Languages of Taiwan
The language with the most native speakers in Taiwan is Taiwanese Hokkien spoken by about 70% of the population.Hokkien is a topolect of the varieties of Chinese originating in southern Fujian and is spoken by many overseas Chinese throughout Southeast Asia. Recently there has been a growing use of Taiwanese Hokkien in the broadcast media.
Members of the Hakka Chinese subgroup, who are concentrated in several counties throughout Taiwan, often speak Hakka Chinese. The Formosan languages are the ethnic languages of the aboriginal tribes of Taiwan, comprising about 2% of the island's population. It's common for young and middle-aged Hakka and aboriginal people to speak Mandarin and Hokkien better than, or to the exclusion of, their ethnic languages.
Persons who emigrated from mainland China after 1949 (12% of the population) mostly speak Mandarin Chinese.Standard Chinese is the official language and is almost universally spoken and understood. It has been the only officially sanctioned medium of instruction in schools in Taiwan since the late 1940s, following the handover of Taiwan to the government of the Republic of China in 1945.
In 1945, following the end of World War II, Standard Chinese ("Mandarin") was introduced as the official language and made compulsory in schools. (Before 1945, Japanese was the official language and taught in schools.) Since then, Mandarin has been established as a lingua franca among the various groups in Taiwan: the majority Taiwanese-speaking Hoklo (Hokkien), the Hakka who have their own spoken language, Mainlanders whose native tongue may be any Chinese variant in mainland China, and the aboriginals who speak aboriginal languages.
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