minnanhua

Minnan hua or Southern Min is the Chinese dialect of the Southern part of Fujian province, the area around xiamen and quanzhou. A variant is widely spoken in taiwan . where it is referred to as Taiwanese (臺彎話 tâi-oan-ōe). Another variant is also spoken widely in the pilipinals  where it is referred to as Lan Nang Oe  In Singapore, Malaysia and Medan, the Minnan dialects excluding Teochew are called Hokkien (福建話 hok-kiàn-ōe), the Minnan pronunciation of 'Fujian'. 

Note that this list is based on the Xiamen version of Minnan. The dialects spoken in Taiwan, other parts of mainland China, Singapore, Malaysia, Medan and other Chinese communities have some differences, due to borrowing of words from different languages and sometimes language evolution due to relative isolation.

Like other varieties of Chinese, Minnan is tonal; tones must be correct in order to convey the correct meaning. Tone sandhi is particularly common and non-standardised in Minnan, which makes it a little harder to learn than Mandarin, where tone sandhi is standardised, and Cantonese, where tone sandhi is used sparingly.

Like all other Chinese languages and their dialects, Minnan uses Chinese characters but employs its own 'unique' pronunciation. However, it should be noted that similar to japanese kanji, most characters have two or more pronunciations in Minnan, which means that many characters would be pronounced differently depending on context, even if their Mandarin pronunciation remains the same in both instances.

This is partly due to the fact that, because standard written Chinese is based on Mandarin, many words in Minnan are written with characters of the same meaning in standard written Chinese.

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