Recently when flicking through my Facebook feed I saw this photo taken by my friend Tariel in Penang in Malaysia.

Photo Provided by Tariel Dzharkimbaev

What caught my notice was the speech bubble in the top right corner:

「教你讲（講）福建」- “[I’ll] teach you [to] speak Hokkien” which is romanized as “Kah Lu Kong Hokkien”.

In Taipei one would normally hear this pronounced as “kà lí kóng Hok-kiàn” (Click each word to hear).

What struck me, was the that the 「你」 which I’d always heard pronounced “lí” in Taipei had been romanized as “lu”.

In Penang they mainly speak the Zhangzhou (漳州) dialect, similar to the dialect of Hokkien spoken in the cities of Tainan and Taichung, Yilan and Yuanlin. In this dialect words like 「你、豬」 end in the consonant “i”, whereas in the Xiamen dialect, they can end in Continue reading →