Taiwanese Hokkien, commonly referred to as Taiwanese, is a language spoken in Taiwan. It is part of the Sino-Tibetan language family; a dialect of the Hokkien language, which is part of the Minnan language group. Taiwanese is mutually intelligible with other Hokkien dialects for the most part. It is, however, not intelligible with other Chinese languages. Taiwanese shares similar grammatical structures with other Chinese languages, and it is also a tonal language.
Taiwanese is predominantly a spoken language. Written forms of the language exist, but seldom used by the majority. It is imperative to focus on listening when learning the language. Taiwanese can be written in latin characters, Chinese characters, or a mixture of both. A modified version of the Bopomofo for Taiwanese exists, but it is mostly used in textbooks.
There are different types of romanisation for the Taiwanese Hokkien language. The two commonly used systems are Pe̍h-ōe-jī and Tâi-uân Tâi-gí Lô-má-jī Phing-im Hong-àn (Tâi-lô). Pe̍h-ōe-jī was invented by Christian missionaries in and commonly used throughout the 19th century. Tâi-lô is a modified version of Pe̍h-ōe-jī introduced by the Ministry of Education.
Chinese characters, or Hàn-jī, are used to write Taiwanese. It is similar to what is used to write Mandarin, but with its own additional characters and modifications. There are words in Taiwanese that do not have a corresponding character in Mandarin, which results in the creation of new characters, borrowing pre-existing ones for phonetic similarities, or replacement with latin alphabets to realise certain words. This orthography style is similar to how written Cantonese works.