Is there such a thing as the "northern accent" in Taiwan Hokkien?

2014年 新加坡 『福建人』:

http://youtu.be/yZfnBjbzWwk

Many non-linguist Taiwan people say that there are the "southern accent" and "northern accent" in Taiwan Hokkien. To that, I would answer: Yes, there's something which you may call a "southern Taiwan accent" if you want; but there's no such thing as one uniform "northern Taiwan accent."

Let me explain. I'll try to be brief and clear.

Everyone knows that there are different accents of Hokkien in different parts of Taiwan. They are all mixtures of various Quanzhou and Zhangzhou accents. It's just that they're mixed in different proportions. The Yilan accent, "suiN-suiN nuiN-nuiN" for "sng-sng nng nng", is the closest to Zhangzhou. Penang in Malaysia has a similar accent. Lugang accent is the closest to Quanzhou accent. All other Taiwan accents are somewhere in between. For example, Taipei urban accent is leaning toward the Quanzhou side in such a way that it is almost identical with the Amoy accent in China. Amoy has influenced Singapore a lot, so it's very close to Singapore Hokkien.

Without trying to oversimplify, if someone says "koe" for chicken, "tu" for pig, and "sian-siN" for a gentleman, that's Quanzhou accent. Quanzhou-oriented Taiwan accents include Amoy, Jinjiang, Tong'an and Anxi accents. It is spoken roughly along the coastal areas of Taichung, Zhanghua and various locations in the Taipei Basin. Older generation may even call you "lu", instead of "li", now prevalent all over Taiwan.

If, on the other hand, someone says a chicken should be called "ke", pig is "ti" and a mister is "sin-seN", you are hearing a Zhangzhou accent. There are not so many varieties of Zhangzhou accents in Taiwan for reasons I will tell you later, except that Yilan, Taoyuan, Nantou and inland Taichung are all Zhangzhou-dominated areas.

In northern Taiwan, there are very many different accents, caused by early migration patterns. For example in Taipei Basin alone, Amoy accent is spoken downtown, Jinjiang in Wanhua, Anxi in Muzha, Zhangzhou in Songshan, etc. In Shilin where I live, Zhangzhou accent is heard around the Mazu temple in the night market, but where I live closer to Shezi,  it's totally Tong'an accent.  (Tong'an accent is very noticeable, because they say "Tai-pak koaiN" instead of "Tai-pak koan" for Taipei County and "haiN" instead of "heng" for returning something borrowed. You still hear this often along Tamsui River in Shezi and Hougang areas of Shilin District.)

In Jiayi, Tainan, Kaohsiung, Pindong and Taidong, the situation is totally different. Everywhere you go, you hear the same accent. This is regardless of which part of Fujian their ancestors may come from. This accent is what I call the Common Taiwan Accent (CTA) or what Ang Ui-jin calls "Tai-oan iu-se im". It is closer toward Zhangzhou accent, but it's a leveled accent, meaning to say, different features of many accents are mixed together and "weird" features of each have been "flattened" toward the easier side. For example, "ke" is easier than "koe" so you go toward Zhangzhou for this word. On the other hand, Zhangzhou "sioN" is difficult to pronounce, so for this word. you choose the Quanzhou "siuN".

The reason for the uniformity is that migration from Fujian started earlier in the Jiayi-Tainan-Kaosiung area. So different accents have melted for longer time there. And Pindong and Taidong are populated with people originated from Kaohsiung.

CTA has become widespread all over Taiwan, replacing many Quanzhou-leaning accents. Amoy accent used to be considered  the standard in Taiwan in the past, because it's spoken in Taipei, and Scottish Presbyterian missionaries translated the Bible using this accent, and it had been the basis for Hokkien literacy in Taiwan. (Textbooks published in Japan mostly still use a Taipei-Amoy accent.) But it's now been replaced by CTA. The Hokkien textbooks that Taiwanese children use in schools now uses CTA. (They call it Tainan accent, which is inaccurate. For example, in Tainan accent, "good" is /hə/, instead of CTA "ho". ) The textbooks published within Taiwan for foreign learners also use CTA, much to the confusion of Japanese learners.

There are several possible reasons why CTA has become so prevalent. First, the influence of the media: Many Hokkien actors in Taiwan originated from koa-a-hi, which uses the Yilan accent, regardless of where the actor comes from. So they brought the Zhangzhou accent to TV screens. Second, Tainan has been a cultural center for Taiwan-independence-oriented people. Perhaps related to this, the vast majority of Hokkien newsreaders in Taiwan have Zhangzhou-leaning accents. (So much so that I find it easier to understand newscast from Amoy, China!) Third, because CTA is an accent which was born in Taiwan, it is not exactly the same as any accent found in China. This is quite unlike accents of northern Taiwan: For example, Taipei urban accent is almost the same as Amoy accent. So it appealed to the people who, for political reasons, wanted to dissociate themselves from mainland China. (It's the same logic as "Tongyong Pinyin"!) Finally, CTA could have spread with men who served in the military for the National Service. Perhaps because people came from all over Taiwan, and also perhaps because the ''southern-ness" of CTA appealed to the masculine identity of the military, it was used in the army and spread throughout Taiwan.

I have an anecdote that supports this last view. In my wife's family, her parents have a marked Tong'an accent. Womenfolk in her family have become Mandarin speakers, because back in their school days Hokkien was considered to be for bad girls, but retain a lot more Tong'an features than menfolk do. As for the male siblings, they have all gone CTA after completing the National Service!

Next time, I want to write about Hokkien spoken in Southeast Asia.