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Law recognizing all languages urged

"All Taiwan's languages should be called `Taiwanese' ... It is exclusionist to refer to just one of those tongues as `Taiwanese."

Lo Chao-jin, chairman of the Council of Hakka Affairs

The government must take steps to legally preserve the diversity of Taiwan's multicultural society while simultaneously working toward ethnic reconciliation, said academics and experts at the Ethnic and Cultural Development Conference yesterday.

Future policies should legalize the use and establish the importance of local languages, seek to accurately reflect a multicultural Taiwanese identity and avoid the assimilation-focused policies of the past, they said.

Over 200 participants gathered to talk with academics and political figures in the National Central Library on the first day of the three-day conference sponsored by the Council for Cultural Affairs, Council of Indigenous Peoples (CIP), Council for Hakka Affairs, the Ministry of Education and the Veterans Affairs Commission.

In his opening remarks to the conference, President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) urged people to forget the mistakes of the past and focus on the future.

He called for mutual acceptance and understanding between ethnic groups in order to work together for a more prosperous Taiwan.

"The ethnic conflict and racism that exists in Taiwanese society comes mainly from the political oppression of the past half century, mistaken ethnic assimilation policies, and unrealistic conditions for a national identity -- not from conflict and biases between ethnic groups," Chen said.

Focus on law

A focus of the conference yesterday was a draft law making all the languages used by ethnic groups in Taiwan national languages.

The proposed national languages development law would guarantee equal respect for all Taiwan-ese tongues, such as Hakka, Hoklo and all Aboriginal languages, Chen said.

The law, emphasized Chen, would not demand that everyone learn all national languages and would establish Mandarin as the official language to be used in government and administrative proceedings, said Chen.

Legal recognition of each dia-lect's status is important, Chen said, because without such recognition "there would still be a long way to go towards ethnic reconciliation."

Chen called on the conference participants to think of a framework for including a promised chapter on ethnic affairs in Chen's proposed new constitution.

In response to Chen's call, conference speakers talked about ways to guarantee ethnic rights and develop local cultures and languages yesterday.

To preserve Aboriginal cultures, the government should draft legislation promising Aboriginal peoples that it will never enact assimilation or ethnic cleansing policies, said Yohani Isqaqavut (尤哈尼．伊斯卡卡夫特), a national policy advisor to the president yesterday.

As a further proof of its commitment, the government should recognize the Pingpu people (平埔族, literally, the Aborigines living on the plains) as an Aboriginal tribe, Yohani said.

Several speakers emphasized the importance of Chen's national languages law as well, pointing out that many minority dialects are dying out.

Dialects dying out

"Although 77 percent of the ethnic Hoklo speak Hoklo at home, about 20 percent speak Mandarin in the home. For the Hakka, the percentage of people speaking Mandarin at home [41] exceeds that of those speaking Hakka [31], and we don't even need to talk about the huge number of Aboriginals that do not speak their native tongue in the home," said Peter Tuin (張學謙), a professor at National Taitung University.

Speakers called for the discontinuation of the term "Taiwanese" as a reference to the Hoklo dialect.

"All Taiwan's languages should be called `Taiwanese,'" said Council of Hakka Affairs Chairman Lo Chao-jin (羅肇錦) when presenting the results of a council-sponsored conference on native languages held earlier this year. "It is exclusionist to refer to just one of those tongues as `Taiwanese."

Aside from minority representatives speaking at the conference, audience members also spoke up and called for the establishment of a Hoklo cultural council akin to the Council of Hakka Affairs and the CIP.

"Even though the Hoklo people are the majority in Taiwan, that doesn't mean that Hoklo culture and language shouldn't be protected and promoted," said Wei Ming-te (魏明德), a teacher representing Taioan Bogi, or the Taiwan Native Language Teachers' Association, at the conference.

The Hoklo people and language were also repressed under the KMT government's assimilation policies of the past 50 years, Wei pointed out, a fact that was echoed by numerous other audience members and speakers such as keynote speaker Stephane Corcuff, a visiting scholar at Harvard University's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research.

Search for identity

During his remarks, Corcuff linked Taiwan's cultural debate to its people's continuing struggle with Taiwan's national identity by examining the history behind cross-strait relations.

The connection between one's ethnic group and view of Taiwan's identity as either an independent country or part of a "Republic of China" stems from the arrival of Chiang Kai-hek (蔣介石) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government of the Republic of China (ROC) in 1949, Corcuff said.

At the time, given the struggle for recognition that both Chiang and the ROC government was facing domestically and internationally, the KMT began to deepen Chinese aspects of Taiwan society and rewrite Taiwanese history, he said.

New consciousness needed

As a result, Taiwanese people have developed differing collective consciousnesses over the course of the past 50 years, Corcuff said.

"If Taiwan wants to keep its ability to preserve civil peace in a future that will probably be more and more tense, it must start right now to imagine a mode of national identification based on citizen's consciousness and to invent a new culture of national allegiance," Corcuff said.

Yesterday's conference sessions were part of the Council of Cultural Affairs' Multicultural Citizens' Festival this weekend.

To learn more about festival events, see the event's Web page at www.cca.gov.tw/cforum/culture_citizen/p2.html.
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