(; abbr. POJ; ),̍hōejī sometimes known as Church Romanization, is an orthography used to write variants of Southern Min Chinese, particularly Taiwanese and Amoy Hokkien.
Developed by Western missionaries working among the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia in the 19th century and refined by missionaries working in Xiamen and Tainan, it uses a modified Latin alphabet and some diacritics to represent the spoken language. After initial success in Fujian, POJ became most widespread in Taiwan and, in the mid-20th century, there were over 100,000 people literate in POJ. A large amount of printed material, religious and secular, has been produced in the script, including Taiwan's first newspaper, the Taiwan Church News.
During Japanese rule (1895–1945), the use of was suppressed and Taiwanese kana encouraged; it faced further suppression during the Kuomintang martial law period (1947–1987). In Fujian, use declined after the establishment of the People's Republic of China (1949) and by the early 21st century the system was not in general use there. However, Taiwanese Christians, non-native learners of Southern Min, and native-speaker enthusiasts in Taiwan are among those that continue to use . Full computer support was achieved in 2004 with the release of Unicode 4.1.0, and POJ is now implemented in many fonts, input methods, and is used in extensive online dictionaries.
Versions of have been devised for other Southern Chinese varieties, including Hakka and Teochew Southern Min. Other related scripts include for Gan, for Hakka, for Hainanese, for Fuzhou, for Teochew, for Northern Min, and for Pu-Xian Min.
In 2006, the Taiwanese Romanization System (), a government-sponsored successor based on , was released. Despite this, native language education, and writing systems for Taiwanese, have remained a fiercely debated topic in Taiwan.
Name
The name () means "vernacular writing", written characters representing everyday spoken language. The name vernacular writing could be applied to many kinds of writing, romanized and character-based, but the term is commonly restricted to the Southern Min romanization system developed by Presbyterian missionaries in the 19th century.
The missionaries who invented and refined the system used, instead of the name , various other terms, such as "Romanized Amoy Vernacular" and "Romanized Amoy Colloquial." The origins of the system and its extensive use in the Christian community have led to it being known by some modern writers as "Church Romanization" (; ) and is often abbreviated in POJ itself to . () There is some debate on whether "" or "Church Romanization" is the more appropriate name.
Objections to "" are that it can refer to more than one system and that both literary and colloquial register Southern Min appear in the system and so describing it as "vernacular" writing might be inaccurate. Objections to "Church Romanization" are that some non-Christians and some secular writing use it. POJ today is largely disassociated from its former religious purpose. The term "romanization" is also disliked by some, who see it as belittling the status of by identifying it as a supplementary phonetic system instead of a standalone orthography.
History
The history of has been heavily influenced by official attitudes towards the Southern Min vernaculars and the Christian organizations that propagated it. Early documents point to the purpose of the creation of POJ as being pedagogical in nature, closely allied to educating Christian converts.
Early development
The first people to use a romanized script to write Southern Min were Spanish missionaries in Manila in the 16th century. However, it was used mainly as a teaching aid for Spanish learners of Southern Min, and seems not to have had any influence on the development of . In the early 19th century, China was closed to Christian missionaries, who instead proselytized to overseas Chinese communities in South East Asia. The earliest origins of the system are found in a small vocabulary first printed in 1820 by Walter Henry Medhurst, who went on to publish the Dictionary of the Dialect of the Chinese Language, According to the Reading and Colloquial Idioms in 1832.