Hokkien Imji (쟝좐ˆ임찌)

Hokkien Imji (漳泉音字) is a way to write Hokkien with Korean Hangeul. It can be used for mainstream dialects including Amoy, Zhangzhou, Quanzhou, Taiwanese, and Southeast Asian Hokkien. It was created by Lee Chun Hoe, and was first published in July 2020 on 閩人閩語, a Facebook group for the Hokkien language community.

Hokkien Imji took inspiration and was adapted from Taiwanese Hangeul (대끼 깐뿐) by Ang Ui-jin.

Notable features

Hokkien Imji serves to be the most comprehensive, practical, and intuitive Hokkien writing system available, optimised for digital text input and Chinese character (漢字) accompaniment.
The transcription of Hokkien Imji takes primarily two forms. It can either be used standalone, or alongside Chinese characters.
The definition of Imji letter parts adheres closely to the proper hangeul construct from hunminjeongeum (訓⺠正音) with a few necessary adaptations, notably the usage of ᅀ(hanshiot, obsolete in Korean as /z/) for nasals, for triangle intuits human nose.
The tone marks were inherited from POJ, the mainstream Hokkien romanisation, with exception of tone 1 and tone 4, which empty tone mark were replaced by the interpunct (·).
The explicit symbol definition for all tones is necessary to unlock partial tone marking. For exampe, in generic cases of casual writing, most tones, which are likely prone to confusion due to complex sandhi rules, are exempted from tone marking, except prominent tones like tone 1 (·), tone 2 (ˊ), and tone 5 (ˆ) when they were pronounced in the original tone in words or sentences. The proper granularity of tone marking boosts read/write efficiency by obviating the need to guess original tones unnecessarily.

Hokkien Imji

Download an alphabet chart for Hokkien Imji (Excel)

Sample phrases (Taiwanese)

Transliteration (Hanzi)

太空朋友，恁好！恁食飽未？有閒，着來阮遮坐嗚。

Transliteration (POJ)

thài-khong pêng-iú, lín hó! lín chia̍h-pá bē? ū-êng, tō lâi gún-chia chē o͘.

Translation

The friend in space, wishing you well (how are you)!
Have you eaten?
Whenever you are free, please visit my home.

Sample text (Penang Hokkien)

Transliteration (Hanzi)

太空朋友，汝好！汝食飽未？有閒，道來我兮厝坐一下。

Transliteration (POJ)

thài-khong pêng-iú, lú hó! lú chia̍h-pá bōe? ū-êng, tō lâi óa ê chhù chē chē ̇.

Translation

The friend in space, wishing you well (how are you)!
Have you eaten?
Whenever you are free, please visit my home.

Hokkien is a group of Southern Min dialects / languages that are spoken in the southeast of Fujian province in the PRC, and in Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and other parts of Southeast Asia [source].

Information about Hokkien / Southern Min

[top]

You can support this site by Buying Me A Coffee, and if you like what you see on this page, you can use the buttons below to share it with people you know.

If you like this site and find it useful, you can support it by making a donation via PayPal or Patreon, or by contributing in other ways. Omniglot is how I make my living.

Note: all links on this site to Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.fr are affiliate links. This means I earn a commission if you click on any of them and buy something. So by clicking on these links you can help to support this site.

[top]