top students. Not to speak heritage language but speak Mandarin in campus. My parents always try to like remind me the importance of Hocken so at home they always try to like talk me in Hocken only. And but recent years I would say there are some rising trends in protection of heritage languages. Although there are some like reading of Hocken channels or Hocken dramas or TV series in province or TV of Fujian. I would say like there are nowhere close to mainstream TV shows in mainland China. And of course there are ongoing courses and researches and applications developed for Hocken speech for example. This is a screenshot of the Hocken speech production app developed by the Speech Lab in Xiamen University. Things are pretty different and more advanced in Taiwan as Hocken is already said as one of the official languages in Taiwan. So a bit of history here Kuomintang was defeated and escaped over to Taiwan. When the troops and the people they brought from mainland China to Taiwan finally settled down in Taiwan. So there are basic two groups of people the outside province person people who don't speak Hocken. And then the other major community will be the original residents so original province person. These people speak Hocken if they are an ethnic group I mean that means that they are not one of the minorities living up in Highland. So these people are basically Fujian immigrants who migrated to Taiwan since like Ming and Qing dynasty in 1948 to reinforce their power. Only Mandarin Chinese was the official national language and all the other heritage languages were forbidden by Kuomintang government. But like since 1980s 90s and entering the new century we will see a reading of mother tongue education where all elementary school students will be offered to learn their mother tongue and the majority of course being Hocken. Then teacher who would like to teach Hocken in primary or secondary schools would also need to secure their teacher qualification from Ministry of Education as well. So the two examples here is still one of the textbooks in used in primary schools in Taiwan and the title the topic will be Jia Di Ba Gui. So what day is it today? And then nowadays in Taiwan you can also see a lot of like slogans in Hocken. So this sentence is actually in Hocken. So this is the slogan I took from the teacher qualification website. So it means hurry up and submit your application. So these are examples of how Hocken is more developed, more standardized, widely used and taught in Taiwan with the status of being one of the official languages. But still, while I was an exchange student in Taiwan. I encountered many situations where I do I spoke Hocken with the elder generation, for example in bus and then they are very surprised that the as a young person I still speak Hocken. And then one of the grandpa that I met even like even encouraged me saying that while the future of Hocken will be rely on you. So I think they are all worrying the status or the trends of Hocken.