On a rainy April day in an elementary school classroom in Taipei, 11 and 12-year-old students giggled and bounced on their feet with fists clenched and arms swinging, performing the action of jumping rope in response to their teacher’s verbal cue.
“Giú tuá soh, pue̍h tuā soh!” boomed the teacher, moving on to the next action. The students reached forward and pretended to pull an invisible rope. Tug of war.
This was a language class aimed at helping young students learn to speak what was for centuries the main dialect spoken on the island: Taiwanese, a variant of the Minnan language family also known as Southern Min, or Hokkien.
The class is part of a sweeping attempt by Taiwanese authorities since the island’s democratization in the 1990s to promote native languages that, for decades, had been suppressed in favor of Mandarin. In 2001, the country enacted a law making schools offer weekly instruction in these native languages, which include, in addition to Taiwanese, Hakka and Austronesian indigenous languages like Atayal, Amis, and Paiwan.
In June 2017, Taiwan passed the Indigenous Languages Development Act, which declared Taiwan’s indigenous languages as national languages and allowed for their use in official documents and legal affairs. In December 2018, Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan passed the National Languages Development Act, which gave national status to Taiwanese and Hakka and compelled the government to fund a Taiwanese language television channel.
Taiwanese is by far the most spoken language in Taiwan besides Mandarin, which is usually referred to in Taiwan as the national language, or guóyǔ (國語). According to Taiwan’s 2010 census, Taiwanese is spoken by 81.9% of the island’s population, compared to Mandarin’s 83.5%.
These figures, however, are misleading. Although 81.9% of Taiwanese citizens can speak Taiwanese to some degree, they often cannot speak it well, as Taiwan’s education system and workplaces have long prioritized Mandarin.
Students play “tug of war” in their Taiwanese language class. (Photo by J. Zach Hollo)
While many people in Taiwan grew up speaking Taiwanese at home, they spoke Mandarin at school and work. This phenomenon caused a gradual decrease in Taiwanese language skills, with each successive generation losing bits of nuanced vocabulary and proper syntax. Since Mandarin became Taiwan’s official language after World War II, the Taiwanese language has experienced a persistent simplification and reduction. Today, many in Taiwan only use it to express greetings and basic phrases.
This trend troubles people in Taiwan not only because it marks the loss of cultural heritage, but also because the Taiwanese language is imbued with historical and political significance. For many in Taiwan who fought for the liberal political reforms that culminated in the country’s democratization in the 1990s, the Taiwanese language embodies resistance to authoritarian rule and is inseparable from the Taiwanese identity.
In 1949, Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) forces fled to Taiwan after being defeated by the Communists in the Chinese Civil War. The KMT saw their time in Taiwan as just a sojourn until they would retake the Chinese mainland from the Communists. In order to unite the island behind this goal, they set about inculcating a Chinese identity in Taiwan’s hearts and minds.
The common language of the KMT bureaucracy was Mandarin, and so the KMT mandated that Mandarin be the primary medium of education on the island, even though the island’s inhabitants themselves spoke mostly Taiwanese while their second language, to the chagrin of KMT officials, was often Japanese. This fed into a notion many Taiwanese have regarding their history that when imperial Japanese troops, who ruled the island as a Japanese colony from 1895 to 1945, were replaced by KMT forces following World War II, Taiwan simply changed hands from one foreign colonial ruler to another.
Meili Fang, a linguist specializing in Taiwanese who grew up in southern Taiwan, remembers being reprimanded in elementary school in the early 1970s for accidentally blurting out Taiwanese. “Sometimes you had to pay a little money or sometimes you had to give a paper but sometimes you had to stand under the sun which was very very hot,” says Fang. Her memory sheds light on the ambitious project of social engineering undertaken by the KMT to make the island Chinese. In many schools, the KMT even deployed “language police” to enforce the policy of only allowing students to speak Mandarin. Students caught violating this rule were cited, fined, and sometimes had to wear signs around their necks that read: “I spoke Taiwanese.”
The period of KMT rule from 1947 to 1987 came to be known as the White Terror period of Taiwanese history, marked by authoritarian repression and incidents such as the 228 Massacre, a government crackdown on civil unrest on February 28, 1947 that left thousands dead. During the White Terror period, the KMT ruled Taiwan as if it were only a province within the country of China. A rubber stamp legislature consisted of representatives from all provinces of China who had fled to Taiwan at the end of the Chinese Civil War with Chiang Kai-shek’s bureaucracy. Taiwan was represented in the legislature along with Henan, Hunan, Shanxi, and China’s other provinces, so rather than the legislature representing Taiwan, it only gave Taiwan a small provincial voice. The KMT reshaped just about every aspect of Taiwan’s society—education, media, the law—in order to impose a Chinese identity on the island’s people.
The Chinese identity formation imposed by the KMT, similar to the Japanese identity imposed on the island by Japan, came at the expense of the existing predominant culture of descendants of migrants from the southern Min region of Fujian, as well as that of Hakka descendants and Taiwan’s indigenous population. During the White Terror, aggravation in Taiwan over both the KMT’s iron grip and the suppression of local culture often gave rise to resistance movements that advocated both democratization and a Taiwanese identity. Unable to find sufficient civil space in Taiwan, some of the most influential of these resistance movements happened abroad, by members of Taiwan’s diaspora community.
Lee Min-chen (李旻臻), a public relations staffer for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which favors eventual Taiwanese independence, has a family history reflective of the diaspora resistance movement. According to Lee, her grandfather was a victim of the White Terror and served time as a political prisoner. When he was released, his son (Lee’s father) and other family members were put on the KMT’s infamous “black list,” or hēi míngdān (黑名單). Her father then moved the family to the United States, where he became active in organizations run by Taiwanese living in the U.S. that promoted Taiwan’s democratization.
These civil society organs of the Taiwanese diaspora were crucial to Taiwan’s democratization. During this period, many of these civil society groups used the Taiwanese language to gauge the likelihood that a potential member was a spy. “If you didn’t speak Taiwanese fluently, they were suspicious you were part of the KMT,” Lee says.
The Taiwanese language was thus a linchpin in the movement for Taiwan’s democratization and independence. It was the language of resistance, a language used to distinguish the island’s identity from that of China.
The use of the Taiwanese language to differentiate the island from China, though, is not without irony. The Taiwanese language, or the Minnan dialect of southern Fujian, is not merely a peripheral Chinese language, but can be traced to the heart of Chinese civilization.
A portrait of Koxinga, a general who led his troops from China to Taiwan in 1661, painted by Huang Zi.
It is common knowledge that the Taiwanese language arrived in Taiwan via migrants in the 1600s from Fujian. This province on China’s southeastern coast was described by historian Tonio Andrade as “a land of many mountains and few fields. Poor and isolated, it bred adventurers who sought their fortunes at sea: fishermen, traders, and pirates.”
Less well-known is that Minnan, the language family from southern Fujian to which Taiwanese belongs, did not actually originate in China’s Fujian province, but rather resulted from the commingling of two dialects that trace their origins to Henan, a north central province along China’s Yellow River. The region is often referred to as the cradle of Chinese civilization, encompassing the cities of Luoyang, Xi’an, and Kaifeng that served as capitals for many of China’s ancient dynasties.
One of these dialects, proto-Quanzhou, came to Fujian in the early 4th century when scores of Han Chinese fled south to escape violence as a series of rebellions overthrew the Western Jin dynasty. The other dialect, proto-Zhangzhou, came to Fujian from Henan three and a half centuries later, when the Tang dynasty sent scores of troops to quell uprisings in the south, resulting in substantial Han migration. These two dialects, situated in adjacent regions in southern Fujian, amalgamated over hundreds of years to form the Minnan, or southern Min, language group.
Interestingly, proto-Quanzhou’s literary form came from an official court language of the Tang dynasty, among China’s most glorious historical periods. “The Tang dynasty is very famous for its poems,” says Chou Whei-ming (周惠民), a history professor at National Chengchi University in Taipei. “If you read these poems in modern Chinese, sometimes they won’t rhyme. But if you read them in the Minnan dialect” they will rhyme, he says.
While the Taiwanese variant of Minnan evolved on the island to be somewhat different from its counterparts in Fujian, a Taiwanese speaker would likely have no trouble conversing with Minnan speakers in the Fujianese cities of Quanzhou, Xiamen, and Zhangzhou today. There, also, the Minnan language faces an uncertain future because of decades of government policy favoring official use of Mandarin.
The gradual decline of the Minnan dialect in Taiwan and Fujian is symptomatic of a global trend of declining linguistic diversity. According to the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, at least 43 percent of languages around the world are vulnerable, endangered, or extinct, and roughly 230 disappeared between 1950 and 2010. According to Ethnologue, a publication focusing on linguistics statistics, more than half the people in the world speak only 23 languages. These healthy languages—English, Mandarin, Hindi and Spanish, among others—have as many as hundreds of millions of speakers, while more than 1,500 languages now have less than a thousand speakers.
According to Jeff Good, a professor of linguistics at the University of Buffalo, languages have always been rising and falling, but the current global trend toward less linguistic diversity is a stark departure from most of human history. “To the extent that we can tell, humanity for most of its time probably was in small groups and people were probably multilingual,” Good says. Languages with smaller numbers of speakers survived because they were integral to the identities and political structures of tribes. Multilingualism was valued because more languages opened up more avenues for trade with different tribes.
Good says that a turning point came at around 1500 with the age of European exploration, followed by colonialism and the Industrial Revolution. During this time, urbanization and an unrestrained appetite for profit caused the main western European languages to consume smaller ones, while European colonial activities began to upend patterns of tribal interactions in many regions of the world. “We seem to be in this massive global stage of endangerment because social structures have changed so rapidly,” he says.
Another threshold came in the late 19th and early 20th century, when “countries began to use monolingualism as a political tool,” Good says. For example, Good notes that Canada, the United States, and Australia all had policies, at the highest levels of political orthodoxy, to systematically exterminate indigenous languages by separating children from their parents to interrupt transmission. As the 20th century progressed, many leaders saw favoring a national language as a useful strategy in nation building. In the late 1930s, the Soviet Union began a policy of Russification, in which the Russian language was taught as a mandatory subject at schools in non-Russian regions.
When the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, they began a Sinification campaign to spread Mandarin to all corners of the country. In the early decades of the Communist era, regional minority languages, such as Tibetan and Uyghur, remained the main languages of instruction in schools, while Mandarin was introduced as a subject. Throughout the decades, though, Mandarin gradually replaced all regional languages in schools. Since 2000, even two of the strongest minority languages, Tibetan and Uyghur, which have writing systems and vast bodies of literature, were phased out of schools in Tibet and Xinjiang, and are now only taught as subject classes.
More recently, the Tibetan and Uighur languages have come under increasing pressure from Beijing. In 2018, China sentenced a Tibetan man to five years in prison for “inciting separatism” after he campaigned against policies that prevent Tibetans from learning and using their language. In Xinjiang, meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party has constructed an Orwellian system of indoctrination camps where as many as 1.5 million Uyghurs have been interned without a trial. The Communist Party says the camps are meant to stop terrorism and teach vocactional training. But former detainees describe classes of political and cultural indoctrination in which they are taught Mandarin and compelled to forsake devotion to Islam in favor of loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party.
Many Uyghur children, whose parents were sent to the camps, have been put in boarding schools where they are instructed in Mandarin and discouraged from speaking Uyghur. According to researcher Adrian Zenz: “Increasing degrees of intergenerational separation are very likely a deliberate strategy and crucial element in the state’s systematic campaign of social re-engineering and cultural genocide in Xinjiang.” China’s campaign in Xinjiang resembles attempts by Canada and the United States starting in the late 19th century to assimilate native peoples by forcing children into boarding schools where they had to forsake their indigenous cultures and languages.
In Taiwan, authorities stopped short of overtly coercive attempts to obliterate local languages. While the KMT made Mandarin the official language in school and promoted its use in public spaces, they did not try to stop the transmission of dialects like Taiwanese from parents to children. Perhaps they thought attacking Taiwanese, which was spoken by such a large percentage of the population, would be political suicide, even for an authoritarian government.
Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei, Taiwan. (Photo by Alan Wu on Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Taiwanese, or Minnan, is actually relatively healthy according to linguistic indicators. It is not down to its last 10 or 100 or 1,000 speakers, but rather boasts 50 million speakers. It is spoken not only in Taiwan and southeastern China, but also by diaspora communities in the United States, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Myanmar.
However, while the basic existence of the language is not yet at stake, the level of proficiency with which people speak Taiwanese is decreasing. While, technically, more than 80% of people in Taiwan speak the language, few can read it well. Many in Taiwan fear that societal trends point to a future where the viability of the language is lost.
As the KMT loosened authoritarian control in the late 1980s and allowed for the island’s first presidential election in 1996, many voices in Taiwanese society began to express concern about the future of the Taiwanese language. The 1990s and 2000s saw the emergence of many civil society, government, and educational actors advocating steps to preserve and resuscitate it. Chief among their concerns were the language’s lack of standardization and the underdeveloped state of its written form, which uses its own formulation of Chinese characters.
From 2001 to 2004, the government compiled an online dictionary to standardize the Taiwanese language, not only recording all known words but also weighing in on disagreements over syntax and vocabulary. According to Alex Wu (吳中益), who worked on the dictionary and serves as chief of the lifelong education department of the ministry of education, this standardization is both the dictionary’s advantage and disadvantage. “For Taiwanese language education, it is simply better for students of the language to have a standard version to consult,” he says, adding that the weakness of the dictionary is that it does not reflect some local pronunciations.
In addition, another online dictionary, itâigí, aims to take a more user-driven approach to cataloguing the Taiwanese language. The website was started by Lin Chia-i (林佳怡), who attended a hacker conference in 2014 and took the mic to ask for programming volunteers to make the online dictionary. It aims to be more flexible than the government’s Taiwanese dictionary.
“It’s a dictionary where everyone can come together and edit the contents. It’s similar to Wikipedia. Although I later discovered it’s more like Urban Dictionary,” Lim says.
On itâigí, users can add new words and definitions, which are then proofread by Lim and other volunteers for the site. The site also has a voting function for words where users can vote on whether a word and its meaning are expressed correctly. In addition to the dictionary, the site also provides links to useful tools like input software for electronically writing Taiwanese, as well as to other learning and teaching resources. The government’s dictionary, itâigí, and other digital resources for Taiwanese are especially important considering Taiwanese is not even available on Google Translate.
Lim believes that the ability to create words is crucial to the continuation of a language. During our interview at a cafe in Taipei, she points to her drink and notes that, in Taiwanese, there is no word for latte. “From the time you wake up in the morning to the time you sleep at night, you come across many things that you couldn’t express in Taiwanese,” she says. “If you want to use a language, but the language cannot communicate what you want to express, the language will die.”
In addition to online dictionaries aimed at cataloging and standardizing new words, another major avenue of revitalizing the Taiwanese language has been literature. Tân Hong-hūi (陳豐惠) started an NGO in the 1990s that publishes a Taiwanese language literary magazine. “During the social movements [of the 1990s], I saw that there was a lack of organizations promoting the Taiwanese language,” she says. “Because I grew up in an environment where Taiwanese was used quite often, my Taiwanese language skills are quite good. I therefore decided to start this organization. Otherwise, I feared Taiwanese would go extinct like other languages around the world.” In addition to the literary magazine, the organization, called the Lí Kang Khioh Foundation for Taiwanese Language Literature and Education (李江却台語文教基金會), also publishes Taiwanese children’s books, gives free Taiwanese language classes, and puts on Taiwanese speaking competitions.
Tân Hong-hūi. (Photo by J. Zach Hollo)
In the case of Taiwanese, the decline of the language has implications for partisan politics. Taiwan’s political spectrum divides over the cleavage of identity, with the pan-Green camp advocating Taiwanese identity and independence and the pan-Blue camp advocating a Chinese identity and eventual unification with China. Underlining this cleavage is a bifurcation of how each camp views Taiwan’s history of Kuomintang rule before democratization.
The “green” version of Taiwanese history goes something like this: The Kuomintang was a brutal authoritarian regime that killed tens of thousands in events like the 228 Massacre and ruled the country only by imprisoning scores of innocent Taiwanese in political prisons where they were tortured and murdered. Only after tireless efforts by dissidents and democracy activists (many of whom would go on to found the DPP) did the country open up in the 1980s and democratize in the 1990s.
The “blue” version of Taiwanese history is a bit different: The Kuomintang was authoritarian, but relatively benevolent compared to other Asian regimes of its time. The 228 Incident was tragic, but death toll estimates are exaggerated, and reports often don’t mention that violence went both ways. Some political prisons did exist, and yes, there was torture and murder, but these prisons were small affairs and don’t reflect the experience of most Taiwanese under KMT rule. In the 1980s, the Kuomintang saw that authoritarian rule was not the best way forward, and chose to democratize.
This partisan debate over the island’s historical narrative still simmers to this day. Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), Taiwan’s current president, and other DPP politicians have spent much of the last three years promoting the idea of transitional justice, in which a recently democratized country comes to terms with the horrors of its authoritarian past through transparency and accountability. In 2017, Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan passed the Act on Promoting Transitional Justice (促進轉型正義條例). As part of the act, an independent commission was established to investigate crimes of the authoritarian Kuomintang rule and to remove symbols that honor Taiwan’s authoritarian past. Some members of the KMT, now the opposition party, were quick to paint the exercise as a political witch hunt.
Taiwanese language literature matters to this partisan historical debate, because, according to Li Bi-chhin (呂美親), a professor of Taiwanese language literature at National Taiwan Normal University, most of its stories fall unabashedly in the “green” camp. “Much of contemporary Taiwanese language literature focuses on topics like 228, the White Terror period, the national identity question,” Li says. As Taiwanese people lose the ability to access this body of literature, they lose perspectives that effectively advocate a certain political view.
Promoting Taiwanese literature to young people is an uphill battle. In Taiwan, bookstores carry primarily Mandarin books, while Taiwanese books are either nonexistent or occupy only a small shelf. A major problem facing Taiwanese literature is the simple fact that not many people can read the language at an advanced level. Ciou Yida, a 25-year-old master’s student at National Chengchi University, is indicative of this. “My Taiwanese language skills are very good compared to most Taiwanese my age. My family spoke Taiwanese at home and I consider it my first language. In fact, I remember being the star of my Taiwanese language class in school because my speaking was the best in the class,” he says. “But I had limited instruction in reading and writing properly. Even today, I cannot read higher-level texts fluently.”
In Taiwan today, many young people identify with a Taiwanese identity even though their Taiwanese language skills are deteriorating. And even though Mandarin is their first language, they are opposed to identifying as Chinese. Perhaps this means language is gradually losing its relevance in Taiwan as a factor in the contentious debate over identity. Today’s Mandarin-speaking pro-independence youth do not primarily include people who trace their ancestry to Fujianese migrants to Taiwan, but rather also include descendants of Taiwan’s other demographics, mainly Hakka, indigenous peoples, and refugees of the Chinese Civil War.
Students slap a picture of children playing catch with a frisbee. (Photo by J. Zach Hollo)
Back in the elementary school classroom, the teacher divided the class into two teams, girls versus boys, and brought a representative from each to the front. On the board were pictures of sports they’d learned, but without the Taiwanese translation. The game’s goal was to be the first to slap the picture of the sport the teacher would say in Taiwanese.
“Tàn hui puânn!” The two players dashed to a picture of children playing catch with a frisbee, and the class erupted into nervous cheers. Both teams claimed victory, but the girl’s hand had clearly been quicker. The girls clapped as the teacher gave the point to their team, and the boys laughed and sunk in their chairs. The teacher scanned the classroom, her students already raising their hands to be next.
A Taiwanese textbook used by 11 and 12-year-old students. (Photo by J. Zach Hollo)
