Taiwanese is spoken by millions and barely written

Around 19 million people in Taiwan can speak Taiwanese (Taiwanese Hokkien, Tâi-gí 台語) to some degree, and tens of millions more speak related Hokkien varieties outside Taiwan, mostly in Southeast Asia. Yet the language lives almost entirely in speech. The numbers show why its transmission is at risk, and why a text-only tool reaches few of its speakers.

The generational cliff

Taiwan's 2020 census found 31.7% of nationals aged 6 and over use Taiwanese as their main language. But the average hides a cliff: among people 65 and older it is 65.9%, while among children aged 6 to 14 it is 7.4%. Research cited on Taiwan's Ministry of Education local-language resource site, applying UNESCO's vitality criteria, places its transmission between “vulnerable” and “definitely endangered”, closer to the latter. Home use, the same research finds, fell from 71.4% among people born before 1945 to 22.3% among those born 1986 to 1994; a 2003 study put frequent mother-tongue use among children under 12 below 17%.

Spoken fluently, written rarely

Taiwanese has writing systems: Pe̍h-ōe-jī, the romanization created by missionaries in the 1800s that carried Taiwan's first newspaper, and Tâi-lô, the official romanization standardized in 2006, alongside Taiwanese 漢字. But the overwhelming majority of fluent speakers never learned any of them; the language was passed down by voice, at home. When Meta built what it described as the first AI speech translation system for a primarily oral language in 2022, the language it chose was Hokkien, which in Meta's words lacks a standard written form.

What this means for a translator

A language passed down by voice needs a translator that can hear and speak it. That is what this project tries to be: speak Taiwanese and get English or Mandarin; type or speak either and hear Taiwanese back, with all three written forms for learners who want them.

More: common phrases with audio, Taiwanese speech to text, why Google Translate can't help.