For Min-Nan, Peh-Oe-Ji (POJ) is been widely used in Mid. and Southern Taiwan for elemetary education. I have some relatives teach as POJ teachers in the elementary school in those area.

Also, POJ is been used for writing an encyclopedia on zh-min-nan.wp, see http://zh-min-nan.wikipedia.org

Min-Nan and Hakka are also been widely used in the southern China, however, I do not know if they have any writing forms for those Chinese speaking languages in there.

FYI.

Regards, H.T.

-----Original Message----- From: wikitech-l-bounces@wikimedia.org [mailto:wikitech-l-bounces@wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Mark Williamson Sent: Saturday, June 10, 2006 2:56 PM To: Wikimedia developers Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Simplified/traditional Chinese on Commons

And although colloquial writing can be found in every major regional variety of Chinese, as a popular phenomenon it is limited mostly to Cantonese, Wu, Minnan, and Hakka for a few reasons: Cantonese and Wu are both the languages of huge (HUGE) urban centers where people take pride in their local identity; Minnan and Hakka are used on Taiwan, which doesn't currently have a rabid government movement to eradicate local varieties so people who want to develop written forms for the native languages have had quite a bit of success.

Having said that, most people who write Minnan do not write it in Peh-oe-ji. There is no single agreed-upon orthography, but most people use a mixture of Chinese characters and Roman letters (and occasionally Japanese characters as well). This is not currently practical for writing an encyclopaedia though, because a huge portion of the words in the language have no consensus as to what character should be used to write them.

Mark

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