Taiwan (Traditional Chinese: 台灣 or 臺灣, Simplified Chinese: 台湾 tái wān) is located off the coast of southeastern China, southwest of Okinawa and north of the Philippines. Shaped roughly like a sweet potato, Taiwan is home to more than 23 million people and is one of the most densely populated places in the world. Besides its modern busy cities like Taipei, Taiwan is also known for steep mountains and lush forests.
Languages Spoken in Taiwan
Taiwanese (Minnan), Mandarin, Hakka and other local regional Asian languages are spoken in Taiwan, as well as several aboriginal Austronesian languages.
Mandarin is the lingua franca, but Taiwanese is spoken by some 70% of the population. In the North where there is a large concentration of so-called mainlanders (those whose families came to Taiwan from China in the mid 20th century), most people speak Mandarin as their primary language (although Taiwanese is spoken in abundance), but in the South of the island, Taiwanese is far more common. On the Matsu islands, the dominant Chinese dialect is Mindong or Eastern Min (also known as Hokchiu or Foochowese), which is also spoken in the area around Fuzhou and the coastal areas of northern Fujian.
The Mandarin in Taiwan is a bit different from the official Beijing Dialect; most notably, Taiwan continues to use traditional Chinese characters, not the simplified versions used on the mainland. Taiwanese Mandarin also tends to not differentiate between the S and Sh sounds in Mandarin. All people schooled after 1945 are generally fluent in Mandarin, although it is sometimes not the first language of choice. Mandarin is fairly popular with young people. Some in the older generation are not fluent in Mandarin as they were schooled in Japanese or not at all. Universally the Taiwanese are very accepting of foreigners and react with curiosity and admiration for trying the local tongue. Generally, most people in Taiwan converse using a combination of Mandarin and Taiwanese by code-switching.
The Taiwanese dialect is a variant of Minnan which is similar to the dialect spoken across the Taiwan Strait in Xiamen. While both variants are largely mutually intelligible, they are not identical as Taiwanese has borrowed a substantial number of words from Japanese due to 50 years of Japanese rule, so Minnan speakers from China may have some difficulty understanding certain words.
All public announcements in the transportation system will be made in Mandarin, Taiwanese and Hakka, with the exception of the Matsu islands, where announcements are made in Mandarin and the Mindong dialect.
In Taipei, people generally speak a little English. The children often understand more English than their parents, especially with the emphasis on English language education today, and English being a compulsory subject from mid elementary school onwards. However, attempts to speak Mandarin or Taiwanese will be met with beaming smiles and encouragement, by and large.
Quite a few people, especially in Taipei, are proficient in Japanese due to the high number of Japanese visitors. Staff for tourist attractions such as the Taipei 101, museums, hotels, popular restaurants and airport shops speak Japanese in addition to English, Mandarin and other local languages. In fact, if you are a visitor of East Asian descent who cannot understand Chinese, when a worker realizes this he or she may try speaking to you in Japanese before trying English. In addition to this, some older people still understand and speak Japanese having lived through the fifty year period of Japanese rule.