For decades, the Republic of China (ROC) government in Taiwan did its best to suppress Hoklo, otherwise known as Taiwanese. The language had been here for hundreds of years, ever since Chinese immigrants started arriving from Fujian Province. The means of suppression were absolute — no television broadcasts in Hoklo, Mandarin was to be spoken in the workplace, government officials spoke in the accepted language and children would be fined if they were caught speaking a local dialect at school.
Things have changed.
Taiwan has had two presidents who speak Mandarin as a second language — one of whom has a thick Hoklo accent. Numerous television programs are broadcast in Hoklo, schools teach the language to children who only speak Mandarin and it is no longer considered shameful to speak the language in the workplace.
However, in China today, things are going in the opposite direction. The government there is stepping up efforts to suppress Cantonese, much like the ROC did to Hoklo. A political advisory group in Guangdong Province recently suggested that local TV stations broadcast their prime-time programs in Mandarin instead of Cantonese ahead of the Asian Games — to be held in November — as a way to promote unity, create a good language environment and help non-Cantonese speakers.
However, this “suggestion” has been interpreted by many as an attempt to relegate the language of an entire population to second-class status, causing dissent.
It might seem like a good idea for the entire population of a country to speak the same language — it’s easier to communicate, education costs less and it is harder for ethnic divisions to form — but the fact is that in most countries, different communities speak different languages and therefore learn to become bilingual to communicate with their neighbors.
If language is nothing but a tool for communication, doesn’t it follow that having more than one tool is better than having just one? Being multilingual is a strength that should be promoted for the good of a nation.
Giving a language spoken by so many a secondary status only serves to weaken a nation because it pushes the people who speak that language to the bottom of the social hierarchy, causing them to resist the very government that is trying to promote unity.
Instead of heavy-handedly stepping on a language that more than an estimated 70 million Chinese citizens speak, Beijing should seek to promote multiculturalism inside its borders. This could be done by not simply pushing the official language over all others in education, government and mass media. People should be given the choice to express themselves in the language that they prefer, not the language that the state prefers. The alternative is to turn native Cantonese speakers into second-class citizens, in much the way Spanish-speaking people in the US have been marginalized for years because the language they speak at home is not the officially promoted language of the country. In an even more extreme case, the Kurds of Turkey were denied a popular outlet for their language for many decades, which in no small part has led to a violent campaign for their own independent homeland.
In the end, the result of attempting to squash a language is the same — marginalization, alienation and dissent. Recognizing the value of a language, promoting its use and giving its native speakers respect gains their trust and loyalty.
Banning Hoklo in Taiwan made people feel less loyalty toward the ROC, because its official language was alien. Giving Hoklo the respect it deserves went a long way toward healing the rift between the older generations of Taiwanese and the newer Chinese arrivals. China could learn much by studying the Taiwanese experience with the politics of language.
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