The Legislative Yuan has advised the government to tone down its plan to make English an official language and said it should instead focus on building a bilingual education system in which English is used as a medium of instruction.
The suggestion was made by the legislature’s Judiciary and Organic Laws and Statutes Committee in a report about Premier William Lai’s (賴清德) plan to designate English as an official language alongside Chinese.
If what the Cabinet wants to see is greater English proficiency in Taiwan, it should seek to create a bilingual education system in which the languages of instruction in schools would be both Chinese and English, the legislative report said.
Equipping students with better English skills would give them a competitive advantage in the international arena and is absolutely necessary, but that is a very different issue from making English an official language, the report said.
Chinese is Taiwan’s main language, but the nation has no legally established official languages, the report said.
The government would first have to pass a law to designate the nation’s official languages, which are generally understood to mean the languages mandated for official use, it said.
However, the government should be careful with such decisions, the report said, identifying two problems that would arise if English were to be designated an official language by law.
First, English would have to be used at all institutions, in all official texts and in interaction between citizens and government agencies, the report said.
The government should carefully assess the practicality of such a scenario, because Taiwan is not like the territories formerly colonized by Britain or the US, which used English as a medium of communication for a long time before making it an official language, the report said.
Second, giving official status to a language by means of legislation would indicate priority over other languages used in Taiwan, which would conflict with the objectives of the proposed national languages development act, the report said.
That bill, which the Cabinet submitted to the legislature in January, is aimed at protecting and promoting all the languages used by the different ethnic groups in Taiwan, the committee said.
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