If you don't know much about this island, chances are your answer would be "Taiwanese."
And you would have guessed wrong.
For the sake of brevity, I won't go into details about the history or politics of Taiwan vs. China. What I'm going to attempt here is to address some general (but totally understandable) misconceptions some people may have about Taiwan, and other trivia on the languages used there.
- Mandarin is the official language spoken in Taiwan, written in Traditional Chinese characters.
- The "Taiwanese" language in Taiwan refers to a variant of the Fujian dialect. It wasn't until about 10 years ago that the government in Taiwan realized the importance of revitalizing this second-most spoken language on the island. The written form of "Taiwanese" is still in development and therefore not widely applied like the way Cantonese is.
- The third-most spoken language in Taiwan is the Hakka language, which shares some similarities with Cantonese.
- There are a dozen or so indigenous languages in Taiwan spoken by the Taiwanese aborigines. Faced with the danger of extinction, quite a few of these languages are undergoing a revival similar to that of the Taiwanese language, with varying degrees of success in their progresses.
- This has nothing to do with the languages in Taiwan, but is worth mentioning because of the confusion so many have had: Taiwan≠Thailand.
Please translate responsibly.
