Letter: Defend native languages

Some my friends are overseas Taiwanese living in Taipei with their families. All of them have dual nationality, holding Taiwanese and US passports. It strikes me that their children cannot find their own identity. They look like Taiwanese children, but they don't speak their native language. They go to school, but it's not the local Taiwanese school.

Since they don't share the language and the traditional culture of Taiwanese people, they live in a strange ghetto and they don't see the real Taiwan. Consequently, the way those children perceive themselves and the way other people perceive them bring up many contradictions that will have a very negative impact on the children. It is like they are putting on other people's ill-fitting clothes.

I don't know how those kids will manage to find a well-balanced direction in life.

Instead sending their children to regular Taiwanese schools, some local families enroll them in foreigners' schools such as the Taipei American School.

How can those children find their own identity and roots? Why don't they follow the normal local educational program? The children didn't ask for it, it was their parents' choice based on the fact that globalization means American culture. But this conception of globalization seems too restrictive, because you can't reduce the world to the US.

Do we have to abandon, in the name of globalization, entire sectors of life to an English-German, English-Taiwanese, English-French or English-Chinese pidgin, or even English itself? The surreptitious or overt "enforcement" of the "one market, one language" principle or the equation "American English equals progress" is unacceptable, for many reasons.

First, other native languages will lose their cultural and social status. If we lose our native language, we lose our identity, because the native language is the one in which you best express your feelings, your emotions, your empathy.

Second, this will create new communication barriers between the rich and the poor, with a kind of Latin for global, abstract, important matters spoken by the privileged few and a vernacular for daily life spoken by the proletariat. In every country there are fully developed languages, and we don't want them to evolve back into dialects.

Third, if important events like political issues are dealt with in a foreign language, the values and identities linked to this foreign language will influence ways of thinking and acting, so politicians will prevail internationally over national interests.

Finally, the world will become monolithic, intolerant and dictatorial. This will send us back to the time of those awful uniform colonizations.

To put it plainly, some linguae francae, like Chinese, Spanish, French and English, are certainly useful tools, because in some countries there are so many dialects that it's more convenient to use one language to do business, but the linguae francae must not be allowed to depreciate all the other languages, especially in their own territory.

If we want a real democratic globalization, we have to defend our own languages. Globalization must not be the subduing of all others by the most powerful, it must be based on equal and democratic participation.

In Taiwan, children can practice local dialects in primary school. Mandarin is the national language, while English is the first foreign language and Spanish, German, Japanese or French are the second foreign languages, which they can study in senior high school. So I suggest that dual-nationality parents should let their children go to local schools, where they can learn about their country's history and culture in their native language.

If parents fail in their mission to transmit their cultural heritage to their children, the children will end up denying their Taiwanese heritage. They may not even know anything about the 228 Incident or the traditional religious parade days either.

Sylvie Allassonniere
Tamsui