The geo-, socio-, ethno-, and politicolinguistics of Taiwan
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I've had guests from Taiwan for the past few days. Two of them are mother and daughter, both primary school teachers. The mother is a nationally known teacher of Taiwanese language who received special awards from two presidents, Lee Teng-hui and Chen Shui-bian. She is very proud of the beauty of the Taiwanese language and is honored to be able to teach it to her students. She refers to Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) as "Huáyǔ 華語", as is done in Singapore and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, and refuses to call it 國語 ("National Language"), because, as she says, "It is not the language of our nation".
Although the mother is from the south and is naturally completely fluent in Taiwanese, the daughter was born in the north and speaks very little Taiwanese.
The third guest is the husband of the daughter. He is an American from Oklahoma who has been living in Taiwan for more than two decades. Recently, after a very long process that involved being able to answer hundreds of detailed questions about Taiwan history, society, and culture, he became a citizen of Taiwan. His wife and mother-in-law are very proud of him for having done so, and he himself is extremely pleased at the outcome.
One last note about the extraordinary physiognomy of the mother. As soon as I saw her, I thought that she must have some aboriginal (Austronesian) blood. Upon inquiring, that turned out to be the case, though she is mainly Hokkien (Minnan). But there was something else very special about her appearance that made me think she also had European genes. Guǒrán 果然 ("as expected"), there is a tradition in their family that they had some Hélán 荷蘭 ("Dutch") ancestry.
N.B.: "Táiwān 臺灣" does NOT mean "Terrace Bay". See under "Readings".
Readings
Dutch Formosa (1624-1662)
Standard Chinese / Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) / Standard Mandarin / Mandarin (I prefer to refer to it as MSM)
"Precious Isle Taiwan" (2/23/18)
"The sociolinguistics of the Chinese script" (8/20/17)
"Water control" (5/30/15)
"The Opacity and Difficulty of the Chinese Script" (9/18/08)
"Vitally worst: 'Chinese' sounds like 'to tear you to die'" (4/7/07)
"How to Forget Your Mother Tongue and Remember Your National Language"
J.W. Brewer said,
July 24, 2018 @ 9:40 am
How recent a development is the regional variation in likelihood of Taiwanese fluency? My wife's heritage-Taiwanese is definitely stronger than her heritage-Mandarin and although she is US-born and grew up in Southern California she is "northern" in a Taiwanese context, i.e. her parents are both from Taoyuan, she spent many summer vacations as a child in Taoyuan, and that would have been the primary place in her childhood where she had occasion to speak either Sinitic language to random third parties like cabdrivers or shopkeepers rather than family members. On the other hand, growing up in California meant she was largely insulated from whatever broader social/political/etc forces might have been discouraging kids her age in Taoyuan from Taiwanese fluency, even if they were the children of two Taiwanese-speaking parents who used the language at home.
Bob Ladd said,
July 24, 2018 @ 10:33 am
Although I was aware of the different names for Modern Standard Mandarin, the fact that the subject of VHM's anecdote "refuses" to call it guo2yu3 surprised me. What other languages are there out there in the world whose very name is controversial? I know about español/castellano, but I don't know whether there are people who refuse to use one name or another. Also, I'm not counting recent moves away from exonyms, like Eskimo/Inuktitut, of which there are a great many – the thing about the multiplicity of names for MSM is that these are all names used by people who speak it natively or quasi-natively.
J.W. Brewer said,
July 24, 2018 @ 12:38 pm
To Bob Ladd's question, are these all "colloquial" names or are they in more of a quasi-official/bureaucratic register? It would seem slightly odd to have no endonym for ones own speech variety other than a coinage that transparently meant "national language" or the like.
I don't know of a specific parallel, but I take it that some Filipinos whose L1 is not Tagalog have not been enthusiastic about the government's longstanding policy of rebranding Tagalog as the "Filipino language" or "national language" (Wikang pambansa, sez wikipedia). So I can easily imagine some of them making a point of just calling it Tagalog and refusing to use the names whose political implications they dislike.
David Marjanović said,
July 24, 2018 @ 4:41 pm
That's a common occurrence when the only available endonyms designate larger entities. The most drastic example may be Bahasa Indonesia, i.e. Malay (Bahasa Melayu) as official in Indonesia as opposed to Malaysia or Singapore.
Suzanne Valkemirer said,
July 24, 2018 @ 5:02 pm
" I know about español/castellano, but I don't know whether there are people who refuse to use one name or another." (Bob Ladd).
I know one Catalan sociolinguist who refuses to call Spanish anything other than 'Castilian' in all the languages he knows actively.
Victor Mair said,
July 24, 2018 @ 5:41 pm
From a Taiwanese colleague:
I salute your esteemed guest, the teacher of Taiwanese language, for her stand on the "National Language."
Jenny Chu said,
July 24, 2018 @ 7:57 pm
I remember that there are several additional indigenous minority languages in Taiwan, e.g. Hakka. How do they refer to the Taiwanese language – and do they see it as "dominant" compared to their own?
Would the "ardent Taiwanese nationalist" imagined in http://pinyin.info/readings/mair/taiwanese.html promote Taiwanese as a 國語 of Taiwan?
Christopher Sundita said,
July 25, 2018 @ 12:51 am
I asked my Taiwanese fiancé about his preferred terms for Mandarin in Mandarin. His preference is 中文 and considers 國語 to be used by "older people." He's in his late 20s.
And to JW Brewer: FWIW, as an L1 Tagalog speaker, I strongly prefer calling my language Tagalog. That was the name long before this wikang pambansa/Pilipino/Filipino business started.
AntC said,
July 25, 2018 @ 5:54 am
indigenous minority languages in Taiwan
Hi @Jenny, as I understand it, "indigenous" refers to the pre-Sinitic/Austronesian languages. Their numbers of speakers are tiny, and limited to 'cultural villages' or enclaves.
Hakka-speaking people arrived same time as the Hokkien/Southern Min-speaking, brought in as labour by Europeans (Dutch, Portuguese).
"Taoyuen" — from which "Taiwan" derives, is a Portuguese spelling of an indigenous name for people/area in the North-West of the island the Portuguese named "Formosa". So as Victor points out, "Terrace Bay" is an entirely false etymology.
Everybody I meet in Taiwan speaks Mandarin, although they might also understand Hokkien/Hakka/Japanese. I agree with @Christopher, native speakers of those languages are the older generation.
KeithB said,
July 25, 2018 @ 8:46 am
Bob Ladd:
One problem is that the people groups that had a language name forced upon them are often quite powerless and helpless to do anything about it. I am specifically thinking about the Navajo/Dine.
(One of my fantasies is to go on Jeopardy and answer "Who are the Dine?" and be called out wrong, with the "correct" answer being "Navajo." I would then complain during the break and have my money restored with an explanation. Of course, Alex Trebek probably already knows.)
Rodger C said,
July 25, 2018 @ 8:49 am
I know one Catalan sociolinguist who refuses to call Spanish anything other than 'Castilian' in all the languages he knows actively.
In my experience this is normal among Catalans, and indeed among people in general who have studied the Romance varieties of the Iberian peninsula.
J.W. Brewer said,
July 25, 2018 @ 9:12 am
I have a question that may not have come up on the previous threads for the various MSM words for MSM. In English we would tend to use MSM rather than "Mandarin" only in fairly technical contexts where we are trying to be precise, and for most English speakers "Mandarin" will mean, if not otherwise specified, MSM, just as the name of any other foreign language will generally be taken by default to mean the standard/prestige/government-blessed-and-school-taught variety of the language unless otherwise specified. According to the internet, which of course may not be reliable, the Mandarin word for Mandarin is Guānhuà. Does anyone in the Sinitic world currently use that word to reference MSM, as a way of avoiding taking an implied political stance about the "national" character of the language or otherwise, or is it now archaic? Although I take it that at least etymologically, Guānhuà itself has a claim about the political status of the language variety built into it (i.e. that it's the language variety characteristically used by pre-1912 government officials a/k/a "mandarins"), so maybe it's turtles all the way.
Neil Dolinger said,
July 25, 2018 @ 11:17 am
@Christopher,
I may be slightly off on the nuances, but AFAIK 中文 (literally "Chinese language / culture") can refer to any Sinitic language, and when used for a specific language, refers to the written version of the language, which resembles but does not mirror MSM. In the case of your fiancé, when he uses 中文 does he only mean Mandarin, to the exclusion of Hoklo/Hokkien and Hakka?
David Marjanović said,
July 25, 2018 @ 6:46 pm
Those are actually a case of a language without an unambiguous endonym: Diné just means "people", so sometimes Diné bizaad "people's language" isn't clear enough. And so, the word naabeehó now exists.
Christopher Sundita said,
July 25, 2018 @ 8:16 pm
@Neil He says that 中文 for him overwhelmingly refers to Mandarin. He says that it could refer to languages like Taiwanese and Hakka, but it would be odd since there are already words to refer to them anyway.
He also says that he considers that he sees a connection between a person's political views and their preference in using 國語 or 華語. 華語 tends to be used by people who are members of the Green Party and 國語 tends to be used by people who are Blue. But he cautions that people might use the words for other reasons as well. He sees 中文 as being more neutral.
dainichi said,
July 25, 2018 @ 9:00 pm
> 華語 tends to be used by people who are members of the Green Party and 國語 tends to be used by people who are Blue
Blue here means Pan-blue Coalition, I guess. Do you mean Green Party or Pan-green Coalition?
Anyway, this matches my very vague understanding of the political situation in Taiwan, in which the more conservative Pan-blue Coalition would favor a reading of 國 as "China", whereas the more independence-favoring Pan-green Coalition would oppose to that.
I'm curious if anybody knows what the distribution of 国语, 汉语 and 华语 was before the PRC (in all of the Sinosphere). I imagine that with the PRC/ROC split, the choice became politicized, but were they in free variation before?
Ponder Stibbons said,
July 25, 2018 @ 11:30 pm
In Singapore 中文 would definitely only refer to Mandarin. I don't think people differentiate between the written/spoken variants as the dialects are almost never written in Chinese characters in Singapore.
Ponder Stibbons said,
July 25, 2018 @ 11:30 pm
Sorry, should have said 'topolects'.
AntC said,
July 26, 2018 @ 12:41 am
"Taoyuen" — from which "Taiwan" derives, is a Portuguese spelling of an indigenous name for people/area in the North-West of the island the Portuguese named "Formosa".
Ah, I see I have completely muddled up two different names.
The Portuguese spelling I'm half-remembering is [wikipedia]:
"In the early 17th century, the Dutch East India Company established a commercial post at Fort Zeelandia (modern-day Anping, Tainan) on a coastal sandbar called "Tayouan",[28] after their ethnonym for a nearby Taiwanese aboriginal tribe, possibly Taivoan people, written by the Dutch and Portuguese variously as Taiouwang, Tayowan, Teijoan, etc."
The Taoyuan district in North-West of the island (which also names the main airport), is allegedly named for 'Peach Garden'. Is this another false etymology like 'Terrace Bay'? Yes blossom trees/gardens are valued throughout Taiwan: do they date back to the Qing era, or more recently to Japanses rule/sakura?
Asher said,
July 26, 2018 @ 3:27 am
FWIW, here in Hong Kong 中文 (jung1 man4) in reference to spoken language usually refers to Cantonese (but does not exclude other Chinese languages or dialects thereof), while in reference to written language it refers to Written Standard Chinese (people may broadly use this to refer to include Cantonese- or HK-specific ways of writing in Chinese).
When the distinction is useful, we'll refer to 普通話 (pou2 tung1 wa2, Putonghua / regular speech / standard spoken Mandarin) or 廣東話 (gwong2 dung1 wa2, Guangdong speech / spoken [usu. HK] Cantonese).
ajay said,
July 27, 2018 @ 4:44 am
One problem is that the people groups that had a language name forced upon them are often quite powerless and helpless to do anything about it. I am specifically thinking about the Navajo/Dine.
I'm finding it hard to think of many languages to which this doesn't apply.
Daniel N. said,
July 27, 2018 @ 6:00 am
There's a famous controversy how to name Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin & Serbian, and how many languages there are at all. The very existence of some of these languages is a point of dispute. Besides, there are many local dialects in that area, some of them with their own small literature.
J.W. Brewer said,
July 27, 2018 @ 10:06 am
Here's an interesting recent article on diglossia in political-rally chants in Taiwan: https://popula.com/2018/07/18/frozen-garlic/. Note that the particular usage reportedly started on the "green" side of the political spectrum but has subsequently been adopted by the "blue" side as well.
dainichi said,
July 31, 2018 @ 12:01 am
@J.W. Brewer, thanks for the link. The description of the politics is interesting, yet the description of the language situation seems dubious:
> Taiwanese and Mandarin share the same underlying character system but have significantly different spoken forms
Oooh, the "underlying" orthography. Right…
> since they share the same written script, a Taiwanese speaker and a Mandarin speaker–who might struggle to speak to each other if they have no common dialect–would probably be able to text each other and understand the conversation
Does this even make sense? Are there literate Taiwanese people who don't speak Mandarin? The article seems to miss the whole point of Taiwanese not having a (standard) orthography.
Chas Belov said,
August 1, 2018 @ 10:15 pm
It bugs me when I see language lessons refer to Mandarin as Chinese.