Medan Hokkien

Medan Hokkien
Medan Hokkien
棉蘭福建話 ; mî lân hok-kiàn-oā
Native to	Indonesia
Region	Medan, Pematangsiantar, Kisaran, Tebing Tinggi, Tanjungbalai, Binjai , Jakarta and other cities in North Sumatra, Java and other regions of Indonesia with significant chinese community.
Native speakers	800.000~1.000.000 (2010)[citation needed]
Language family	Sino-Tibetan Sinitic Min Southern Min Quanzhang Zhangzhou dialect Medan Hokkien; ; ; ; ; ;
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
Glottolog	None
Linguasphere	79-AAA-jek

Medan Hokkien is a local variant of Hokkien spoken among the Chinese in Medan and Jakarta, Indonesia. It is the lingua franca in Medan as well as other northern city states of North Sumatra surrounding it, and is a subdialect of Zhangzhou (漳州) dialect, together with widespread use of Indonesian and English borrowed words. It is predominantly a spoken dialect: it is rarely written in Chinese characters as Indonesia had banned the use of Chinese characters back in New Order era, and there are official romanizations of Hokkien such as 白話字 and 臺羅.^{[citation needed]}

Comparing Medan Hokkien to Hokkien dialect in other countries such as Malaysia and Singapore, Medan Hokkien is still understandable to a certain extent. Medan Hokkien speakers may have a similar accent as Malaysian and Singaporean speakers. The closest comparison to Medan Hokkien is the Penang Hokkien dialect. Both are so similar that it is hard to tell the difference between the two if the Medan Hokkien speaker does not mix Indonesian language borrowings in their conversation.