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All languages are equal, Su says

Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) said yesterday that the Executive Yuan is working on a draft national language development bill that aims to preserve the nation's many languages, particularly Aboriginal ones.

"The core purpose of the bill is to prevent native tongues from dying out as a result of `incorrect' language policies that were adopted by the government in the past," Su said.

Su was responding to a question from Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Su Chi (蘇起), who asked whether the government was planning to make Hoklo (also known as Taiwanese) rather than Mandarin Chinese, the official language.

The Chinese-language United Daily News reported yesterday that all languages would in future be regarded as "national languages."

Su said that the new policy was intended to preserve all languages rather than encouraging their extinction by forcing everybody to use Mandarin Chinese. All languages should be regarded as "national languages," but there is still only one "official language," he said.

Council for Cultural Affairs Chairman Chiu Kun-liang (邱坤良) noted that, more than a decade ago, UNESCO listed Taiwan as a place where mother tongues are vanishing.

Chiu said the government, including the Ministry of Education and the Council for Cultural Affairs, has worked hard to preserve dying languages.

He said the bill was aimed at preserving all mother tongues, rather than replacing Mandarin Chinese as the official language.

"All mother tongues in the country -- including Hakka and Aboriginal languages -- are equal, and all tribes or ethnic groups in Taiwan have the right to use their own languages, and that is the reason why the government is drafting a bill to protect native languages," Chiu said.

Defending the bill, Minister without Portfolio Lin Wan-yi (林萬億) said that in the past the meanings of "national language" and "official language" were confused so that only one language was allowed to be used in the country.

"In the past, the government discriminated against all languages apart from Mandarin Chinese," he said. "This is wrong and this policy accelerated the demise of many languages."

Languages should be regarded as part of a nation's culture and the government should do whatever it takes to preserve them, Lin said.

"It is quite natural for a country to have more than one language. Speakers of different languages must learn to respect each other -- that is what we are doing now," Lin said.
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