Fukienese is an older English name for Hokkien, the Southern Min Chinese language of southern Fujian province. Its traditional centres are Quanzhou, Zhangzhou and Xiamen, and it crossed the strait to become Taiwanese Hokkien, spoken by a large majority of Taiwan's population. Emigration carried it through Southeast Asia, where it remains a major community language in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia. Speaker estimates for the wider Hokkien group run into the tens of millions. Like other Min varieties it is not mutually intelligible with Mandarin or Cantonese, having split from the ancestors of those languages very early. Hokkien is richly tonal, with tones that change in connected speech, a process called tone sandhi. It is written with Chinese characters, and a Latin romanisation, Peh-oe-ji, has existed since the nineteenth century.
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