Taiwanese Mandarin in the context of "Han Taiwanese"

The languages of Taiwan consist of several varieties of languages under the families of Austronesian languages and Sino-Tibetan languages. The Formosan languages, a geographically designated branch of Austronesian languages, have been spoken by the Taiwanese indigenous peoples for thousands of years. Owing to the wide internal variety of the Formosan languages, research on historical linguistics recognizes Taiwan as the Urheimat (homeland) of the whole Austronesian languages family. In the last 400 years, several waves of Han emigrations brought several different Sinitic languages into Taiwan. These languages include Taiwanese Hokkien, Hakka, and Mandarin, which have become the major languages spoken in present-day Taiwan.

Formosan languages were the dominant language of prehistorical Taiwan. Taiwan's long colonial and immigration history brought in several languages such as Dutch, Spanish, Hokkien, Hakka, Japanese, and Mandarin. Due to the former Japanese occupation of the island, the Japanese language has influenced the languages of Taiwan, particularly in terms of vocabulary, with many loanwords coming from Japanese.

Bopomofo, also called Zhuyin Fuhao (/dʒuːˌjɪn fuːˈhaʊ/ joo-YIN foo-HOW; 注音符號; Zhùyīn fúhào; 'phonetic symbols'), or simply Zhuyin, is a transliteration system for Standard Chinese and other Sinitic languages. It is the principal method of teaching Mandarin pronunciation in Taiwan. It consists of 37 characters and five tone marks, which together can transcribe all possible sounds in Mandarin Chinese.

Bopomofo was first introduced in China during the 1910s by the Beiyang government, where it was used alongside Wade–Giles, a romanization system which used a modified Latin alphabet. Today, Bopomofo is more common in Taiwan than on the mainland, and is used as the primary electronic input method for Taiwanese Mandarin, as well as in dictionaries and other non-official documents.

Taiwanese people are the citizens and nationals of the Republic of China (ROC) and those who reside in an overseas diaspora from the entire Taiwan Area. The term also refers to natives or inhabitants of the island of Taiwan and its associated islands who may speak Sinitic languages (Mandarin, Hokkien, Hakka) or the indigenous Taiwanese languages as a mother tongue but share a common culture and national identity. After the retreat of the Republic of China government to Taiwan in 1949, the actual-controlled territories of the government were limited to the main island of Taiwan and Penghu, whose administration were transferred from Japan in 1945, along with a few outlying islands in Fuchien Province which include Kinmen and Matsu Islands.

Taiwanese people as a demonym may broadly refer to the indigenous peoples of Kinmen and Matsu as they share the same national identity with people of Taiwan. However, the islanders of Kinmen and the Matsu may not consider the "Taiwanese" label to be accurate as these two islands are legally parts of Fuchien and not Taiwan. They maintain distinctive cultural identities from that of the Taiwanese, and prefer to be called "Kinmenese" and "Matsunese", respectively.

Yilan City (Mandarin pinyin: Yílán Shì; Hokkien POJ: Gî-lân-chhī) is a county-administered city and the county seat of Yilan County, Taiwan. The city lies on the north side of the Lanyang River.

Erhua (simplified Chinese: 儿化; traditional Chinese: 兒化; pinyin: érhuà), also called "erization" or "rhotacization of syllable finals", is a phonological process that adds r-coloring or the er (儿; 兒 [ɚ]) sound to syllables in spoken Mandarin Chinese. Erhuayin (儿化音; 兒化音) is the pronunciation of "er" after rhotacization of syllable finals.

It is common in most varieties of Mandarin as a diminutive suffix for nouns, though some dialects also use it for other grammatical purposes. The Standard Chinese spoken in government-produced educational and examination recordings features erhua to some extent, as in 哪儿 nǎr 'where', 一点儿 yìdiǎnr 'a little', and 好玩儿 hǎowánr 'fun'. Colloquial speech in many dialects especially in northern China has more extensive erhua than the standardized language. Southwestern Mandarin dialects such as those of Chongqing and Chengdu also have erhua. By contrast, many southern Chinese such as in Fujian and Guangdong who speak their own languages may have difficulty pronouncing the sound or may simply prefer not to pronounce it, and usually avoid words with erhua when speaking Standard Chinese; for example, the three examples listed above may be replaced with the synonyms 哪里 nǎlǐ, 一点 yìdiǎn, 好玩 hǎowán. Furthermore, erhua is extremely rare or absent in Mandarin speakers from Singapore and Taiwan.

Taiwanese units of measurement (Chinese: 臺制; pinyin: Táizhì; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Tâi-chè; Hakka: Thòi-chṳ) are the customary and traditional units of measure used in Taiwan. The Taiwanese units formed in the 1900s when Taiwan was under Japanese rule. The system mainly refers to Japanese system. The measurement refers to the traditional size of a Japanese flooring mat called a Tatami mat (made of woven dried grass) which were positioned to completely cover the floor of traditional Japanese homes, therefore it became a convenient measurement tool as mat area was standardised hundreds of years ago. In Taiwan the measurement units were pronounced in Taiwanese Hokkien and Hakka before World War II and adopted by the Mandarin-speaking immigrants from China in 1949. Today, the Taiwanese units are used exclusively, in some cases alongside official SI units, and in other cases they have been replaced by SI.

Although the Taiwanese units have similar names to those in Chinese units of measurement and Hong Kong units of measurement, the standards are different from those used in China and Hong Kong due to them being Japanese in origin.

The New Taiwan dollar (code: TWD; symbol: NT$ or $, also abbreviated as NT or NTD), or the Taiwan dollar, is the official currency of the Republic of China (Taiwan). Usually, the $ sign precedes the amount, but NT$ is used to distinguish from other currencies named dollar. The New Taiwan dollar has been the currency of the island of Taiwan since 1949, when it replaced the old Taiwan dollar, at a rate of 40,000 old dollars per one new dollar. The base unit of the New Taiwan dollar is called a yuan (圓), subdivided into ten jiao (角) or 100 fen (分), although in practice neither jiao nor fen are used.

There are a variety of alternative names for the units in Taiwan. The unit of the dollar is typically informally written with the simpler equivalent character as 元, except when writing it for legal transactions such as at the bank, when it has to be written as the homophonous 圓. Colloquially, the currency unit is called both 元 (yuán, literally "round") and 塊 (kuài, literally "piece") in Mandarin, 箍 (kho͘, literally "hoop") in Hokkien, and 銀 (ngiùn, literally "silver") in Hakka.