One of the most striking aspects of globalization is a greatly accelerated migration of people around the world. Most materially rich countries are becoming immigrant nations and Taiwan is no exception.
"Foreigners" are already coming to Taiwan, integrating with local society and becoming part of the mosaic of Taiwanese culture.
This trend has an obvious linguistic dimension. When moving to a new country, perhaps the most crucial adjustment is learning the local language or languages. Newcomers who learn the language of a given society find themselves more able to understand, cope with and integrate with that culture.
In some ways, Taiwan is doing reasonably well in this area. It is quite common for foreigners who come here from wealthier nations to be able to communicate in at least one local language (usually Mandarin), more so than in many other Asian countries. This is, of course, largely due to the perceived economic value of becoming fluent in Mandarin.
However, if Taiwan follows through with its plans to raise the status of Taiwanese Holo (Hokkien), it can only serve as an encouragement for resident foreigners to become familiar with that language as well.
At any rate, one by-product of the popularity of Mandarin studies has been high quality of language instruction available for foreigners who can afford it. Certainly, Taiwan is quite capable of teaching its languages to non-Taiwanese.
On the negative side, however, the large number of migrant workers from South East Asia find themselves linguistically isolated to a profound degree, a fact which cuts them off from the local community and facilitates their exploitation.
Being a speaker of Thai and having befriended a number of Thai guest workers, this author is often struck by the extent to which Thais, the most numerous group of foreigners in Taiwan, find themselves unable to communicate with Taiwanese people on even a very elementary level.
Filipinos have an advantage due to English skills, but the reality is that English is a foreign tongue in Taiwan, and is often of little use in many crucial situations. Foreign workers in general need to be helped in two ways: they need more services in their own languages and they need more opportunity to learn local languages.
Encouraging or requiring companies with a large number of foreign workers to offer language courses would be a good step. Given that there are hundreds of thousands of Filipinos, Thais, and Indonesians in Taiwan, places like airports, tax offices and foreign affairs police offices would do well to provide services in those languages.
In addition to migrant workers, there are also those who move to Taiwan permanently. Currently, for example, there are large numbers of local men taking "foreign brides," often from South East Asia.
There are also more and more people from various countries who, although they are not at this time permitted to become ROC citizens, have settled down in Taiwan permanently. Often, these people find themselves unable to use local tongues, which repre-sents a real barrier to their integration with Taiwanese society.
In the short run, services in relevant foreign languages will aid integration, but in the long run, it is more important that new immigrants learn Taiwanese languages. True, immigrant tongues are a valuable resource for any society in this globalized world, but for obvious reasons, immigrants, and especially their children, find proficiency in local languages to be essential.
Taiwanese people are often startled to find children of non-Han foreign residents having native-like ability in Mandarin and/or "Taiwanese," but in truth, this will certainly become very common in the future, as it has in all multi-racial immigrant cultures. Still, Asian societies, especially the more monocultural ones, have so far had difficulty understanding the clear difference between "race" and language.
Recently, for example, Japanese opposition legislator Shigefumi Matsuzawa stated "Globalization means that in a hundred years time ... many foreigners will be living in Japan and English will be the way we will have to communicate."
In truth, a century from now Japan will have been forced to accept the well-documented and growing fact that "foreigners" who live in Japan permanently, and especially their children who grow up in Japan, are no longer "foreigners." They are becoming Japanese and they are increasingly speaking Japanese, no matter what their ethnic background is.
This is the reality of globalization that much of Asia has yet to understand. Taiwan, as a comparatively diverse society, actually has a great advantage in this area over more monocultural countries like Japan and Korea.
In addition to the obvious need to continue to make it easier for foreigners to legally live and work in Taiwan, the Taiwanese people and government should do everything possible to help foreign residents integrate linguistically. Doing this will greatly help Taiwan face the challenges of the new century.
Matthew Ward is a lecturer at Jinwen Institute of Technology
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