Taiwanese is a branched-off variety of Hokkien, a group of Southern Min language. Like many Min varieties, it has distinct literary and colloquial layers of vocabulary, often associated with formal and informal registers respectively.

Phonologically, Hokkien is a tonal language with extensive tone sandhi rules. Syllables consist maximally of an initial consonant, a vowel, a final consonant, and a tone.

Modern linguistic studies (by Robert L. Cheng and Chin-An Li, for example) estimate that most (75% to 90%) Taiwanese words have cognates in other Sinitic languages. False friends do exist; for example, cháu (走) means "to run" in Taiwanese, whereas the

Until the late 19th century, Taiwanese speakers wrote mostly in Classical Chinese, although songbooks using Han characters are attested from the 1820s. Among many systems of writing Taiwanese using Latin characters, the most used is called

Spread of Hokkien to Taiwan
During the Yuan dynasty, Quanzhou became a major international port for trade with the outside world. From

The syntax of Taiwanese is similar to southern sinitic languages such as Hakka and Yue. The subject–verb–object sequence is typical as in, for example, Mandarin, but subject–object–verb or the passive voice (with the sequence object–subject–verb)

Regional variations
The prestige variant of Taiwanese is the southern speech found in Tainan and Kaohsiung. Other major variants are the northern speech, the