Southern Min, or Min Nan (), is a family of Chinese languages or varieties spoken in parts of China such as southern Fujian, eastern Guangdong, Hainan, and southern Zhejiang, and in Taiwan. The languages are also spoken by descendants of emigrants from these areas in diaspora. In common parlance, Southern Min usually refers to Hokkien. Amoy and Taiwanese Hokkien are both combinations of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou speech. The Southern Min family also includes Teochew. Teochew has limited mutual intelligibility with Hokkien. Hainanese and Puxian Min both originated from Min Nan. However, both of these dialects are generally not considered to be mutually intelligible with any other Southern Min variants phonologically, although the grammatical structures and most lexical items are to some degree similar as they come from the same roots as Min Nan. Southern Min forms part of the Min language group, alongside several other divisions. The Min languages/dialects are part of the Chinese language group, itself a member of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Southern Min is not mutually intelligible with Eastern Min, Cantonese, or Mandarin. As with other varieties of Chinese, there is a political dispute as to whether the Southern Min language should be called a language or a dialect.
