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.
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