In a modest conference room near the edge of Sun Moon Lake (日月潭), Panu Kapamumu held up an unwieldy A3 booklet. The home-printed document contains every known word of Thao, the language of his Aboriginal community.
Kapamumu ran his finger down the list, reading out a selection of Thao words, meanings and translations. He read slowly and purposefully, a man in his 60s, but still just a student of his mother tongue.
“Pastay piakolingkin piakaimahan. Ito Thao Panu Kapamumu,” he said.
It translates in English to: “Everyone is safe and doing well. I am of the Thao people, Panu Kapamumu.”
Normally, Kapamumu speaks in a mix of the two languages he knows better than his own — Mandarin and English.
“We believe in our ancestors’ spirits, so we treasure our own language and see it as more important than our own lives... We have a right to survive,” he said.
Aboriginal communities are in a race against time to save their languages before they are lost forever. An estimated 35 percent of 400,000 Aborigines speak their native tongue fluently, but in some communities there are far fewer fluent speakers.
The government formally recognizes 17 Aboriginal peoples who inhabited Taiwan for millennia before the arrival of Han people. The Thao, whose traditional lands surround Sun Moon Lake, are the smallest, with fewer than 800 members.
Thao is in the Austronesian family of languages, which are spoken throughout Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and much of the Pacific. It is among four of the 16 languages in Taiwan considered by UNESCO to be critically endangered.
Under the authoritarian and assimilationist rule of Japan and then the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime, native languages were criminalized. The Thao’s losses extended to land, lives and culture.
“With the Japanese, you can’t speak your language. The KMT, you can’t speak your language, there was punishment in schools. So our language stopped 75 years ago,” Kapamumu said.
A loss of language is a loss of traditional and cultural practices, said Dremedreman a lja Tjuveleljem, a consultant and professional teacher of her language, Paiwan.
“Traditional knowledge was always transmitted by native tongue,” Tjuveleljem said.
The loss is more pronounced among urban communities, where people were moved by force, natural disaster or economics, she said.
Kapamumu, chairman of the Thao Cultural Development Association, said that their efforts have recorded about 90 percent of the Thao language.
There are now five dedicated teachers of the language in Taiwan, but it is an informal community effort, with minimal resources — a scenario playing out across the nation.
The government is seeking to address the oppression wrought on Aborigines, particularly language loss, and in 2016 President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) apologized for the “centuries of pain and mistreatment.”
In 2017 the Legislative Yuan passed a law to promote and preserve Aboriginal languages. It designated the 16 as national languages of Taiwan, increasing the Council of Indigenous Peoples (CIP) language budget fivefold, and proscribed more Aboriginal consultation in policy development, the establishment of a language research and development foundation, and the offering of language courses in schools and colleges — which activists have demanded be made compulsory for Aborigine high schoolers.
As of last week there are three languages included as options on Wikipedia.
Chen Ting-chung, assistant professor of linguistics at National Tsing Hua University, said the government has good intentions, but the foundation, which is responsible for language preservation and educational measures, was understaffed and unable to meet the needs of the 42 dialects within the 16 languages.
“A lot of communities are trying to come up with their own textbooks ... but they don’t really know how to do that. Teachers aren’t trained as teachers,” she said, adding that more expertise in linguistics was needed to ensure quality and consultation with communities.
In response to the concerns, CIP executive officer of international affairs Sayun Tosu said that the council has developed teaching materials for all learning levels and online learning for remote students, like herself, a Tayal woman living in an urban area. It was also cooperating with local elders, schools and organizations to develop dictionaries and lessons.
“Languages that were once viewed as dialects and banned from use in schools now have legal basis as national languages,” Tosu said.
“Language preservation has higher priority in the CIP’s policy promotion because it is the core for our culture,” she added.
Community-level projects risked “developing a romanization system which can’t be understood outside their immediate circle,” and needed external expertise, Tjuveleljem said.
More native speakers are being fast-tracked as teachers themselves, amid growing acceptance of teaching Indigenous languages as a profession.
“There was a time quite recently when it would have been considered fanciful to make a living from the government teaching mother tongue, but now there’s a significant number that do,” Tjuveleljem said.
Communities should focus on speaking their languages regularly, especially with children, she said.
“There are all the challenges of government funding and time at school, etc, but if Indigenous people themselves can’t carry that flag then it becomes even more of a challenge,” she said.
The benefits of Indigenous communities retaining their language are well documented overseas. In Australia, which shares Indigenous historical similarities, efforts to save languages have been linked to improved mental health, social outcomes and land management.
There appears to be less literature about the impact in Taiwan, but a study of an Atayal elementary school’s immersive native language program in 2017 found it “greatly enriched” the students’ enthusiasm and educational outcomes. The school’s average math scores became significantly higher than the national average, and Chinese scores also rose.
Chen said that her experience working with dozens of language consultants was of seeing a growing enthusiasm for the language revitalization and education.
“Most of them weren’t teachers in the beginning — they were housewives or farmers or truck drivers, which is typical because the ones who got better education tend to not speak their traditional language. These are the ones who stayed behind in their tribe, and now they’re sought out by the government and schools. It gives them a sense of pride and purpose,” she said.
In Nantou County, Kapamumu plans for a language camp in the summer.
Self-consciously posing for photographs, he looked across the lake and pointed to the horizon.
“I’m looking towards our young people’s future,” he joked.
It is clear the issue weighs heavily. They have little time.
“This is our right to learn our culture and language, and no one can take it, but we need friends to help out,” he said. “We don’t have land, and we have a hard life, but if we learn our language we’ll be the happiest tribe.”
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