Huang Liang-cheng (黃良成), principal of the Rueifong Elementary School in Tainan’s Nanhua District (南化) and third-place recipient of the Hoklo-language character and sound recognition award in the adult division at this year’s National Languages Competition, is calling on schools across the nation to do more to promote Taiwanese culture.
“I eat Taiwan’s rice, drink its water and walk its paths; of course I should know the Taiwanese language,” Huang said, referring to Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese).
He was selected to represent the city after winning the municipal-level competition in September.
The Ministry of Education’s National Languages Competition — held this year from Saturday of last week to Monday in New Taipei City — is a competition for language proficiency in Chinese, Hoklo and Hakka.
In the character sound and form sections of the competition, contestants are provided with the sound or the written form of 100 characters, and then get evaluated on their ability to provide the correct counterpart in their written response.
Huang said that Hoklo is the common language used in Tainan County’s Guanmiao Township (關廟), where he was born and raised, but the political conditions of his youth meant that Mandarin Chinese was the language mandated in many situations, forcing him to abandon his interest in exploring Hoklo at that time.
As linguistic research of the language gained wider acceptance, he resumed Hoklo studies, particularly in the sound and written form of characters, Huang said.
He is currently a National Cheng Kung University and certified C2-level Hoklo speaker and a promoter of Hoklo teaching in his school, Huang said.
He said that he teaches Hoklo classes himself, because the remoteness of his school made hiring qualified Hoklo instructors difficult.
He is also teaching a class on classical literature in Hoklo, and is engaged in the promotion of the Three Character Classic in Hoklo, the Hoklo-language version of the Chinese-character canon, sanzijing (三字經).
“Language is the key to cultural heritage, and full language proficiency is based on listening, speaking, reading and writing competencies,” he said.
However, while children today are proficient in speaking and comprehending Hoklo, they are not able to write Hoklo and read it poorly, which is a form of “illiteracy” and a situation that is becoming increasingly “worrisome,” Huang said.
“This only hardens my resolve to push for localism in education,” he said.
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