82 ON THE AMOY COLLOQUIAL DIALECT. 



Amoy or Hia Mun (the harbour or gate of Hia) is situated in 

 latitude 24'' 40' N., and longitude IIS'^ 20' E., upon the south- 

 western corner of the island of Amoy, at the mouth of the Dragon 

 river. At the beginning of the 18th century it was the seat of a 

 large foreign commerce. It contains about 180,000 inhabitants. The 

 two districts in which this dialect is spoken, contain two or three 

 millions. The Chinese population of the island of Tai "Wan or For- 

 mosa, estimated at two and a half millions, speak, for the most part, 

 this dialect. So that within the limits of China proper it is the 

 language of four or five millions. 



But this dialect is not limited by the bounds of the Chinese Empire. 

 The emigration from China to the islands of the Archipelago and to 

 the south-eastern peninsula of Asia is composed of men from the 

 districts where this dialect is spoken. The Fuh Kien men have been 

 for centuries known as the mariners of China. Their junks have 

 visited Bankok, Malacca, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and many of the 

 islands. These junks are almost all of them owned in Amoy. The 

 inhabitants of this region know that within eight or ten days sail of 

 Amoy, there lie large, fertile, unsettled regions, where starvation is 

 unknown. Tens of thousands, finding themselves unable to obtain 

 subsistence in the midst of a dense population, leave their country to 

 seek their fortunes in less densely peopled and more fertile lands. 

 They have carried with them their language, and thus the Amoy 

 dialect is spoken by hundreds of thousands of Chinese emigrants in 

 Bankok, Batavia, Borneo, and Singapore. 



Hence the estimate does not seem extravagant that this language is 

 spoken by five millions of people in these several regions. 



A Spoken, and not a Written Language. 



In China there is but one written language and this is identical in 

 all parts of the Empire. This written language is not spoken, nor 

 can it ever become a spoken language. It can not even be read aloud 

 so as to be intelligible to an audience of cultivated men. The written 

 language addresses itself to the eye and not to the ear. On the other 

 hand, the spoken languages being unwritten, address themselves to 

 the ear alone. Their range or area, unlike that of the written lan- 

 guage, is very narrow, embracing only a few hundred square miles, 

 and being used by only a few millions of people. It is not known 

 how many distinct dialects exist within the limits of the eighteen 



