Fri, Oct 21, 2011 page3

• FEATURE: In politics, it’s not what you say, it’s what you say it in

  • By Jialu Chen / Reuters, TAIPEI
  • • 
    • 
    • 

  Most politicians don’t need to learn a new language to get elected, but in Taiwanese elections it’s not just what you say, it’s what you say it in that can be key to getting into power.

  Campaigning by candidates for January’s presidential poll has thrown the spotlight on the need to know not just the official Mandarin language, but also Taiwanese, also known as Hokklo, which is spoken by almost 80 percent of the population. The two are mutually unintelligible.

  In Taiwan, language holds many pitfalls and it is intimately linked with complex social, ethnic and political divisions between city and country, the richer industrial north and the poorer rural south, as well as with the tricky relationship with China.

  “Every word you utter has the connotation: ‘I am part of your group, I belong to you,’” said Henning Kloeter, professor and acting head of Chinese language and literature at Germany’s Ruhr-Universitat Bochum. “It is therefore crucial for any politician in Taiwan to consider the linguistic background of the people and to choose languages accordingly.”

  Mandarin is the language of the later arrivals from China, those who retreated to Taiwan with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) after their defeat in 1949 by Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) Chinese Communist Party.

  It symbolizes Taiwan’s bond with China and it is the language of officialdom, business, academia and the social elite, and it predominates in the north.

  Taiwanese is the language of those who left China’s Fujian Province and settled in Taiwan from the late 17th century onwards. It is also widely spoken by overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, including in Singapore.

  The KMT banned public use of Taiwanese from 1949 until the late 1980s, but it has since revived and it is a mark of individuality and separateness from China.

  Taiwanese speak or understand both languages to varying degrees. Taiwan also has a large number of speakers of the Hakka language, as well as about 10 Aboriginal languages completely unrelated to Chinese that are spoken to varying degrees of fluency by its 500,000 Aborigines.

  For the two presidential candidates, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) of the KMT and Democratic Progressive Party Chairperson Tai Ing-wen (蔡英文), it’s been a learning curve.

  Ma, elected in 2008 and pushing for a second term, was born in Hong Kong of parents from China. He has had to brush up on Taiwanese and now regularly peppers his speeches with the language, throwing in Hakka and Aboriginal phrases too.

  “The first Cabinet Ma Ying-jeou appointed was all Mainlanders and people who had spent their whole life in Taipei,” said Bruce Jacobs, professor of Asian languages and studies at Australia’s Monash University.

  That was a problem in 2009, Jacobs said, when the government confronted the widespread destruction in the south caused by Typhoon Morakot.

  “They couldn’t speak to the population,” he said.

  For Tsai, born in the south of Hakka origin, but predominantly a Mandarin speaker through her career in academia and politics, picking up Taiwanese has an added importance, as her party’s stronghold is in the Taiwanese-speaking south.

  A TV station last month showed clips of her switching to Mandarin mid-sentence in speeches and audience members shouting the correct words back to her.

  This month she delivered a speech entirely in Taiwanese, earning media plaudits for embracing the language. That could give her a boost among the party faithful.

  “If politicians campaign in the south and don’t use Taiwanese, the people won’t understand as much. There’ll be a barrier,” said John Tse, emeritus professor of linguistics at National Taiwan Normal University.
• Most Popular

  • 1

    Minister warns Taiwanese about Chinese passports

  • 2

    APEC Shenzen visit was smooth, safe: ministry official

  • 3

    Manchester United tap Carrick as interim coach

  • 4

    Taiwan passport rises three spots in global ranking

  • 5

    Taiwan eases work, residency restrictions for foreign professionals