Writing systems of Formosan languages

The writing systems of the Formosan languages are a set of Latin-based orthographies used to write the indigenous Austronesian languages of Taiwan. The current orthographies were officially promulgated on 15 December 2005 by the Ministry of Education and the Council of Indigenous Peoples following several years of consultation with linguists and native speakers; 16 languages and 45 dialects are now regulated under the system.

The Formosan languages, which are toneless, typically have small phonemic inventories of roughly twenty consonants and four vowels, which makes them readily representable with a Latin-based script supplemented by a few diacritics and digraphs. Earlier attempts to write the languages date to the seventeenth century, when Dutch missionaries developed the Sinckan romanisation for Siraya and Taivoan, and continued through the post-war period when Protestant missionaries created Latin scripts for several Formosan languages to support Bible translation.