More than two decades ago, speaking local languages other than Mandarin Chinese was a taboo in public places such as schools.
Languages that had long been ignored in the nation's mainstream culture did not start to emerge from the dominance of Mandarin Chinese until 2000, the year when the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) defeated the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in the presidential election.
The revival of mother tongues has become a major issue ever since, partly as a result of political correctness, but largely as a result of each ethnic community's cultural anxieties.
Six years ago, the Ministry of Education launched its "local language education campaign" in elementary and junior high schools nationwide.
Students are obliged to choose an elective local language course among Hoklo (also known as Taiwanese), Hakka and Aboriginal languages and spend one hour every week learning literature, culture and language use in the target language.
One month before President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) inauguration in 2000, the Law Ensuring the Equality of the Language Use in Mass Transportation and Broadcasting (大眾運輸工具播音語言平等保障法) took effect.
The law stipulates that Mandarin Chinese, Hoklo and Hakka are the three primary languages used during public broadcasting on public transport and in airports.
However, not every ethnic community thought the government's mother tongue revival efforts went far enough. Some of them still fear their mother tongues and culture are dying.
To Chuang Chen Yueh-hsiu (
"In the Hakka culture, we teach our children to respect other [cultures] from when they are little, but an overemphasis of this cultural practice had contributed to a hindrance of the development of our own language," Chuang Chen told the Taipei Times.
According to an estimate by the Council of Hakka Affairs in 2004, many Hakka speakers cannot speak their mother tongue fluently, and the situation was even worse among younger generations of the community.
During the past month, the association has been cooperating with the DPP's Ethnic Affairs Department to facilitate a volunteer Hakka interpreter training program.
The purpose of the program is simple: To ensure that native Hakka speakers do not have to switch to Mandarin Chinese or Hoklo when communicating to speakers of these languages.
"[We] want to help native Hakka speakers understand that it is all right for us to speak Hakka anywhere if we want to," said Tseng Chuan-hsiang (
Thirty-six volunteers, most of whom are teachers from the association, spent 20 hours taking courses related to simultaneous interpretation and volunteer work regulations.
Participants of the program, with certificates of course completion from the DPP and volunteer certificates from the Ministry of the Interior, will offer Hakka-to-other-language simultaneous interpretation free of charge.
"It was a special and interesting program," secretary-general of the Hakka Association of Public Affairs Chang Chen-kun said.
"It aims to give Hakka speakers more opportunities to use the language [in public places]," Chang said.
According to Tseng, the interpreters will start by offering simultaneous interpretation in academic conferences.
However, promotion of the service was tougher than Tseng imagined it would be.
While the training was going on, Tseng contacted many conferences, seeking "internship" opportunities for the interpreters, but he met with a negative response.
"The biggest difficulty [of promoting the program] was how you persuade the host that they need Hakka simultaneous interpretation in their conference," he said.
Most of the hosts turned down his requests for fear that participants in the conferences would be distracted by the interpretation in Hakka, he said.
Despite the discouragement, Chuang Chen had a bigger vision for the program -- she would like to encourage more native Hakka speakers, domestic and abroad, to join the program.
"I hope the program will be promoted on a national scale," Chuang Chen said. "I hope more and more people will have the opportunity to share the beauty of our language and culture."
Chang, who was one of the program lecturers, said the program needs more exposure so that the public will know that interpretation resources are available to them.
"I told the interpreters that it is not enough to feel obliged to revive the language. You still need to have professional knowledge [of many different fields]," Chang said.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not