Proposed by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1999, International Mother Language Day has been celebrated on Feb. 21 every year since 2000.
Over the past 20 years, people have witnessed the most vigorous development of the Hakka language ever in Taiwan: In 2001, the Hakka Affairs Council — the world’s only national agency dedicated to Hakka affairs — was established as part of the Executive Yuan, and in the same year, the Ministry of Education started to include Hakka and other local languages in the Grade 1-9 Curriculum Guidelines.
That was followed by the launch of Hakka TV in 2003, the passage of the Hakka Basic Act (客家基本法) in 2010 and the Development of National Languages Act (國家語言發展法) last year and the establishment of Hakka colleges in major higher education institutions, such as National Central University, National United University and National Chiao Tung University.
Since joining the Hakka TV Station 17 years ago, work has taken me to Wales, Scotland, Ireland and Norway to report on their preservation and revival of local languages.
In Taiwan, we often hear people say that mother tongues should “take root.” For example, some kindergartens apply language immersion in their Hakka language teaching, so that preschoolers start learning their mother tongue from a young age.
It sounded logical until I talked to an official on the Welsh Language Board, who made me think that “taking root” has more to do with learning from a young age.
“Mother tongue” literally means one’s mother’s language, and this is where the Welsh approach starts off — they directly target pregnant women in hospitals and obstetrics and gynecology clinics. It is a decisive moment when a mother talks to her baby for the first time — she is a decisive influence on the language the child will use.
In Wales, the government offers pregnant women a wealth of services. For example, there is a parental kit that contains health, hygiene and other information, similar to the Mother’s Handbook in Taiwan.
The Welsh Language Board visits the obstetrics and gynecology clinics to give briefings and ask prospective parents if they have considered speaking Welsh to their children.
The parental kit also provides details of Welsh-speaking nannies, kindergartens and schools available near where parents live.
In addition, it provides academic survey data to make parents aware of the difference in academic performance between monolingual students and students who attend bilingual — Welsh and English — schools from a young age, comparing their results at elementary school and later major entrance examinations.
The board does this, because it is aware that bilingual students perform better academically and it wants to let parents know as early as possible that learning their mother tongue would not affect other aspects of their children’s learning, and might even make then perform far better than students who do not learn to speak their mother tongue.
Using this as bait, they try to persuade parents to let their children start learning Welsh as soon as they are born.
In addition to this approach to make the mother tongue “take root,” the way European countries treat the languages of ethnic groups have also made an impression on me during my visits to various countries over the past dozen years.
In Europe, learning a language is an added plus — every new language opens a new perspective and new ways to learn about the world.
They do not look on language education as occupying brain capacity or memory in the brain’s language learning area.
Taiwanese parents often complain that their children are too busy learning English and Mandarin, so there is no way they will have the capacity and time needed to learn their mother tongue.
Such a statement is undoubtedly self-limiting — or at least it limits their own children — as it makes the mistake of looking on language learning as occupying limited brain space with building blocks, as if there is only a finite volume available for learning so that learning new things will crowd out existing knowledge.
Take my visit to the Sami people in northern Europe for example. My interviewees were men and women, ranging from five-year-old kindergarten students to 75-year-olds in Norway, Sweded and Finland. When interviewed, they had one thing in common: They talked to me in fluent English.
They spoke at least three languages: Sami, the official language of their country — Norwegian, Swedish or Finnish — and English.
For Europeans, this is natural, because they speak their mother tongue at home, the national language outside their home and English, the main shared international language, to people from other groups than those two. This is a basic survival skill.
This example shows that the idea that learning multiple languages is an extra burden is not only incorrect, but it also limits mother tongue education in Taiwan.
There are 4.5 million Hakka in Taiwan. Although this is much fewer than the 60 million China says live there, the importance given to Hakka language and culture by the government, in laws and regulations, by broadcast media, and academic and educational institutions, means that Taiwan is leaps and bounds ahead of China and clearly has the ability to be a world leader in this respect.
Hopefully Taiwanese will renew their thinking so that the promotion and preservation of the Hakka language and culture will become one of the key driving forces as Taiwan brings its soft power to the world.
Paul Shiang is head of the news department at Hakka TV.
Translated by Lin Lee-kai
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