Taiwanese, often called Taiwanese Hokkien or Minnan, is the variety of Southern Min Chinese spoken in Taiwan, where a substantial share of the population, plausibly around 70 percent, speak or understand it. It descends from the Hokkien carried across the strait by settlers from southern Fujian, and it remains broadly intelligible with the Hokkien of Xiamen and with varieties spoken in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines. Taiwanese is tonal and is not mutually intelligible with Mandarin, Taiwan's official language, despite sharing Chinese characters in writing; romanisation systems such as Peh-oe-ji have long been used for it as well. Decades of Mandarin-only policy pushed Taiwanese out of schools, but it has revived in politics, television and music, and it now holds status as a national language of Taiwan.
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