English is a pervasive, persuasive influence in the
daily lives of Taiwan's people, and of their nation.
Will "Taiwanese English" one day become as distinctive
a variety of English as the tongue H.L. Mencken
dubbed "the American language"?
The thoughtful foreign tourist preparing for her first trip to Taipei may well wonder how she will manage to communicate with the people while she is there. "Well, Taipei is in Taiwan, so I guess I need a Taiwanese phrasebook," she tells the bookshop clerk on her way to the airport. Not finding one on the shelves of the Language & Reference section, she tries the Foreign Travel section of the same store and notices a general guidebook to Taiwan. Skimming the chapter on "Language and Customs," our intrepid pilgrim is told that what she really needs is a Chinese phrasebook--of which there are, of course, several back in the Language & Reference section. She selects one, makes her purchase, and races to catch her flight.
Upon landing at Chiang Kai-shek International Airport, our savvy traveler cannot wait to try out some of the phrases she has learned. To her surprise, however, each time she attempts to engage a local person in conversation, her Chinese is met with an English response. "My pronunciation must be off," she tells herself, and tries again. No matter how carefully she articulates her Ni hao ma? (How are you?), the Taiwanese person she is addressing returns with a volley of English. She flips vainly through her phrasebook in an attempt to respond in Chinese, but ends up talking to folks in much the same way as she would if she were back home in Kansas.
English Taipei
The experience of the tourist just described is increasingly common in Taiwan today. This is particularly true in Taipei, where local residents are saturated with English broadcast and print media, English conversation schools, university graduate programs in English teaching, and an international consumerist culture that is primarily English-language-based.
Taipei billboards and shop signs blend English with Chinese, and public transportation systems feature announcements in English. Many street and place names are represented in romanized phonetic approximations and combined with English words, as in "Chung Shan North Road." (The fact that the same road sign may be romanized in more than one way reminds us that human communication defies scientific attempts at uniformity and consistency.) The ubiquity of English in Taipei is not only a sign that the general public's communication habits are undergoing a transformation; on a more profound level, it also signals the emergence of a new way of looking at the world.
The Prussian diplomat and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) appreciated how learning a foreign language can transform not only one's communication habits, but also one's perception of the world. He said that "each language draws a circle around the people to whom it adheres which it is possible for the individual to escape only by stepping into a different one. The learning of a foreign language should therefore mean the gaining of a new standpoint toward one's worldview." Elsewhere, he speaks of individual languages as "webs" that simultaneously unify and set boundaries on one's thinking.
This dual function of language as both unifier and divider can be seen in Taiwan's language policies, past and present. While Mandarin Chinese has been the island's official national language for over fifty years, Taipei's twenty-first century statecrafters understand the strategic role that English can play in reexamining the political landscape of Taiwan's recent past. They see how promoting new methods of English education vigorously, particularly in the primary schools, can also have a transforming effect on the way Taiwan's residents view themselves--and in how they proclaim this identity, directly and indirectly, to those across the Taiwan Strait, as well as to the rest of the international community. In short, English education is being appropriated to serve the larger goal of promoting a new national identity for Taiwan, which is distinct from that of China.
At this point in Taiwan's history, it is difficult to imagine that English would become the island's primary national language. At the same time, it is difficult to deny that a Taiwanese variety of English is already emerging, and which in the foreseeable future may come to function in ways that are simply beyond the scope of Mandarin Chinese. In many respects, Mandarin is a legacy of Taiwan's Republican past. Practically speaking, although Mandarin is used widely here, the majority of the island's residents consider one or another "Taiwanese" language their mother tongue. Considering this multilingual state of affairs in the context of current debate about statehood and national identity, what's the use of English in Taiwan?
A Dialect Backed by an Army
To understand how language policy, ideology, and national identity are related in contemporary Taiwan, it is helpful to review a bit of history. In fact, the history of Mandarin (one of several "dialects" of Chinese) as the official language of the Republic of China is in many ways intertwined with the historical development of the Republic itself. The Republic of China was founded in 1912; the same year, the "Committee for the Unification of Pronunciation" was formed, and in 1918 the Chuyin Fuhao--a Mandarin-based, phonetic-symbol system--was officially implemented. According to one estimate, hundreds if not thousands of such phonetic systems were in use in China in the early 1900s. They offered a simplified alternative to writing the more intricate Chinese characters. It was hoped that the implementation of an official phonetic system would not only standardize pronunciation, but also promote the memorization of Chinese characters and at the same time unify the masses around a common identity.
Sun Yat-sen realized the indissoluble link between language and a sense of belonging. National identity, according to Sun, was comprised of "blood kinship, common language, common religion, and common customs." It is therefore understandable that the Kuomintang's (KMT's) Central Standing Committee would move that "all members of the Party should instruct their members to use the phonetic system in order to facilitate the propaganda of Party principles," and that they would form a "Committee for the Promotion of the National Language" in 1935. Still, the initial efforts of the committee were at best flaccid, since almost half of the KMT leadership at that time came from the southern regions of China where non-Mandarin varieties of Chinese predominated.
The Chinese Civil War necessitated that the Party harness an extension of its national language policy across the Taiwan Strait. In 1946, a KMT "Taiwan Committee for the Promotion of Mandarin" was established, with two ostensible goals: to promote Mandarin as a sort of Chinese lingua franca, thus unifying the inhabitants of the island under the banner of a single national identity (namely, China); and to encourage ethnic harmony among members of Taiwan's culturally diverse population. Although the KMT's motivations for promoting Mandarin in Taiwan have their critics, it is worth noting that one of the six guiding principles of the Taiwan Committee for the Promotion of Mandarin suggests that the committee was initially in favor of encouraging the island's multilingual makeup: "Implement the revival of the native languages of Taiwan, learn Mandarin from comparison with the dialects."
The imperfections of the KMT before and after it arrived in Taiwan are well known, and need not be rehearsed here. In terms of language policy and national identity, however, it is worth remembering that many of the tensions experienced between the KMT "mainlanders" and local "Taiwanese" were exacerbated when the latter felt themselves increasingly circumscribed by the former's implementation of a language policy that eulogized Mandarin over their mother tongues. Use of languages that the committee had originally characterized as "the native languages" of Taiwan soon became evidence of an unpatriotic attitude on the part of the language user. There are many accounts of Taiwanese of all ages being punished for using languages other than Mandarin in places they had been forbidden. For official purposes, the non-Mandarin "dialects" of Taiwan were effectively rendered unspeakable. This condition persisted until a popular democratic movement became more visible--and audible--in the 1980s.
Taiwanese Mandarin, Taiwanese English
The Mandarin that has developed in Taiwan since the end of World War II is sometimes referred to as Taiwan Kuoyu ("Taiwanese Mandarin"). To refer to the English that is emerging alongside the other languages used on the island every day as Taiwan Yingyu ("Taiwanese English") is to call attention to the fact that English is a malleable, living language that has developed into a great many varieties--among them, American English, Indian English, "the Queen's English," and so on--and to place Taiwan's residents into the company of English speakers around the world. Each of these "Englishes" marks its users as members of a discourse community, which in turn is often related to a national identity with its own cultural traditions and values. English is not the exclusive property of any single country.
It is true that English was at one time seen and heard in Asia as a mark of Western imperialism and colonialism. Under current postcolonial conditions, however, the same English language is being appropriated and re-colonized by many of the same Asian peoples who were formerly treated as colonial subjects by nations that considered English their first language. As Filipino poet Gemino Abad articulated in a recent issue of Newsweek , "the English language is now ours. We have colonized it, too." The same observation could just as easily have been made by many residents of Taiwan today.
For that matter, the same relationship between the people of Taiwan and English has existed between the people of Taiwan and Mandarin Chinese since the Nationalist era. Mandarin's status as the official national language of the island was once a mark of the government's efforts to "Chinese-ize" the inhabitants of the island; in the process, however, Taiwan's people "colonized" Mandarin and made it their own, regardless of their political affiliation or personal identification with Chinese civilization. The result of these processes is what we see today in Taiwan: English and Mandarin are both "Taiwanized" and have become "Taiwanese" languages. Taiwanese English may be younger than Taiwanese Mandarin, but it is growing in popularity. The people of Taiwan may one day find themselves speaking a "single" language that is in fact an amalgamation of many languages--Mandarin Chinese, "Taiwanese," English, and several others. This is only fitting in Taiwan's multicultural, multilingual society.
An Analogy
The Philippines, Singapore, and India are examples of Asian nations that have experienced how the learning of foreign languages results in "the gaining of a new standpoint toward one's worldview"--and how such language learning can shape the way a nation thinks about itself and represents itself to the outside world. A less obvious and (and less comfortable) analogy for Taiwan might be seen in the twentieth-century Jewish experience. European and Russian Jews in the years leading up to World War II identified first with Hebrew and Yiddish as "mother tongues," but also adopted the national languages of their second home countries. Those who escaped the death camps of National Socialism and the pogroms of Stalinism survived in exile. If they settled in the United States (as many did, particularly in the boroughs of New York City), they learned English, but approached it through the unique sounds and expressions of their other tongues and seasoned it with features of their first, second, and third languages. The result was a vibrant, unique code--"Yiddish English"--which helped to forge a new ethnic identity at the same time that it symbolized solidarity with an ongoing struggle. This language is alive and remains a rich, powerful force in the life of a people, and of the nation in which they live.
This same process of language acquisition is relevant to Taiwan in two ways. First, applied to the experience of the Chinese people who came to this island with the KMT in the 1940s, life in the new world of the Republic of China on Taiwan was in many ways one of exile from the motherland. It necessitated the learning of a new way of life. For many, the new life on Taiwan also entailed the acquisition of a standardized variety--Mandarin--of the various Chinese languages they had spoken in the old country. Elevating that language to "official" status helped to unify them in a common identity that strengthened their resolve to recover the past. To these "Free China" exiles, Mandarin Chinese was a powerful symbol of solidarity with an ongoing struggle to liberate the mainland from what they saw as its communist captivity.
Considered from the perspective of the majority of residents of Taiwan whose families had come to the island prior to the arrival of the Nationalists, the experience of Jewish European exiles is analogous in second way. Although this "Taiwanese" majority is also of Chinese ethnic heritage, they identified first with languages other than Mandarin Chinese. A good many of today's residents of Taiwan also studied Japanese as the official language of the island between 1895 and 1945. Beginning in the late 1940s, they and their children learned Mandarin Chinese. Subsequent key events leading up to Taiwan's current democratization have brought issues of ethnicity, language policy, and national identity to the forefront of local political debate. Although they live in a land they have historically called their home, the Taiwanese majority have found their interests officially marginalized by most of the rest of the international community. The near-universal recognition of Beijing as the sole representative of the people of China has resulted in Taiwan's isolation and virtual exile from the international diplomatic community. To avoid the frequently hypothesized Anschluss of contemporary Taiwan and China--whether economical or political--necessitates that Taiwan acquire a new language.
This new language is English. Yet while it is a language quite different from the other languages of Taiwan, it need not be regarded primarily as a foreign language--as was the case in Taiwan, initially, with Japanese, if not of Mandarin Chinese during the Republican period. Like the New York English adapted by many exiled European Jews, the English embraced by Taiwanese people can be punctuated and intoned with the salient features of all of the languages that are closest to the hearts of the people of Taiwan--Southern Min, Mandarin, Hakka, and languages of the indigenous peoples. It can be one of the many international varieties of "world English." And, with wise promotion by various government agencies, it can have an energizing role in Taiwan's "quiet revolution" from single-party statism to democracy--in addition to serving as an ideological buffer against an undesired unification with China.
Official recognition of Taiwan comes in fits and starts. With Taiwan now a member of the World Trade Organization, local businesspeople are often encouraged to improve their English so that they will not be limited to doing business with their counter parts across the Strait. The unpleasant implication of staying entirely within a Chinese-speaking commercial fold is that Taiwan becomes economically bound to China. The alternative is to develop stronger economic ties with the rest of the world by accelerating the use of the international medium of English. In a time of economic uncertainty, the lure of financial gain through the use of Chinese as the main language of commerce serves as bait in a trap. It also paints Taiwan into not only a linguistic corner, but a political one as well. In this sense (to cite Humboldt again), the Chinese languages used in commercial dealings between the two sides of the Strait "draw a circle around the people to whom it adheres which it is possible for the individual to escape only by stepping into a different one."
In any event, one thing that will emerge from a realigning of languages here is an appreciation of the notion that Taiwan is in fact a sovereign nation of immigrants--not an island of headhunters and pirates, not a Dutch possession, not a distant subject of Manchuria, not a Japanese colony, not an American client state, and not a renegade province of China. I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.
Kristopher Kowal is an associate professor of English at Tamkang University in Tamsui, Taiwan, and the author of Rhetorical Implications of Linguistic Relativity.
Copyright (c) 2002 by Kristopher Kowal.