Language rights advocates and groups supporting “Taiwanization” have called on the government to change its linguistic designation for Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) from Minnanyu (閩南語, Southern Min) to Taiyu (台語).
The word Minnan has overtones of racial discrimination, and in the past, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) authoritarian government used “unlawful” means when designating it the “official name” for Taiyu, Taiwanese Pen Tai-bun Pit-hoe, the Takao Promote Tai-gi-bun Association and other advocacy groups said in a statement.
When Nvidia cofounder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), who was born in Tainan, spoke in Hoklo during a recent visit to Taiwan, he referred to the language as Taiyu, the statement said.
Photo: CNA
“Therefore we urge the Ministry of Education to follow the Executive Yuan’s resolution to prioritize the term Taiyu instead of Minnan,” it said
No article in the Constitution, nor any legal provision requires the use of Minnan when referring to Hoklo, the statement added.
Furthermore, the Min (閩) symbol is composed of the radical for door, and the component for insects (虫) or beast, which in ancient times referred to snakes, it said.
“The use of Minnan by northern Chinese was intended as racial discrimination when referring to the people of the Fujian or Minnan region,” the statement said, adding that some textbooks say the term meant “snake people” or “persons crawling on the ground.”
“Therefore Minnan when applied ... to speakers of the language, is like Han Chinese in the past referring to Taiwan’s indigenous people as fan [番, ‘uncivilized, or barbarians’] who spoke fan languages,” the statement said.
The government’s continued use of the term Minnan violates people’s right to language equality and contravenes the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights; the UN’s covenants on protecting civil and political rights, and social and cultural rights; and the Development of National Languages Act (國家語言發展法), which went in to effect in 2019, it said.
The groups urged the Ministry of Education “to respect the wishes of Taiwanese, to change the term in school textbooks ... and to take action through an official notification from the ministry” saying that the language should be referred to as Taiyu, not Minnan.
Other organizations involved in the statement included the Taiwanese Romanization Association, the Taiwan-Vietnam Culture Association, Toa-bak-chiu Liam-koa-thoan, National Cheng Kung University’s Department of Taiwanese Literature and the Hoat-Ki Tai-gi Ki-kim-hoe Taiwanese Foundation.
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