Clarifying Taiwanese
Taiwan’s Coast Guard released a video on the jurisdiction of the waters around Kinmen County, drawing attention to safety in the area while at the same time clearing up for the Taiwanese public the differences between Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) and Southern Min.
In Executive Yuan Order Tai-Wen-Tzu No. 1110025587
(臺文字第1110025587號函), each government institution or organization shall use the name “Taiwan Taiwanese.”
However, the Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Education continue to use the wording “Taiwan Minnan,” or “Taiwan Southern Min,” refusing to implement the order.
Not only are their actions not aligned with reality, they contribute to confusion over the official naming of languages, misleading people into thinking that Southern Min is the same as Taiwanese.
Meanwhile, the Kaohsiung City Government has drawn up a plan for an experimental school taught solely in Taiwanese as a medium of instruction, which is a wonderful leap forward in the protection of Taiwanese as a mother tongue.
We need to have a clear understanding of the differences between Southern Min and Taiwanese.
Taiwanese is one of several languages endemic to Taiwan and it is broadly used in daily life.
Southern Min, on the other hand, is one of three language groupings in the overall Min language branch that exists mainly in China’s Fujian and Guangdong provinces.
As a language grouping, Southern Min is much broader in scope.
In academia, although Taiwanese originated from and is classified as a Southern Min language, there are differences in their scopes of use and their cultural connotations.
After hundreds of years of changes, shifts in dialects and tone sandhi, grammar and vocabulary, there is a massive difference.
If Taiwanese institutions continue to use the name “Southern Min,” they would not only be misleading people, they would also be forcibly parking mother language education in a mistaken identity.
Yeh Hsin-yi
Tainan
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
After “Operation Absolute Resolve” to capture former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, the US joined Israel on Saturday last week in launching “Operation Epic Fury” to remove Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his theocratic regime leadership team. The two blitzes are widely believed to be a prelude to US President Donald Trump changing the geopolitical landscape in the Indo-Pacific region, targeting China’s rise. In the National Security Strategic report released in December last year, the Trump administration made it clear that the US would focus on “restoring American pre-eminence in the Western hemisphere,” and “competing with China economically and militarily
RSS