Amoinese

Amoinese is how I call and name those resident in Xiamen. Xiamen is also called Amoy in the past.

Amoy or Xiamen
“Xiamen” is the manderin pinyin for the name of this city. Amoy should be the first English name for Xiamen, a saying tell us that it came from Fuzhou dialect. Fuzhou is about 600 miles away from Xiamen. Residents there speak a total different dialect from xiamen. The first English speaking foreign asked a Fuzhou resident about the name of xiamen city. Sure the guy answered with his local dialect and accent, that was Amoy. Here comes the first English name for xiamen, and it did last for a very long history, and became the real English name for xiamen.
If the foreign asked a xiamen resident first, I believed xiamen’s English name now should be Emeng, nearly the same as an Ariabian country. Emeng is the Minnan ( Hokkien ) dialect pronounciation for the xiamen.

Amoinese
I like the pronounciation of Amoinese, it can be stands for both an noun or an adj. Amoinese is the thing of xiamen and resident of xiamen. According to the manderine pronounciation, that can be “Xiamen Ren”, to Minnan ( Hokkien ) dialect will be “e meng lang”.

Who are Amoinese
Amoinese is quite unique residents in China. Xiamen has migration history for hundreds of years. Most of the residents here came from Minnan district (Minnan means South of Fujian), they shares the same unique local language, Minnan dialect ( also called Hokkien in Southeast of Asia ). There are Quanzhou city and Zhangzhou city, both have a longer city history than xiamen. More than 70% of the xiamen residents are the offsprings of immigrants from Quanzhou and Zhangzhou. Quanzhou, Zhangzhou, Xiamen are connected by their border lines, together they were the famous Minnan Golden Triangle Districe. Which stands for their fast developing economy and industrial union relationship. The rest 30% are Aboriginal, and resident from all over china.
Here we are, we know who is amoinese. Due to the immigration history, Xiamen became a city with open mind. So Amoinese is very open-minded and friendly.

This blog will note all the morden life of Amoinese and their city, sure part of the related history will be reminded time to time.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 8th, 2006 at 12:27 pm and is filed under Xiamen Stories, Xiamen Resident. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.