Origin of the Term "Hoklo"

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The term Hoklo does not have a clear origin, and historically has not had a standard Chinese-character representation.

There have been many other terms used to refer to this people and/or their language. For example: Hokkien, Fukien, Amoy, Minnan, Min, Fujianese, Taiwanese, etc. The drawback of all these other terms is that they are attached to geographical locations, whereas Hoklo refers solely to the people, with no string attached. Most importantly, this is the term used by these people to refer to themselves, for many centuries.
Given that the most widely used modern pronunciation of Hoklo does not contain the letter k, there are also advocates for spellings like: Holo or . However, Hoklo remains as the most widely used term in English. The ancient pronunciation probably contained an unreleased final glottal stop h, which is (1) mapped as a k in European languages, a practice seen also in today's Malaysian/Indonesian, (2) mapped as a unreleased velar stop k into Cantonese and some Hoklo subdialects (e.g: Hai-Feng, Lu-Feng), due to the lack of unreleased glottal stop in these dialects. For people familiar with the Chinese tonal system, this means that the first syllable Hok carried the Yang-Ru tone, not the Yang-Qu, nor the Yin-Ru tone.