Saving Taiwanese languages
On Saturday last week, President William Lai (賴清德) attended a memorial service for renowned Hakka doctor and poet Tseng Kuei-hai (曾貴海) in Kaohsiung. Lai’s eulogy, delivered entirely in Taiwanese, highlighted the emotional depth and cultural value of the language.
Lai read aloud from Tseng’s poem Winter Flowers Bloom at Night: “Eternal blooming / Undying dreams / In a small corner / The world silently transforms.”
The words reflect Tseng’s love of literature and concern for environmental conservation and urban development. Lai also quoted the Bible: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith,” poignantly describing Tseng’s lifelong fight for democracy.
Finally, Lai expressed his deep respect for Tseng, stating: “A great philosopher has passed, but his legacy endures.”
Growing up in southern Taiwan, I spoke Taiwanese with my parents and grandparents. During my school years, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) pushed its monolingual policy, promoting Mandarin as the national language while banning the use of all other languages and dialects. The memory of this language discrimination still haunts me. I later studied in central Taiwan and worked in northern Taiwan, often ridiculed by classmates and colleagues alike for my Taiwanese-accented Mandarin.
Fortunately, Taiwan’s democratization brought the first shift in power from the KMT to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) with the election of Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) in the 2000 presidential election. Chen’s administration implemented reforms that officially incorporated other languages into the education system, gradually reducing language discrimination.
However, due to long-term suppression of the languages, most Taiwanese have lost knowledge of their mother tongues. Hakka usage declines by 5 percent each year. The situation is even more dire for indigenous languages.
Lai’s speech underscores the need for further promotion of Taiwanese. Recently, Kaohsiung City Councilor Chang Bo-yang (張博洋) of the Taiwan Statebuilding Party said that while Taiwan has been developing and promoting native languages, the lack of dedicated Taiwanese language committees at the central and local government levels has led to insufficient resources.
Soon after, the Kaohsiung Education Bureau announced that select schools will conduct pilot programs for Taiwanese-language instruction, with implementation expected next year.
Promoting Taiwanese might not require creation of special committees, but the Ministry of Education should provide resources and offer incentives for cities to implement Taiwanese-language programs at schools.
With a declining birthrate leading to many unused school spaces, these programs could make use of existing resources and provide immersive learning environments for students. It could also address the cultural losses resulting from long-term suppression of the language.
Let us work together to promote the Taiwanese language, ensuring that this precious cultural heritage can be passed down to future generations.
Yeh Yu-chin
Kaohsiung
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
RSS