There are plenty of books written about Taiwan written by Taiwanese authors. But books in Taiwanese? These are few and far between, but according to Lu Guangcheng (
The release, tentatively scheduled for the end of the year, of the second volume of the University Taiwanese Reader (大學台語文選), is a small step toward the foundation of Taiwanese literature.
It only requires a quick look around any bookshop to see that there is no shortage of Taiwanese language teaching materials. That might not seem surprising, given that this is Taiwan. But you are unlikely to find any literature in the Min-nan dialect (otherwise called Taiwanese), as it is a tiny niche market that is only now gaining some exposure due to the emphasis on mother-tongue education.
All this might be rather confusing for people who have been told that one of the glories of Chinese civilization is a script that joins together Chinese all over the world, regardless of what dialect they speak. But for Lu and other like-minded people, while Chinese can be used for writing Taiwanese, the languages, not the dialects, are as different as English and French.
But why write Taiwanese at all? Most people are content to see it as spicy vernacular, the language of taxi drivers, street vendors and gangsters. The language of literature, it seems, is Chinese.
But this assumption is what sticks in the craw of Lu and his fellow editors of the University Taiwanese Reader.
"Without a written tradition, a language can easily die out and once dead, can never be revived," Lu said. In this context, he referred to the Hebrew revival (which got started in the 1890s), in which a language that had been neglected for centuries and the understanding of which was confined to a religious elite, was brought back into wide use through the dedication of a number of individuals such as Eliezer Ben-Yehuda.
It is a powerful analogy, and while the Taiwanese and Hebrew examples differ in some crucial respects, they share elements of an ideology in which national destiny, racial identity and political sovereignty play important roles.
The primary difference has to do with literature and explains why the publication of the University Taiwanese Reader and books like it are of such importance to those seeking a Taiwanese revival. The problem for Lu is that Taiwanese -- while it has a long history as a spoken vernacular -- only has a marginal history in the written form, and that is largely confined to various kinds of narrative poetry and popular songs.
"Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese share a common written lexicon of about 60 percent," Lu said. "But it is in the other 40 percent that the unique character of Taiwanese is expressed."
Finding characters to express this 40 percent is an important part of his work, but at the moment, due to lack of consensus, publication in Taiwanese is forced to rely on an unregulated mixture of Chinese ideograms and romanization. Lu brushes off criticism that they are creating an unreadable literature.
"People get cross when they cannot read it," Lu said. "But there is nothing strange about that because this is simply another language. It is like an English speaker expecting to understand French because it is written with the same alphabet."
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