Database of Hokkien Dictionaries and Textbooks

Hokkien (a.k.a. Minnan 閩南話, Southern Min, Taiwanese) is a variety of Chinese spoken in the southern part of Fujian province (China), Taiwan and by a large number of overseas Chinese all over Southeast Asia. Hokkien dictionaries and textbooks have been published since the 16th century in a number of locations and in a variety of languages (Classical Chinese, Dutch, English, Hokkien, Japanese, Latin, Mandarin, Spanish) for purposes such as education for locals, Christian missionary work and colonial administration.

In this post I would like to share a database project I created for the "Working with Digital Data for Historians" class taught by Prof. Tara Andrews at Uni Vienna in the autumn semester of 2018/19. The project work is based on my 3-years MA studies at Xiamen University (Fujian prov., China) and is connected to an article of mine (Xiamen at the Crossroads of Sino-Foreign Interaction During the Late Qing and Republican Periods: The Issue of Hokkien Phoneticization) already peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in the journal Crossroads - Studies on the History of Exchange Relations in the East Asian World. The database is an Excel spreadsheet-based SQL database containing 121 titles of Hokkien linguistic works, connected to relevant information (author, place/date of publishing, publisher, language, transcription method, etc.).

Hereby, I submit the dump version of the database (a .sql file containing the SQL scheme and the data as well) and a zip collection containing further relevant materials (project description, original spreadsheets, SQL command scheme, .ipynb documentation of converting the Excel spreadsheets into the SQL database using Jupyter Notebook).

Since during my research work I focused on the pre-WWII period, data regarding the post-WWII is highly insufficient. Therefore, the database is up for further expansion. (My e-mail address: sebestyen.hompot@outlook.com)