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We have often experienced vexation and consternation over the future of Taiwanese / Hoklo, especially in light of what's happening to Cantonese in the PRC.  Now comes some welcome news from Ilha Formosa.  A renewal of Taiwanese has recently been spurred by a least expected source, China.

Chinese Pressure Fuels an Unlikely Language Revival in Taiwan:

Local tongues gain popularity as more people on the self-ruled island, where Mandarin predominates, disavow their connection with China

By Joyu Wang, WSJ (12/22/21)

Pranav Mulgund remarks:

A recent aversion to the CCP has pushed people in Taiwan to stop speaking Mandarin. For instance, “One enthusiastic participant is Lala Sin, a 35-year-old mother of three, who has largely avoided speaking Mandarin Chinese, the most used language in both Taiwan and China, since last winter, instead talking with her children exclusively in Taiwanese Hokkien, or Taigi (pronounced 'dye-ghee')”. Teachers of the language have experienced a tripling in enrollment from 2012 to 2020. I think it’s quite an interesting idea to revolt through language. It’s obviously not an unprecedented idea, but quite fascinating to happen in modern times.

The WSJ article continues, quoting Lala Sin:

“Speaking our mother language is the most effective vaccine” against a more assertive China, said Ms. Sin, one of a growing group of Taiwanese parents who are trying to steep their children in the island’s local languages—while also brushing up themselves—in what they see as a form of resistance against China’s authoritarian influence.

China’s Communist Party, which considers Taiwan a part of China and has vowed to take control of it by force if necessary, has been steadily increasing diplomatic and military pressure on the island of 23 million, partly in response to a tightening of relations between the Taiwanese and U.S. governments under Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen.

Amid the tensions, more Taiwanese people are disavowing their connection with China. Roughly 63% of people polled on the island identify themselves exclusively as Taiwanese, according to a survey conducted by Taiwan’s National Chengchi University in June, up from 54% in 2018, when Beijing stepped up efforts to lure away the island’s allies and increased military drills nearby.

According to the poll, 2.7% of people in Taiwan see themselves exclusively as Chinese.

Taking into account the more two million mainlanders who came to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek's armies, and compared to the number of people who thought of themselves as Chinese as late as the 2000s, that's a remarkably low percentage.  In my classes at Penn and among my friends and acquaintances from Taiwan, in the 80s and 90s I already started to see a shift in their opinion on where they considered themselves to be from, with more and more of them thinking of themselves as Taiwanese rather than as Chinese from the mainland.

 

Selected readings

• "Hoklo" (9/18/16)
• "Hoklo, part 2" (12/6/21) — with an extensive bibliography
• "Death knell for Cantonese" (12/18/21) — with lengthy bibliography

[h.t. Chau Wu; thanks to Kerry Gershaneck]

December 24, 2021 @ 11:24 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Language preservation, Language teaching and learning

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