What is Taiwanese?

Taiwanese is:
  • spoken by about 70% of the population of Taiwan (15 million native speakers).
  • a vernacular but can be written in orthographies such as the popular Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ) as well as Modern Literal Taiwanese (MLT) which is also known as Modern Taiwanese Language (MTL).

Modern Taiwanese Language (MTL) was created by Dr. Liim Keahioong, a professor at Cheng-Kung University in Tainan, Taiwan; Dr. Liim had practiced MTL for more than 60 years (1943 - 2012). MTL adopts the letters of the English alphabet plus two special characters: ν (GREEK SMALL LETTER NU) and an 'o' superimposed with a back slash '\' (similar to Q).

Note: In these web pages, in order to avoid creating new characters and to facilitate MTL use on the standard word processors, the following steps have been taken: (1) v is used in place of the Greek letter nu (there is no 'vee' sound in the Taiwanese language) and, (2) either a font-reduced Q (LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Q), ø (LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH STROKE), or 0 (DIGIT ZERO) is used in place of the backslashed o.