Amoy dialect in the context of "Taiwanese kana"

Pe̍h-ōe-jī (/peɪweɪˈdʒiː/ pay-way-JEE; Taiwanese Hokkien: 白話字, pronounced [pe˩ˀ o̯e̞˩ d͡ʑi˧] , lit. 'vernacular writing'; POJ), also known as Church Romanization, is an orthography used to write variants of Hokkien Southern Min, particularly Taiwanese and Amoy Hokkien. It is widely employed as one of the writing systems for Southern Min. During its peak, it had hundreds of thousands of readers.

Developed by Western missionaries working among the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia in the 19th century and refined by missionaries working in Xiamen and Tainan, it uses a modified Latin alphabet and some diacritics to represent the spoken language. After initial success in Fujian, POJ became most widespread in Taiwan and, in the mid-20th century, there were over 100,000 people literate in POJ. A large amount of printed material, religious and secular, has been produced in the script, including Taiwan's first newspaper, the Taiwan Church News.

Min is a broad group of Sinitic languages with about 75 million native speakers. These languages are spoken in China in a region centered on modern Fujian Province, stretching from Southern Zhejiang to Eastern Guangdong, as well as on Hainan Island and the neighbouring Leizhou Peninsula. Min varieties are also spoken in Taiwan, and by a large international diaspora, particularly in Southeast Asia. The name Min is shared with the Min River in Fujian, and is also the abbreviated name of Fujian Province. Min languages are not mutually intelligible with one another nor with other varieties of Chinese.

The most widely spoken variety of Min outside of China is Hokkien, a variety of Southern Min which has its origin in Southern Fujian. Amoy Hokkien is the prestige dialect of Hokkien in Fujian, while a majority of Taiwanese people speak a dialect called Taiwanese Hokkien or simply Taiwanese. The majority of Chinese Singaporeans, Chinese Malaysians, Chinese Filipinos, Chinese Indonesians, Chinese Thais, and Chinese Cambodians are of Southern Min-speaking background (particularly Hokkien and Teochew), although some of these communities are shifting to national or regional languages. Communities speaking Eastern Min, Pu-Xian Min, Haklau Min, Leizhou Min, and Hainanese can also be found in parts of the Chinese diaspora, such as in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia.

A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the soft palate (or velum) so that the air flow escapes through the nose and the mouth simultaneously, as in the French vowel /ɑ̃/ () or Amoy [ɛ̃]. By contrast, oral vowels are produced without nasalization.

Nasalized vowels are vowels influenced by nearby sounds. For instance, the [æ] of the word hand in English is affected by the following nasal consonant. In most languages, vowels adjacent to nasal consonants are produced partially or fully with a lowered velum in a natural process of assimilation and are therefore technically nasal, but few speakers would notice. That is the case in English: vowels preceding nasal consonants are nasalized, but there is no phonemic distinction between nasal and oral vowels, and all vowels are considered phonemically oral.

Taiwanese Hokkien (/ˈhɒkiɛn/ HOK-ee-en, US also /ˈhoʊkiɛn/ HOH-kee-en), or Taiwanese (Chinese: 臺灣話; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Tâi-oân-ōe), also known as Taigi (臺語; Tâi-gí), Taiwanese Taigi (臺灣台語; Tâi-oân Tâi-gí; Tâi-uân Tâi-gí), Taiwanese Southern Min (臺灣閩南語; Tâi-oân Bân-lâm-gí), Hoklo and Holo, is a variety of the Hokkien language spoken natively by more than 70 percent of the population of Taiwan. It is spoken by a significant portion of those Taiwanese people who are descended from Hoklo immigrants of southern Fujian. It is one of the national languages of Taiwan.

Taiwanese is generally similar to Hokkien spoken in Xiamen (Amoy), Quanzhou, and Zhangzhou, as well as dialects used in Southeast Asia, such as Singaporean Hokkien, Penang Hokkien, Philippine Hokkien, Medan Hokkien, and Southern Peninsular Malaysian Hokkien. It is mutually intelligible with the Amoy and Zhangzhou varieties at the mouth of the Jiulong River in China, and with Philippine Hokkien to the south in the Philippines, spoken altogether by about 3 million people. The mass popularity of Hokkien entertainment media from Taiwan has given prominence to the Taiwanese variety of Hokkien, especially since the 1980s.

Singaporean Hokkien is a local variety of the Hokkien language spoken natively in Singapore. Within Chinese linguistic academic circles, this dialect is known as Sin-ka-pho Ban-lam Gu. It bears similarities with the Amoy dialect in Xiamen and Taiwanese Hokkien in Taiwan.

Hokkien is the Southern Min pronunciation for the province of Fujian, and is generally the term used by the Chinese in Southeast Asia to refer to the Quanzhang dialects. Singaporean Hokkien heavily views the Amoy dialect as its prestige, and its accent is predominantly based on a mixture of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou speech, with a greater inclination towards the former instead of the latter.

Sun (/sʊn/) is a transliteration of a common Chinese surname (simplified Chinese: 孙; traditional Chinese: 孫; pinyin: Sūn; pronounced [swə́n]). It is the third name listed in the Song dynasty classic text Hundred Family Surnames.

Other transliterations include Suen (Hong Kong and regions with Cantonese-speaking populations), Soon (Amoy dialect), Sng and Soon (Teochew dialect), Tôn (Vietnamese), Son (Japanese/Korean), Soon (regions with Hokkien-speaking populations), Sen/Suan/-son/-zon (Chinese Filipino in the Philippines), and Swen.