Hakka is spoken by Hakka. Hokkien is the Hokkien spelling of Fujianhua. Taiwanese is a variant of the Fujian language, otherwise known as southern Min or minnanhua.
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I stand corrected.
Despite the mix-up, Hokkien and Taigi are still different dialects. Hokkien usually refers to the mixture of Tsiang-tsuan languages spoken in South East Asia.
As mentioned before, that’s the name proposed in the 1930s as the name of a sub-language-family. Saying all the languages in this branch is named the same as the sub-language-family is like telling others users of Forumosa communicates in West-Germanic.
Do you mean Hokkien refers to Qiaozhouhua for example?
I’m still confused because even Wiki refers to Taiwanese as a variant of Hokkien
Southern Min
- Hoklo-Taiwanese
- 閩南語; 闽南语
- Bàn-lâm-gú
ABT here (have been here 9+ years) who studied art.
Q1: ABCs are in between foreigners and taiwanese. You won’t really be treated differently unless you r the obnoxious/loud type, anyway I found that in Taipei it matters not how you act bc Taipei is saturated with foreigners anyway so…if your goal is to make friends u can join some FB groups (sports etc.) or art classes even.
Q2: From personal experience it is difficult to get a purely art-related job especially as a newbie. I recommend teaching English first (easy to get hired) and then you can job hunt while surviving/paying the rent.
Meanwhile, build your portfolio like crazy, improve your Chinese too. Be ready for any opportunities that open up, basically. You can post ur art up online/advertise your skills as much as possible.
I’ve seen a few English teaching jobs/art studios where you can teach art related subjects to kids. You can definitely apply for those jobs!
Q3: rare to have a casual opportunity to learn Taiwanese unless you hang around some older people & they don’t mind teaching you a bit… other than that you can pick up some random phrases but will barely use them (if you live north).
Wiki is often wrong on most things Chinese. They’ve got an army making sure stuff about them on the internet is their flavor of wrong.
The branch for Taigi in the language tree looks like this:
- Trans-Himalayan
** Sinitic
*** Old Chinese
**** Proto-Min
***** Min language branch
****** Inland Min
****** Coastal Min
******* Mindong branch (Fuzhou and surrounding areas)
******* Puxian branch (Between Fuzhou and Datian)
******* Qiong-Lei branch (Guangdong, Hainan island)
******* Minnan branch
********- Zhenan (Zhejiang)
********- Datian (Between Puxian and Tsuan-tsiu)
********- Tsuan-tsiu
********- Tong-an
********- Amoy
********- Tsiang-tsiu
********- Taigi (Taiwan)
********- Lan-lang-oe (Philippines)
********- Hokkien (Southeast Asia)
********- Teochew (Guangdong)
Tong-an, Amoy, are already mixtures of Tsuan-tsiu and Tsiang-tsiu. All varieties of Taigi, Lan-lang-oe and Hokkien are different mixtures of Tsuan-tsiu, Tsiang-tsiu, Tong-an, and Amoy, plus different local influences. So Hokkien would have a lot of Malay influences. Lan-lang-oe would have Tagalog influences. Both of those would also have plenty of English influences. Taigi would have Aboriginal, Dutch and Japanese influences.
I think hakka in Southern Taiwan speak Taiwanese for the most part. You still have towns in Pingtung where everyone speaks Hakka and even a few that speak Paiwan.
There’s a saying that if you go to tourist destinations in the mountains, those who speak Mandarin to you are Holo (Taigi speakers), those who speak Taigi to you are Hakka, and those who speak Hakka to you are Aboriginal. More true 10 to 20 years ago, I guess.
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