In a bid to advocate reforms in native-language education, an umbrella group, the Global Taiwanese Movement Federation, was established yesterday.
"Native-language organizations in the past have been too disorganized to accomplish anything. By uniting, we hope to accomplish more, earlier," group spokesman Lee Chin-an (李勤岸) said yesterday.
The federation is comprised of 10 different organizations promoting native languages in Taiwan.
"Native languages" usually refers to Hakka, Hoklo or Taiwanese, and aboriginal languages.
"Because of cultural repression in the past in which Mandarin Chinese was the only language allowed, we now have a situation where individuals cannot speak their native tongue well or even at all, and also where ethnic conflict is prevalent because there is no mutual understanding between cultures," Lee, a professor at Taiwan Normal University, said. "The current conflict is a general result of this."
Lee said that the presidential election Saturday ended up pitting ethnic groups against each other. If there were more promotion of native languages and cultures, he claimed, then the different ethnicities in Taiwan would be more tolerant of each other.
The federation previously held an event protesting Lien Chan's (連戰) candidacy in Saturday's election, saying that no party or person who has repressed native languages should represent Taiwan.
The federation Web site (http://203.64.42.21/TG/BGLB/) further lists 10 grievances against the KMT, such as such a 1980 ruling that aboriginal teachers be restricted from using aboriginal languages in schools and a 1976 law against television programming in the Hoklo language.
The group is asking government and political party representatives to sign a declaration of linguistic rights.
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