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Hokkien, a Min Nan variety of Chinese spoken in Southeastern China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, does not have a unitary standardized writing system, in comparison with the well-developed written forms of Cantonese and Mandarin. Since there is no official standardizing body for Hokkien except within Taiwan, there are a wide variety of different methods of writing in Vernacular Hokkien. Nevertheless, vernacular works written in the Hokkien dialect are still commonly seen in literature, film, performing arts and music. ==History== Prior to the modern era, the main written language of China was Classical Chinese, which has grammar and vocabulary based on Old Chinese used in ancient times. Whilst the written form of Chinese remained static, the spoken varieties of Chinese diverged further away. In the early 20th century, reformers in China saw the need for language reform and championed the development of a writing system that allowed Chinese people to write the language the same way they speak, and eventually the vernacular language movement took hold, leading to the development of the standardized written language known as Vernacular Chinese. Because Mandarin Chinese had the largest number of speakers amongst all varieties of Chinese, it was chosen as the basis for the vernacular standard. However, there are various differences between the spoken Chinese varieties, such as Mandarin, Cantonese and Hokkien, such as variations in vocabulary and grammatical particles, meaning that Vernacular Chinese is less suited for writing texts spoken in Hokkien. Various expressions in Hokkien, as with other Chinese varieties, do not have associated Chinese characters in Vernacular Chinese, meaning that some words originally could not be written. In the case of Cantonese, a vernacular system specifically for writing Cantonese was developed in Hong Kong, then a British colony. On the other hand, since Hokkien was never standardized, different people began to use various separate methods to solve the issue of Hokkien-specific words, where such words would eventually be written using either a Latin-based script, phonetically using bopomofo, or through the use of a Chinese character chosen phonetically with no relation to the original word via meaning.〔 Varieties of Hokkien are spoken in Fujian Province in mainland China, Taiwan, Chinese communities in Malaysia, Singapore, and other Chinese expatriate communities. Initially there was no effort by the government of the Republic of China on Taiwan, nor other governments, to create a standardized Hokkien vernacular. During the initial stages of Kuomintang rule in Taiwan, the official Kuomintang language policy was to promote the use of Mandarin Chinese in everyday speech, and to discourage the use of other dialects such as Hokkien and Hakka; this was done in an attempt to promote national linguistic unity, and to promulgate a Chinese identity over that of a Taiwanese one for political reasons. Following the Taiwan localization movement, education and everyday usage of spoken and written Hokkien by local Taiwanese became more widely used. A Chinese character online dictionary for Hokkien was released in 2008 by the ROC Ministry of Education. Nevertheless, within literature circles there is still ongoing debate over which writing system should be used to write Taiwanese Hokkien, and controversy exists between the various rival systems currently used to write Hokkien. Today usage of languages remains a politicized issue in Taiwan. In Singapore, in an effort to promote Mandarin as a lingua franca amongst ethnic Chinese through the Speak Mandarin Campaign, usage of other varieties such as Hokkien is discouraged. Today, whilst Taiwanese Hokkien speakers speak in their variety of Hokkien, they would officially write in Vernacular Chinese for formal documents, and only use vernacular Hokkien writings during informal occasions. In Taiwan, vernacular Chinese is used for academic writings, newspaper articles and television news report headlines, whilst Hokkien writings are used in novels, songs lyrics, film subtitles, theatrical and opera scripts, and in informal communication. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Written Hokkien」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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