At the 35th Golden Melody Awards ceremony held this year, singer Makav won Best New Artist and Best Indigenous Language Album. Makav began composing music in Bunun, her mother tongue, when she was 17. Indigenous music is gaining traction at the Golden Melody Awards, which manifests the importance of Taiwan’s cultural and educational policy on the promotion of diverse native languages. Only when Taiwanese identify with their native languages and cultures can valuable music compositions be created.
I once took a field trip to China and conducted research in a Miao community. I discovered that Taiwanese value indigenous language culture and education significantly more than Chinese do. To achieve cultural and political homogeneity, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is sinicizing China’s indigenous people, eradicating their languages and cultures in the process.
In Taiwan, the government is establishing an organization for indigenous language teachers and the planning of indigenous language courses. Moreover, it is launching policies, including last year’s indigenous language teacher excellence program, as well as livestreamed indigenous language classes. To preserve rare languages and to raise the cultural awareness of indigenous students, the government is doing its best.
However, promoting indigenous languages in Taiwan is not without challenges, one of which is indigenous students’ faltering motivation to learn them. Students are encouraged to learn their native languages, but gradually run out of enthusiasm after they begin. Indigenous parents tend to be less willing to assist their children in learning native languages because of life pressure. How to stimulate indigenous students’ inner motivation to learn their native language is the first big challenge.
The second big challenge is how to make students recognize the uniqueness and importance of their native languages. They are not exposed to a natural language learning environment. Burdened by stress from their schoolwork, they find it hard to be enthused by their native languages. If they are unaware of the importance of traditional culture and customs, they would not think it is necessary to learn their native languages.
The government must help make indigenous people appreciate the distinctiveness and irreplaceability of their native languages and cultures.
Knight Chang is a political worker and holds a doctorate in education.
Translated by Chen Chi-huang
Weeks into the craze, nobody quite knows what to make of the OpenClaw mania sweeping China, marked by viral photos of retirees lining up for installation events and users gathering in red claw hats. The queues and cosplay inspired by the “raising a lobster” trend make for irresistible China clickbait. However, the West is fixating on the least important part of the story. As a consumer craze, OpenClaw — the AI agent designed to do tasks on a user’s behalf — would likely burn out. Without some developer background, it is too glitchy and technically awkward for true mainstream adoption,
A delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) officials led by Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) is to travel to China tomorrow for a six-day visit to Jiangsu, Shanghai and Beijing, which might end with a meeting between Cheng and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). The trip was announced by Xinhua news agency on Monday last week, which cited China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) Director Song Tao (宋濤) as saying that Cheng has repeatedly expressed willingness to visit China, and that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee and Xi have extended an invitation. Although some people have been speculating about a potential Xi-Cheng
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) is leading a delegation to China through Sunday. She is expected to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing tomorrow. That date coincides with the anniversary of the signing of the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), which marked a cornerstone of Taiwan-US relations. Staging their meeting on this date makes it clear that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) intends to challenge the US and demonstrate its “authority” over Taiwan. Since the US severed official diplomatic relations with Taiwan in 1979, it has relied on the TRA as a legal basis for all
The ongoing Iran conflict is putting Taiwan’s energy fragility on full display — the island of 23 million people, home to the world’s most advanced semiconductor manufacturing, is highly dependent on imported oil and gas, especially that from the Middle East. In 2025, 69.6 percent of Taiwan’s crude oil and 38.7 percent of liquified natural gas were sourced from the Middle East. In the same year, 62 percent of crude oil and 34 percent of LNG to Taiwan went through the Strait of Hormuz. Taiwan’s state-run oil company CPC Corp’s benchmark crude oil price (70 percent Dubai, 30 percent Brent)
RSS