The Ministry of Education recently announced that compulsory "mother tongue" classes will be made part of the primary school curriculum throughout the Taiwan public school system, starting next year. After 100 years of exclusion from public education, this is a major step forward for Taiwan's non-Mandarin native languages.
As, not surprisingly, objections are already been raised to this watershed policy change, it is important to consider the reasons why mother-tongue teaching is important if the Taiwan populace wishes to keep its traditional languages alive.
First, extensive use in public education is an essential element in linguistic maintenance.
Name any society which has taken serious steps towards preserving its language or languages, and you will find that the policy in question includes compulsory teaching and use of those languages in education. Wales, New Zealand, Quebec, Malaysia, India, Puerto Rico, Finland and various Native American socie-ties are but a few commonly cited examples.
There are several reasons why public education use is so crucial in determining whether languages live or die. In Taiwan's case, non-Mandarin local languages are still essentially banned from the classroom.
Granted, students are no longer beaten or fined for speaking them, but requiring young people to spend most of their waking hours, for much of their childhood, in classrooms in which essentially only one language is used has a profound effect on their linguistic development.
This not only gives them a powerful negative message about how their society values non-Mandarin local tongues as compared with Mandarin, it also provides an enormous practical barrier to their becoming proficient in those languages.
Perhaps even more crucially, the policy of keeping Mandarin as the only local language required as a subject and used as a medium of instruction provides parents with a strong incentive to speak only Mandarin with their children.
Education is valued hugely in Taiwan and if only one language is tied to educational achievement, then it will eventually come to be the only language taught to children at home.
Making the "mother tongue" classes optional and thus letting the free market rule would do little to rectify this situation.
Of course, Mandarin would remain compulsory and would still be the only medium of instruction, leaving the other languages, already reeling under 100 years of public-sector suppression, at a huge competitive disadvantage which would render the whole concept of market competition invalid.
Indeed, in Taiwan the free market has played a significant role in the revival of Taiwanese Hokkien (
In the case of Taiwanese Hokkien in particular, its much-publicized comeback among adults may actually be lulling its speakers into a false sense of security.
In truth, the fact that it is increasingly not being transmitted to children, particularly in northern Taiwan, is an ominous sign that the "linguicidal" policies of the ROC education system are finally working as they were originally intended to.
If the society ceases to transmit Hokkien to children, then it is doomed, even if it remains the native language of a majority of Taiwanese adults.
Without a sweeping change in public-school policy, there is little realistic chance that Hokkien and other "mother tongues" will survive.
If Taiwan is serious about retaining its traditional languages, the move towards mother-tongue teaching will be part of a process of standardizing and developing languages to the point where they can be used, along with Mandarin, as mediums of instruction.
If Taiwan reaches this point, then parents will presumably take much of the burden off the school system by ensuring that their children are adequately exposed to these languages at home.
But, in the meantime, this transition will not be easy. New materials will have to be written and teachers will have to be trained.
Children who are not proficient in the "mother tongues" will be required to study them, just as generations of non-Mandarin speaking children have been required to study Mandarin.
However, it is helpful to remember that in recent years, many other societies have successfully made this change. There should be no reason for language policy reform not to work in Taiwan, providing it is done before it is too late.
Although more and more children are growing up unable to speak Taiwanese languages, the fact that these languages, especially Taiwanese Hokkien, are still widely spoken in Taiwan means that the cycle of language loss can still be reversed.
Nevertheless, no-one should have the illusion that Taiwan can continue to transmit its traditional languages to the young without the full support of the public education system.
And, no-one should forget that when languages are not passed on to younger generations, they die, and when they are dead, there is no bringing them back to life.
Matthew Ward is a lecturer at Jin-Wen Institute of Technology (
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