How linguistically distinct is Taiwanese from Mandarin? And how would you respond to the claim that Taiwanese is simply a dialect of Chinese? (Questions about Taiwanese; part 2)

[The 'Questions about Taiwanese' series consists of drafted answers to interview questions prepared for an episode recording of the NTNU International Taiwan Studies Centre Podcast.]

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Taiwanese and Mandarin Chinese? Totally different sound systems. Like, the consonants and vowels? Super different. And the way syllables are put together is not the same either.

Chinese has 21 consonants and 6 vowels with a retroflex base, plus five tones. Taiwanese has fewer consonants at 15 but the same number of vowels, and a whopping nine tones including a neutralized tone and a special high rising tone. Chinese has the famous third tone sandhi and special rules for "bu" and "yi," while Taiwanese has tone sandhi for basically every single tone.

In addition, Taiwanese differs from Chinese by having syllables that end in unreleased stops, which are sounds ending abruptly, and a nasal bilabial sound, which ‘m’ stands for. In terms of syllable structure, Taiwanese is more similar to English than Mandarin is.

As for vocabulary, a researcher named Ong Iok-tek found something interesting. He compared word similarities between Amoy, which is close to Taiwanese, and Chinese and then compared English and German. Turns out, English and German have more similar words than Amoy and Chinese do! Lots of people in Taiwan think Taiwanese is just Chinese with a different way of saying things, but that's definitely not the case.

In terms of syntax, Taiwanese has its own distinctive characteristics. For instance, the Taiwanese language utilizes negations differently from Mandarin. Only in Taiwanese is obligatory object fronting required with certain verbal compounds. Additionally, there are unique sentence patterns in Taiwanese, such as evaluative verbal reduplication and the event control construction.

Basically, these two languages are totally different and people can't understand each other. So, yeah, Taiwanese is definitely its own thing, not just a dialect of Chinese.

Okay, so I know "dialect" can be a loaded term, like it's used to put down languages that aren't the "official" one. But Taiwanese is now officially recognized as a national language here since 2018. The Ministry of Education has even standardized its orthography. People might still think Mandarin is the big cheese around here, but legally and politically, Taiwanese isn't just a "dialect" in any sense.

Additionally, many people mistake Taiwanese for a dialect of Chinese because they both use Chinese characters. But, other languages in East Asia, like Japanese, also use those characters. Even Korean and Vietnamese used them before switching to their own systems. Basically, writing is just about picking symbols. Whether we write Taiwanese with characters or Roman script, linguistically speaking, it's its own language, not just a dialect of Chinese.