Taiwan Today

In the summer of 2005, Chun Jimmy Huang (黃駿), then a doctoral student at the University of Florida, visited the National Museum of Prehistory in Taitung, eastern Taiwan. Accompanied by his parents and his sister, Huang was expecting to learn about the people who lived in Taiwan thousands of years ago. By the end of his visit, however, he was feeling somewhat perplexed.

“Inside the museum, there was a display titled ‘Siraya tools’ that included fishing equipment, bamboo utensils and a cradle,” recalls Huang, now an assistant professor of English and Applied Linguistics at the University of Guam.

The Siraya, an Austronesian-speaking group, dominated Taiwan’s southwestern lowlands before and for some decades after the Dutch East India Company’s (VOC) 1624–1662 occupation of what is now Tainan City in southern Taiwan. In fact, the word Taiwan, many believe, is derived from the Siraya language. The Executive Yuan’s Council of Indigenous Peoples (CIP) recognizes 14 ethnic groups as aboriginal tribes, but in recent years has rejected petitions seeking formal recognition for the Siraya.

“I realized I’d seen several of the museum exhibits in my home in Jiali,” he says of Tainan’s Jiali District. “Until then, I’d thought of myself simply as a ‘Taiwanese’—someone of Southern Min descent,” he explains. Southern Min is a term used to describe the people and languages of one part of Fujian, the mainland Chinese province closest to Taiwan. The majority of Taiwanese trace their ancestry to that part of China.

“I called relatives on my father’s side to ask about our identity. To my surprise, a great uncle told me, ‘Oh yes, our family is actually huan-a,’” says Huang, using a Taiwanese word which literally means “barbarian.” Commonly applied to Taiwan’s indigenous minority in the past, the term is now considered offensive.

This discovery surprised not only Huang, but also his father. “When he was little, his mother, my grandmother, used to take him to worship a pot like ones we’d seen in pictures in the museum. His grandmother called the deity Alid, and exactly the same name was in the notes beside those pictures,” Huang says. “My father, then 54 years old, was rather confused. Like me, he’d always thought of himself as a Southern Min Taiwanese. But later he remembered having wondered why his home religion was different from that of his childhood friends.” In the Siraya language, the word alid originally meant “deity” or “spirit” in the general sense, but in Siraya religion, Alid is also the supreme spirit that is above all other gods. It is the water contained in the pot, rather than the pot itself, that embodies the spirit of Alid.

“So that’s when I first learned I was in fact a Siraya aborigine,” Huang says. “The discovery of my true identity got me thinking about issues such as the social connotation of labeling and the survival of minority languages in modern nation-states: Why did my family feel ashamed about our aboriginal ethnicity? Does this have to do with the fact that we were labeled huan-a?”

If Huang found the trip unsettling, he also found it inspiring. Five years later, the doctoral thesis he submitted to his supervisors at the University of Florida was titled Language Revitalization and Identity Politics: An Examination of Siraya Reclamation in Taiwan. In it, he disputes “the popular belief today... that by the late 19th century, the Siraya people had been ‘completely Sinicized, or Hanized,’ and their language, which served as lingua franca for several lowland peoples in the southwest plains, had become ‘extinct,’ ‘lost,’ or ‘dead.’”

“Although no one today speaks Siraya natively, the variety of Southern Min I and my Siraya family and friends speak employs several Austronesian linguistic features not found in Standard Southern Min. Therefore, ‘completely Sinicized and extinct’ is an overstatement,” he states in his thesis.

Believing that fragments of Siraya “persist in a modified form in Southern Min,” Huang began searching for information about the language, studying whatever he could find in scholarly articles about it. “However, they’re not very helpful,” he says. “There aren’t many of them, and following the conventions of academic linguistics, they focus on one or two grammatical aspects of the language. These academic publications are not ideal language learning materials.”

Undeterred, Huang tried to memorize the Siraya phrases he gathered. Only in 2007, after meeting the leaders of the Tainan Pepo Siraya Culture Association (TPSCA), did he become part of a broader effort to breathe life back into the Siraya language.

Language revitalization has been a core goal of the TPSCA since it was established in Tainan’s Xinhua District in 1997. The city’s other Siraya groupings focus on preserving Siraya traditions such as the worship of Alid.

TPSCA activists object to Siraya being labeled an “extinct” language. When Huang noticed the website of Ethnologue—an ongoing worldwide language research project that began in 1951—placed Siraya in the “extinct” category, he explained the TPSCA’s revitalization efforts to one of the editors. “Now you’ll see that in the 2013 version the old, now-believed-to-be-inappropriate, term ‘extinct’ has been replaced by the more appropriate term ‘dormant.’”

Drawing on 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century sources—but lacking audio recordings of native speech or an extensive lexicon—the association has been encouraging its supporters to study a language which, according to the anonymous author of a VOC report, sounded “pleasant, modest, measured, and extraordinarily graceful.”

It was Protestant missionaries, rather than the VOC, who expanded Dutch influence along the coast and into the interior. “These ministers soon acquired a much better knowledge of conditions on the island and had a much better grasp of local inter-tribal politics than did the local representatives of the company, who became very dependent on them,” says Sander Adelaar, associate professor and reader in Indonesian in the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and author of the 2011 book Siraya: Retrieving the Phonology, Grammar and Lexicon of a Dormant Formosan Language.

“The ministers’ first priority was conversion of the local population, and they succeeded in their aims through a program combining religious instruction, a literacy program, and health care,” Adelaar says. He has been studying the Siraya language since 1991, and stays in touch with the Siraya activists who draw on his research.

According to Adelaar, sources of information about the Siraya language fall into three categories: 17th-century Dutch religious texts, the so-called “Sinkang manuscripts,” and wordlists collected during the Japanese colonial era (1895–1945). Sinkang was the name of both a major indigenous settlement in what is now Tainan’s Xinshi District and the Siraya dialect spoken there.

For the purpose of proselytizing, a missionary named Daniel Gravius translated two parts of the New Testament—the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. John—from Dutch into Siraya. The former is a key document for those studying Siraya; the latter has been lost. Gravius also translated a shortened version of the Heidelberg Catechism.

“The missionaries who made the Siraya translations often used several ways to spell a sound,” Adelaar explains. “These ways often reflect the spelling problems that existed in their own language, as 17th-century Dutch spelling was not yet unified. Authors still followed personal spelling preference, influenced by their own Dutch dialect background. The spelling confusion in their own language certainly adds to the problem of interpreting Siraya orthography.”

From Dutch pastors and teachers, Siraya people learned how to write their language using the Latin script. Because it was in use before substantial numbers of Chinese-speaking Han migrants arrived on the island, and long before writing systems were devised for other aboriginal languages, Adelaar calls Siraya “Taiwan’s oldest written language.”

Dutch Writing System

The Siraya seem to have abandoned Christianity soon after a band of Ming dynasty (1368–1644) loyalists led by Zheng Cheng-gong (鄭成功, 1624–1662), popularly known as Koxinga, forced the Dutch to withdraw from Taiwan in 1662. Yet the system of writing created by the Dutch remained in use for several generations, as proven in the form of more than 170 contracts by which Siraya landowners agreed to sell or lease plots to Han Chinese. Written in both Chinese characters and Siraya script, these “Sinkang manuscripts” date from the final quarter of the 17th century to the first quarter of the 19th century.

“The language of the land contracts might be considered more authentic than that of the 17th century liturgical texts as they were composed by Siraya speakers themselves, but they are highly formulaic and lack the grammatical and lexical variation of the Gospel and catechism texts,” Adelaar says. “The contracts are also very difficult to interpret and show regional variety.”

The wordlists compiled by Japanese researchers (not all of whom were trained linguists) during Japan’s colonial rule of Taiwan (1895–1945), “show forms not found in other sources, and suggest a greater dialect variation than that reflected in the 17th century texts,” Adelaar says.

“These written texts contain only a limited amount of evidence, so we may never be able to retrieve the whole language,” Huang says. “Also, there are things in the biblical text that didn’t exist in Taiwan in the 17th century, such as grapes and bread. The missionaries must have invented terms for these.”

“A characteristic of Siraya that seems strange to English and Chinese speakers is the fact that word order doesn’t matter as much. In English and Chinese, ‘Kate ate a banana’ and ‘A banana ate Kate’ would mean very different things. But in Siraya, ‘Ate Kate a banana’ and ‘Ate a banana Kate’ can have the same meaning,” says Huang, pointing out that Siraya sentences usually begin with a verb.

“Siraya utilizes additional markers to mark the ‘doer’ and the ‘undergoer’ of an action,” he explains. “Also, it marks verbs, so every verb has at least two forms—one is doer-oriented, the other is undergoer-oriented—and since they are marked, their order isn’t significant.”

Unlike another of Taiwan’s lowland aboriginal tongues, Pazeh—which ceased to be a living language when its final native speaker, Pan Jin-yu (潘金玉), passed away on October 24, 2010—no one is sure when Siraya disappeared as an everyday language.

Some researchers think the last native speaker died around 1908, but Paul Li (李壬癸), a research fellow in the Institute of Linguistics at Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s foremost research organization, believes the language had fallen out of use by the middle of the 19th century, and perhaps as early as 1830. He points out that none of the Sinkang manuscripts available to scholars dates from after 1818, and refers to notes taken by Joseph Beal Steere, an American ornithologist who explored Taiwan in the 1870s. “Steere visited an old Siraya woman who couldn’t remember much Siraya vocabulary in 1873. She told him that even her parents didn’t speak Siraya in their daily lives,” Li says.

Bringing Language Back

Li does not think Siraya can be revived. Comparing Siraya with Hebrew, which is often described as the only language brought back into widespread daily use after a long period of dormancy, he points out that throughout the history of what is now one of Israel’s official languages, many people used Hebrew for religious purposes even if they did not speak it in everyday activities. When Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922), the man widely credited with reviving spoken Hebrew, began his campaign in the 1880s, the number and range of texts written in that language were vastly greater than those materials now available to scholars of Siraya. “Is there anyone who reads Siraya or says prayers in Siraya every day?” wonders Li, who thinks that even if activists put in a great deal of time and effort, truly reviving Siraya is “very unlikely, because there are too many gaps. What we know about the language is very insufficient.”

Although Siraya efforts to gain formal central government recognition as a tribe have yet to succeed, Siraya activists have received local government help. For example, Su Huan-chih (蘇煥智), a Democratic Progressive Party politician who was Tainan County’s magistrate for nine years before the county’s merger with Tainan City in late 2010, has often expressed support for the tribe.

In 2005, Tainan County Government recognized the Siraya as an indigenous ethnic group; between then and the city-county merger, more than 14,000 Tainan residents registered themselves as ethnic Siraya at local household registration offices. Only those who could show descent from families listed as indigenes during the Japanese colonial era were permitted to apply for this status.

“We can’t say exactly how many people in the Tainan area are Siraya. One estimate is 60,000,” says Uma Talavan (萬淑娟), executive secretary of Tainan City Government’s Siraya Cultural Promotion Center and chairwoman of the TPSCA. Nine of the 14 tribes currently recognized by the CIP have fewer than 13,000 members.

Quest for Identity

Talavan stresses that the push for central government recognition is motivated by a quest for identity and dignity. “The influence of government recognition on social attitudes is very great,” says Talavan’s husband, Edgar L. Macapili. “If we get recognition, then we can restore our names, music and other facets of our identity.”

Music is of special interest to Macapili. A native of Zamboanga in the Philippines, Macapili and Talavan met when both were studying music in Manila, and he now teaches music in the Tainan area. In 2002, he wrote a trilingual (Southern Min, English and Siraya) musical based on the biblical story of Noah’s Ark called Ta Avang ki Noe-an. Its performance at a school in Xinhua received a lot of media coverage. “He constructed Siraya sentences from individual words and fairly transparent grammatical elements in the Gospel text,” says Adelaar of Macapili’s writing process. “The result does not always follow the actual grammatical rules of the Gospel, which is to be expected given the lack of descriptive data. However, in terms of language revival the project was remarkably successful.”

Macapili’s interest in Siraya was spurred when he leafed through a copy of Gravius’s Siraya-language version of the Gospel of St. Matthew. He found he was able to understand a good amount of it because one of the languages he grew up speaking is Bisaya—like Sirayan, an Austronesian language.

Among his contributions to Siraya language revitalization is a 3,500-word glossary of Siraya terms, with their meanings and example sentences in English and Chinese, that was published with the support of Tainan County Government in 2008.

“Local languages” (Taiwanese, Hakka and aboriginal languages) have been an official part of the elementary school curriculum in Taiwan since 2001. Talavan says that while Siraya is “not yet on the same level as other local languages,” thanks to the city government’s support, it is now being taught to 14 classes in nine elementary schools around the city.

In 2002, the association began holding summer language camps called Musuhapa (“to burgeon” in Siraya), which usually run for three days. Attendance ranges from 50 to 120 people. Typically, “about 40 percent have been to a previous camp, while 60 percent are first-timers. Most people are very enthusiastic,” Talavan says. “We now have more than 10 volunteer teachers, of all ages,” she says, adding that experts are brought in to lecture on Siraya culture and society.

In some cases, attending classes is free, while in others participants pay for materials and other expenses, depending whether funding has been obtained from outside sources.

Siraya-language teachers use a five-book set written by TPSCA activists and published by Tainan City Government. The books were awarded an Honorable Mention in the 2011 National Publication Awards. Adelaar praises the books, saying that, “in many respects, they’re a model for the development of learning materials involving other dormant languages.”

Among those who attended the 2011 camp was Amos Wu (吳彥融), a 26-year-old Tainan native who has since become the TPSCA’s full-time administrator. Wu first heard of the Siraya people in history classes at junior high school. “However, it didn’t mean anything to me until 2008, when the professor teaching my sociolinguistics class at university assigned two of my classmates to interview Uma Talavan. They weren’t sure how to get to Xinhua, and I was interested in the topic, so I joined them,” he recalls.

“Because of my enormous interest in languages, I immediately began thinking about learning the language,” Wu says. He now attends Siraya classes for six hours each week. “I practice speaking and making sentences with my classmates, and complete assignments. I wish I had more time to review lessons, but it seems impossible this year because of my heavy workload.”

“The syntax of Formosan Austronesian languages differs from the languages I already knew, so it took me awhile to figure out the voice pattern of Siraya,” he says. “As for the romanized writing system, I didn’t have problems with it because it’s quite similar to Spanish, Italian and peh-ōe-jī,” he adds, referring to the system developed by missionaries in the 19th century to write Southern Min.

Wu points out that Tainan City is increasing the number of Siraya classes in local elementary schools, and adds that he may teach some of these before the end of this year.

Finding the Words

“Our revitalization work involves a lot of ‘reinventing.’ If we only follow the old texts, the only thing we can teach our people today—and hence the only thing they’d be able to talk about in Siraya—would be Bible stories. That wouldn’t be ideal,” Huang says. “Our people want to use the language to talk about normal things in life such as introducing a friend or counting objects. We, as language teachers, need to make it happen.”
Huang explains that whenever a word cannot be found in the old texts, a new word is created, based on what is already available. “Doing so for Siraya is actually no different to the natural ‘word formation processes’ in currently spoken languages,” he says, giving as an example the creation of the word “television” in English after the device was invented.
“We’re missing tons of linguistic data about what life for 17th- and 18th-century Siraya was like,” he says. “The fact is, we will never ‘rebuild’ a Siraya language exactly the same as its 17th century variety. That’s why we don’t speak of ‘rebuilding’ or ‘retrieving’ Siraya. Instead, we are ‘revitalizing’ Siraya.”

Seventeenth-century Siraya should not be viewed as more authentic, he stresses. “The 21st-century variety of Siraya is a developing language. It doesn’t have a fully systematic grammar yet and it’s lacking in a lot of vocabulary. Nevertheless, it’s based on the 17th-century variety and is taken up by the descendants of 17th-century Siraya folks—and therefore it’s a continuation of our heritage.”

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Steven Crook is the author of Taiwan: The Bradt Travel Guide.

Copyright © 2013 by Steven Crook