Hokkien phonology

Hokkien has one of the most diverse phoneme inventories among Chinese languages, with more consonants than Standard Mandarin or Cantonese. Vowels are more or less similar to that of Standard Mandarin. Hokkien varieties retain many pronunciations that are no longer found in other Chinese dialects. These include the retention of the initial, which is now  (Pinyin 'zh') in Mandarin (e.g. 'bamboo' 竹 is tik, but zhú in Mandarin), having disappeared before the 6th century in other Chinese dialects.

Initials
Southern Min has aspirated, unaspirated as well as voiced consonant initials. For example, the word khui (開) (meaning "open") and kuiⁿ (關) (meaning "close") have the same vowel but differ only by aspiration of the initial and nasality of the vowel. In addition, Southern Min has labial initial consonants such as m in m̄-sī (毋是) (meaning "is not").

Another example is ' (meaning "boy") and '  (meaning "girl"), which differ in the second syllable in consonant voicing and in tone.

Finals
Unlike Mandarin, Southern Min retains all the final consonants of Middle Chinese. While Mandarin only preserves the n and ŋ finals, Southern Min also preserves the m, p, t and k finals and developed the ʔ (glottal stop).

Vowels
The following table illustrates some of the more commonly seen vowel shifts. Characters with the same vowel are shown in parentheses.

Tones
In general, Hokkien dialects have 5 to 7 phonemic tones. According to the traditional Chinese system, however, there are 7 to 9 "tones", more correctly termed tone classes since two of them are non-phonemic "entering tones" (see the discussion on Chinese tone). Tone sandhi is extensive. There are minor variations between the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou tone systems. Taiwanese tones follow the patterns of Amoy or Quanzhou, depending on the area of Taiwan. Many dialects have an additional phonemic tone ("tone 9" according to the traditional reckoning), used only in special or foreign loan words.