The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday launched its first televised Hakka camapign advertisement highlighting the DPP administration's efforts to preserve the language and cultural assets of the Hakka people, who have been showing weak support for the party and are deemed a crucial element for the DPP's electoral prospects.
The TV advertisement depicts non-Hakka people learning to speak the now infrequently spoken language for the purpose of better ethnic integration. It shows President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) speaking Hakka with a strange accent, which is what happens when non-Hakka people learn the language.
DPP campaign spokesman Wu Nai-jen (
"The Hakka TV channel itself is a major pioneering project to keep the Hakka language and its cultural assets alive, and this is something the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hasn't been able to do for the past five decades," Wu said.
Hakka is considered a minority language and according to statistics from the Council for Hakka Affairs, less than 10 percent of Hakka teenagers can speak fluent Hakka.
Wu, whose wife is a Hakka, said the Hakka TV channel has made it easier to learn the language.
"I remember the hard way my children learned to speak Hakka with their mother. My wife would pretend she didn't hear the children's words if they were not spoken in Hakka. But now, with the Hakka channel, I believe other Hakka families experiencing a similar struggle in passing down this language heritage would find it easier to keep their mother tongue alive," Wu said.
National Policy Advisor Liang Jung-mao (梁榮茂), also a Hakka, said yesterday that from 1945 until 2000, the KMT government had seriously ignored the development of the Hakka communities and even oppressed the survival of the dialect.
People First Party (PFP) legislator Chung Hsiao-ho (
Chung said the idea of setting up a Hakka TV station had been initiated during the premiership of KMT Chairman Lien Chan (
"Without the help of opposition parties reviewing the Hakka-related budgets, those initiatives can never succeed," Chung said.
However, earlier this month opposition lawmakers were criticized by the Hakka people for trying to block 80 percent of the annual budget for the Council of Hakka Affairs.
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