Taiwan Today

Efforts to promote and pass on Taiwan’s many native languages are bearing fruit.

Last September, Tainan City Government’s Cultural Affairs Bureau released a documentary titled “Going Home” to mark the first anniversary of the opening of Ong Iok-tek (王育德) Memorial Museum in southern Taiwan. A Tainan native, Ong gained fame for his pioneering research into the Holo language, also called Taiwanese, for which he earned a doctorate in linguistics from The University of Tokyo. As a political dissident, Ong was not allowed to return to his homeland from Japan before his death in 1985, two years before martial law came to an end in Taiwan.

The documentary is noteworthy as the first feature-length production by the bureau to use Holo subtitles alongside standard vernacular Chinese. One of the roles highlighted is that of Ang Ui-jin (洪惟仁‬), who helped establish the museum. A victim of political persecution, Ang has given numerous talks about Ong’s life and achievements in the field of Holo studies. In 2004, he became the founding director of National Taichung University of Education’s Department of Taiwanese Languages and Literature in central Taiwan, one of the first such tertiary education institutes in the country.

Ang is keen to emphasize Holo’s origins as a language brought over with immigrants from China’s Fujian province, where he has conducted a number of field work projects. It is currently spoken by about 65 percent of Taiwan’s population of 23 million people. Together with other native languages, Holo was suppressed under government policies to promote Mandarin during the martial law era. At that time, the use of non-Mandarin languages was banned at schools and rigorously restricted in popular music, film and TV.

In 2019, Ang’s decades of linguistic research culminated with publication of the two-volume “Studies on Social Language Geography of Taiwan,” which focuses on the classification and regionalization of Mandarin, Holo and Hakka—used by the country’s second largest ethnic group—as well as indigenous languages. This work marked the first major endeavor in Taiwan to map in great detail the geographic distributions of local languages and their regional dialects. “Although linguistic studies in Taiwan date back many years, it’s an area now incorporating cultural, ethnographical, historical and geographical research,” Ang said.

Written Record

One of Ang’s primary goals is developing a unified Holo writing system for teaching and creating literary works using Chinese characters, romanized script or a mixture of the two. Although a variety of systems for writing Holo exist, the language lacks a widely understood standard that the majority of speakers can use.

The origins of romanized Holo trace back to Taiwan’s time under Dutch rule (1624-1662), when Western missionaries utilized Roman letters to mimic the sounds of languages they heard. The use of Chinese characters has an even longer history, according to Ang, appearing in early screenplays of Holo opera. Yet, inconsistencies in usage have proven a major stumbling block for linguists and language policymakers.

In the 1990s, the Ministry of Education began formulating the official writing systems for non-Mandarin languages by using standardized romanization schemes plus, for Holo and Hakka texts, recommended Chinese characters. Contributions to the project were made by linguists and organizations such as Taipei City-based Taiwan Languages and Literature Society (TLLS), which Ang helped found in 1991.

One of the group’s first tasks was to create phonetic alphabets for native languages, its current head Chiang Min-hua (江敏華) said. She specializes in Hakka language studies as a researcher in the Institute of Linguistics at Taipei-based Academia Sinica, the nation’s foremost research institution.

According to Chiang, TLLS’s functions include publishing the biannual Journal of Taiwanese Languages and Literature as well as organizing forums for international exchanges. Its latest event was hosted last November by the Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature at National Changhua University of Education in central Taiwan, which included presentations of 18 research papers by postgraduate students from home and abroad.

A major theme of the Changhua forum concerned teaching courses for local languages, which have a crucial role to play in any preservation plans. “People may now be more aware of the importance of protecting their mother tongues, but this mentality means nothing without the proper structures in place to do so,” Chiang said. She highlighted the lack of support for non-Mandarin languages in official spaces such as schools and government buildings as among the major stumbling blocks to overcome if Taiwan is to become a truly multilingual society.

The government response to these concerns includes promulgation of the National Languages Development Act in January 2019, which aims for the protection and revitalization of all the languages used by Taiwan’s various ethnic groups. Among the bill’s provisions are clauses stating the government should promote publications, movies and TV productions for all the country’s vernaculars, and that nonprofit communications organizations receiving public funding should provide linguistically diverse services.

Austronesian Origin

Nowhere is action more urgently required than in preserving the languages of Taiwan’s indigenous peoples. The government officially recognizes 16 different tribes alongside 16 aboriginal languages plus numerous dialects. “They’re widely considered invaluable by international linguists,” said Sung Li-may (宋麗梅), an associate professor in the Graduate Institute of Linguistics (GIL) at National Taiwan University (NTU).

Some scholars believe Taiwan is the likely source for Austronesian languages around the world given that nine of the 10 language families are found in the country. This has given rise to the hypothesis that Austronesian peoples originally settled in Taiwan before migrating outward to Southeast Asia and Oceania, including Easter Island in the east and Madagascar in the west, according to Sung.

Head of the Indigenous Languages Research and Development Center under the Cabinet-level Council of Indigenous Peoples from 2016 to 2019, Sung is currently a member of the council’s Indigenous Languages Development Committee. She has taught Austronesian languages at GIL for more than two decades since it was established in 1994. Each year, the institute’s students are sent for a five-day visit to a tribal village to talk with elderly residents. Recent trips included to an Atayal settlement in northern Taiwan’s Miaoli County and to the Tao people on Orchid Island in the southeastern county of Taitung.

In 2018 and 2019, Sung was a co-leader of an NTU project supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology’s Department of Humanities and Social Sciences conducting interdisciplinary research on Austronesian cultures, spanning such fields as anthropology, archaeology, botany, geography, history, law, linguistics, literature and sociology. A follow-on program is now looking to build language databanks using artificial intelligence, starting with the indigenous Seediq and Amis languages, she said. “Emerging technologies are giving us new opportunities to preserve and pass on languages that might otherwise die out.”

For TLLS’s Chiang, it is a matter of profound regret that Taiwan was once deaf to the tongues of native inhabitants. “If a language has no public space, there’s little room to meaningfully study its development,” she said. The future is much brighter, she feels, after the country’s postdemocratization embrace of liberal, pluralistic values. “Now’s the time for us to restore and elevate the country’s linguistic heritage.”

Write to Pat Gao at cjkao@mofa.gov.tw