Medan Hokkien

Medan Hokkien
棉蘭福建話
Mî-lân Hok-kiàn-oā (POJ)
Native toIndonesia
RegionMedan, Pematangsiantar, Kisaran, Rantau Prapat, Tebing Tinggi, Tanjungbalai, Binjai, Jakarta and other cities in North Sumatra, Java and other regions of Indonesia with significant Chinese community.
Native speakers
800.000~1.000.000 (2010)[citation needed]
Early forms
Latin (Indonesian orthography)
Language codes
ISO 639-3nan for Southern Min / Min Nan which encompasses a variety of languages and dialects including "Penang-Medan Hokkien"/"Medan Hokkien".[4]
GlottologNone
Linguasphere79-AAA-jek

Medan Hokkien is a local variety of Hokkien spoken amongst Chinese Indonesians in Medan, North Sumatra, Indonesia. It is the lingua franca in Medan as well as the surrounding cities in the state of North Sumatra. It is also spoken in some Medan Chinese migrant communities such as in Jakarta. Medan Hokkien is a subdialect of the Zhangzhou (漳州) Hokkien, particularly of Haicheng (海澄) subdialect. It borrows heavily from Teochew, Deli Malay and Indonesian.

It is predominantly a spoken dialect: Vernacular Hokkien, including Medan Hokkien, is traditionally passed down orally and is rarely transcribed in written Hokkien. Moreover, Indonesia's New Order Era imposed martial laws to suppress and ban display of Chinese characters and Chinese tradition in public.[5] However, with the rise of social media, Medan Hokkien is often transcribed in EYD, ignoring tone markings altogether.[6]

When comparing Medan Hokkien to other Hokkien dialects spoken in countries such as Malaysia and Singapore, Medan Hokkien can be relatively intelligible. It is, however, most similar to Penang Hokkien. Both are strikingly similar that it could be difficult to tell the difference between the two if a Medan Hokkien speaker does not heavily mix Deli Malay and Indonesian borrowings in their conversation.

  1. ^ Mei, Tsu-lin (1970), "Tones and prosody in Middle Chinese and the origin of the rising tone", Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 30: 86–110, doi:10.2307/2718766, JSTOR 2718766
  2. ^ Pulleyblank, Edwin G. (1984), Middle Chinese: A study in Historical Phonology, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, p. 3, ISBN 978-0-7748-0192-8
  3. ^ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian (2023-07-10). "Glottolog 4.8 - Min". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. doi:10.5281/zenodo.7398962. Archived from the original on 2023-10-13. Retrieved 2023-10-13.
  4. ^ "Reclassifying ISO 639-3 [nan]" (PDF). GitHub. 31 August 2021. Retrieved 28 July 2022.
  5. ^ Suryadinata, L. (1976). Indonesian Policies toward the Chinese Minority under the New Order. Asian Survey, 16(8), 770–787. doi:10.2307/2643578
  6. ^ "KUMPULAN KALIMAT DENGAN BAHASA HOKKIEN". Retrieved 2023-10-13.


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