Code-mixing in Taipei Mandarin

The most prevalent code among the young generation in Taipei is Taipei Mandarin, with extensive code-switching, especially with Taiwanese Hokkien lexis. Or so I thought.

I was recently surprised to have come across a young person who has lived all her life here in Taipei, but Taiwanese Hokkien was not among her repertoire for code-switching.

She could not follow the conversation I was having with my daughter and my wife, which was being conducted in Taipei Mandarin with some borrowed words from Taiwanese Hokkien. It was something along the line of: 「如果你把a-kong的te-koh kong-phoa的話，他一定會很生氣。」 I was being careful not to insert too many English or Japanese words in my utterances, in order to accommodate this young lady. But to my surprise, she only understood the Mandarin part, or so she claimed.

I didn't get to ask her background, but I would assume from her job description that she must have been educated in Taiwan at least until university. So it came to me as a surprise that she even didn't know some Hokkien words which I had considered to be basic.

In the past, I occasionally came across older generation people with roots in the mainland, who claimed that they understood no Taiwanese Hokkien, because they considered it to be a low-class dialect. It is rare to find this sort of ideology among the youth in Taipei nowadays, regardless of their cultural background. So I suspect that this girl I met yesterday was being sincere when she said she didn't understand us.

The lesson I learned from this incident is that I need to be more careful about accommodating my interlocutors, even if they are young people from Taipei, by sticking to Mandarin words whenever possible and appropriate.