For the Love of Penang Hokkien

If you want to learn German, French, or Japanese, you can make a trip to the bookstore or click over to Amazon, and you will have a wide selection of books and audio recordings to use. The same is true if you wish to learn Mandarin or even Malay. But if you want to learn Penang Hokkien, there is hardly anything on the market. A person wishing to learn Penang Hokkien has to rely on material created for a different variant of Hokkien. If the person has to resort to using material created for Taiwan Hokkien or Singapore Hokkien, the product of his learning will not be Penang Hokkien.

My dear friend Tan Choon Hoe does have a series of books on Penang Hokkien, but even Mr. Tan himself acknowledges that his books do not attempt to establish a standardized orthography for the language.

It is sad but true, that we can learn more about the history of other people's languages than that of our own. If we so wish, we could look up the history of the Russian language, or of Swedish, or even of Sanskrit. But when it comes to the history of Penang Hokkien, most of us who use the language every day are unable to explain where it came from and why are we speaking it. If we do not know it for our own sake, how then are we to explain it to others?

The biggest handicap that Penang Hokkien faces is that, for much of its history, it is an oral language. People used it to speak. They did not use it to write. That was fine in the past when most people were illiterate, and there was no need to communicate in writing. The minor few who learned to read and write communicated using English or Literary Chinese.

Society has changed. In present-day society, literacy has become commonplace and is now an essential part of life. Nowadays, Penang people not only converse, but they also telecommunicate. A large portion of their communication is done by picking up the smartphone and keying into Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, Telegram, and emails. The communication that was once carried out in Penang Hokkien is now taken over by English, Mandarin, and Malay. Penang Hokkien is losing out.

On all these platforms, if a person wants to express himself in Penang Hokkien, he is reduced to transcribing his words based on his own ad hoc interpretation of the sounds. The end result can only be understood by another Penang Hokkien-speaking person through deciphering the context and a fair amount of guesswork. But if guessing doesn't work, the reader is stumped. There isn't a dictionary the reader can consult to unlock the meaning.

Is it no wonder, therefore, that Penang Hokkien gets no respect? It doesn't help that the very speakers of Penang Hokkien do not respect the language either. To many of them, it is an arena for profanities. Alas, if we have no respect for our language, nobody else will. And a language that receives no respect will die.

Even among languages, it is the fittest that survives. A language that refuses to change and keep up with time will eventually fossilize with the dinosaurs. Penang Hokkien needs to evolve, to make itself relevant for the present age. Its very survival depends on that.

I have too much love for Penang Hokkien to let it die. It's like seeing your parent dying and not doing anything about it. For the love of that language, I am willing to do whatever is necessary, going it alone if that's what it takes, to give Penang Hokkien a fighting chance to survive, and that one day, all Penang Hokkien-speaking people would feel proud to say that they have a language which they can use in written communication, and they can call that language their own.

To turn Penang Hokkien into a written language, the first step is to establish a writing system. "Hang on," some people said, "you do not need to create a new writing system. You can write Penang Hokkien using Chinese characters. You can also use Church Romanisation or Taiwanese Romanisation. Why reinvent the wheel when the wheel is there?"

My response to that is because the wheel was not created for Penang Hokkien. A system using Chinese characters would favor the Chinese-educated. This would immediately alienate all the Penang Hokkien speakers who are not Chinese-educated. Moreover, Chinese characters do not encapsulate the pronunciation of the words, so learners have to memorize the pronunciation of every word anew.

What about Church Romanisation? It was created back in the 19th century by Christian missionaries for spreading the Gospel in the Hokkien language, and today it has the largest body of written work. I carefully assessed the choice of Church Romanisation but decided against it. Church Romanisation uses diacritic marks and unique letters. It was created at a time when people hand-write, so diacritic marks and unique letters are no issue for the masses.

Nowadays, most people type using a standard keyboard or keypad. It is not easy to type Church Romanisation. One has to download specific apps to do so. Only a small handful of language enthusiasts are willing to accept the inconvenience. The rest of the mainstream Penang Hokkien speakers would not care for diacritics and unique letters. Moreover, the large body of written work in Church Romanisation presents no benefit because much of it is in the Xiamen variant of Hokkien, which is different from Penang Hokkien.

What about Taiwanese Romanisation? It does away with those unique letters that plague Church Romanisation, but it retains the diacritic marks, so typing it will be a little easier though still a challenge. But the bigger reason why I am unable to accept Taiwanese Romanisation for Penang Hokkien is that it was not created for the Penang people. A person who goes through mainstream education in Penang, learning English, Malay, and Mandarin, would not be able to pronounce words written in Taiwanese Romanisation intuitively. On top of that, people who are familiar with the diacritics in Pinyin will find that these are different from the diacritics in Taiwanese Romanisation. For these reasons, I find that Taiwanese Romanisation is not compatible with Penang Hokkien.

I am also careful that in my quest to save Penang Hokkien, I do not get sucked into the Hokkien orbit. Penang Hokkien is not only used by people of Hokkien ancestry. It is also the language used by Penang Chinese who are Cantonese, Teochew, Hakka, Taishanese, Foochowese, and Hainanese. A great many Indians and Malays in Penang are also able to speak Penang Hokkien. Therefore, the writing system has to be inclusive so that all speakers of it can feel an attachment and ownership to it. If saving Penang Hokkien results in promoting Hokkien history, culture, and heritage at the expense of all other Penang Hokkien speakers, then the feeling of alienation will once again emerge.

With all that in mind, I realize the only option is to create a brand new writing system that is truly homegrown. It has to be a system that takes into account its speakers' capabilities. As most people in Penang would understand English, Malay, and Mandarin, the writing system would leverage elements from these three languages. The spelling system is based on English and Malay, while the tone system is based on Mandarin. It is possible to map the tones in Penang Hokkien to the tones in Mandarin, thereby making it a lot easier for people who are familiar with Mandarin to learn it, and for those who know English and Malay to pronounce the words intuitively. I do away with the need to memorize pronunciation of Chinese characters, or on which vowel to place the diacritic marks, learnings that don't contribute to mastering Penang Hokkien. As far as possible, the less learning involved the better. With that in mind, Taiji Romanisation was created in 2013.

This writing system is created not only for the Hokkien people but also for the Cantonese, Hakka, Teochew, for all people who speak Penang Hokkien, even the Malays, Indians, and everybody else. Penang Hokkien isn't someone's language; it is our language. As much as possible, I have made it so easy that most people can read it intuitively. But Penang Hokkien is a tonal language, so there is no escape from learning tones. However, the tones have been simplified from the seven tones in the traditional methods to just four that correspond to the four tones in Mandarin. Even with just these four tones, learners are able to pronounce Penang Hokkien clearly and make themselves understood in it.

Having a writing system without a depository for all the words is useless. Therefore, I started compiling words used in Penang Hokkien, and this evolved to become the web-based Penang Hokkien Dictionary. In the beginning, it was just a static collection of words in alphabetical order. But over time, with help from like-minded friends, the dictionary underwent successive improvements. Today, it has all the words in common use in Penang Hokkien, with audio rendition for all its entries, and definitions in English, Malay, example sentences, Chinese characters, Church Romanisation, Taiwanese Romanisation, and corresponding pronunciation in Pinyin, Zhuyin, Cantonese and other Chinese languages.

Though I had undertaken much of the work myself, and without seeking or receiving funds from anybody, this effort would not have been possible without the help and input from all the members of Learn Penang Hokkien Facebook Group, to whom I owe an immeasurable amount of thanks and gratitude.

The writing system is ready and so is the dictionary. The next step is to create the best learning tool for Penang Hokkien, a definitive guide for all learners. This is presently in the works, with participation from dozens of voice contributors who are Penang Hokkien speakers. I am incredibly thankful to them for giving their time to help me.

I encourage all Penang Hokkien speakers to learn the writing system. The reason you are able to communicate so effortlessly in English, Mandarin, and Malay is because there was once when you learned to read and write in those languages, and now the ability stays with you. To save Penang Hokkien, you need to do the same for it.

My dream is that one day soon, every Penang Hokkien speaker can proudly present his language to the world. Anybody who wants to learn Penang Hokkien has the means to learn it. People who master the writing system can use it to write stories, poems, plays, songs, blogs. Then our language has successfully transitioned from an outdated oral tongue to a modern written language.

Read also Penang Hokkien Vocabulary

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