Why are there various dialects in Hokkien

Hokkien is a latecomer to writing, as it exists for much of its existence as an oral language. In the past, the Hokkien communicated using Literary Chinese. Their spoken language is pronounced quite differently from how they would pronounce Literary Chinese, and on top of that, the sentence structure is not entirely the same.

So when it came a moment the Hokkien wanted to write their spoken language, they found that there are at least 15% of the words they use which do not have any corresponding Chinese characters. They took various methods to address that issue: create new character that you don't find in Mandarin, or adopt characters that sound like it but came with an otherwise different meaning, and to spell the word using letters of the alphabet.

Penang Hokkien has even more words that are not in Literary Chinese, so it is easier to communicate in writing using a romanised form rather than with Chinese characters. Having said that, Chinese characters offer the benefit of "character recognition" - because each character looks different, words that otherwise sound the same can be quickly differentiated by their characters.

The drawback of using Chinese characters is that they do not reflect the pronunciation - the same character can be pronounced in many different ways depending on which Chinese language is used to read it. Because of this, when words spread into isolated parts of Chinese, without the benefit of audio, pronunciation of words gets distorted, resulting in regional pronunciation, and giving birth to dialects.

Fujian Province, where the present form of Hokkien language originated, is a mountainous province. The people live in the valleys and ravines, often isolated from one another. The geographic segregation leads to various dialects. The missionary Medhurst mentioned in the early 19th century that traveling just 10 minutes, he encountered people who otherwise could not understand one another when speaking, but astonishingly, they could communicate in writing.

He then discovered that the Hokkien communicated in writing using a writing system that has remained largely uncharged over a thousand years. This writing system, based on Classical Chinese, explains how the people could communicate with the bureaucrats, also called the mandarins.

In the past, the Hokkien language can be divided into two main dialects - that of the Zhangzhou and that of the Quanzhou. Elements of these two dialects mixed to create the Xiamen dialect, which became the prestige form of the Hokkien language, from which is derived the present Taiwanese Hokkien. Having said that, within Taiwan itself, there are still pockets where one or another form of Hokkien dialect predominates.

By the time the Hokkien language reached the shores of the Malay peninsula, the various dialects already existed. Depending on where the pioneer migrants settled, they populated the area with their form of Hokkien. That is why the Hokkien spoken in the northern part of the Malay peninsula is different from that spoken from coastal Perak to Singapore.

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