Can Taiwanese be revived? Five reasons why it's an uphill struggle

 I'll discuss here if Taiwanese (Hokkien) can be revived, not if it should be.

When a language becomes just one of the subjects at school, used in speech contests and cultural performances, but not used in families as the primary language, we say it has been folklorized. On the surface, it looks like the language is being celebrated as rich cultural artefact. But in fact, its vitality is pretty much all gone. A cynical way of looking at it would be to say that the governments already feels safe about promoting that language, because it knows that it is no longer a threat. Breton of France and Ainu of Japan come to mind. Building a museum, uploading popular anime dubbed in that language on YouTube, and adding that language to the bus stop announcements will do little to revive it. You will be doubtful if I say Taiwanese will become like that, I know. But the fact that Taiwanese is attriting at an unforeseen speed since it became a school subject 30 years ago. So can Taiwanese be rescued? My answer is rather negative, mainly for the following five reasons:

1. Only those driven by strong ideology are actively working for its preservation;
2. Precisely because of such strong ideologies, specialists can't agree with each other on how and what should be preserved;
3. The very idea of selecting one dialect and granting prestige to it so that it can be promoted through media and education contradicts with what they have been fighting so hard against;
4. Mandarin has a hidden value as the first island-wide lingua franca of Taiwan;
5. Taiwanese is no longer tied to Taiwan identity.

Reason 1

Strong ideology is prerequisite to language revitalization, said Joshua Fishman, Jewish sociolinguist and Yiddish-revivalist. I bet you have seldom come across a Taiwanese person who insists on speaking only in Taiwanese regardless of who they are talking to including their own children, even though it would be easier even for himself to use Mandarin. The Taiwanese are friendly and not known to inconvenience others for the sake of their own ideology.

Reasonable parents prioritize practicality. And the practical choice is to use Mandarin. Not that they don't think Taiwanese is important; but studies have found time and again that parents thought English was more important for their children than Taiwanese. So a regular Taiwanese parent would be satisfied that their child is now taught Taiwanese folk songs and traditional stories at school as now that Taiwanese is a school subject, and carry on speaking to their children in Mandarin. The consequence of this, of course, is a generation of Taiwanese who don't speak Taiwanese well. 

Reason 2

One of the reasons why school education in Taiwanese is unsuccessful is that its orthography has been changed so often. (We put aside for now the fact that Taiwanese people tend to place much less importance on romanized scripts than on Chinese characters.) The specialists with strong ideologies I talked about above cannot reach a compromise and agree on what romanized system to teach children. After all, each scholar has spent years developing his own system of romanization. Another example would be the scholars of National Cheng Kung University launching their own Taiwanese proficiency test, because they are not happy with the Hokkien Proficiency Test developed by the Ministry of Education in Taipei. So this resulted in the government adopting a romanization system nobody is familiar with, sacrificing the Pe̍h-ōe-jī invented by foreign missionaries and has been in use for over a century with lots of available publications. 

Now that I mentioned this: I've been uncritically using the term Taiwanese so far in this post. The specialists can't even agree on what to call the language! Each of the following terms have strong proponents and opponents: Hokkien, Taiwanese Hokkien, Taiwanese, Holo, Hoklo, Southern Min. That's why I've chosen to stick to the popular terms, even if they may not be academically accurate. 

Reason 3

The next difficulty is the self-contradictory nature of the revivalist arguments. Ir order for Taiwanese to become a language that can be promoted in many domains including formal ones, it first needs to be standardized. Standardization means selecting one variety among many, making authoritative grammars, dictionaries, unified orthography, technical terminology, etc. Only then it can be promoted in schools, media, etc. and it will be to the exclusion of other varieties. In other words, that's what the KMT did to Mandarin in China, and then, in Taiwan. This also happens to be precisely what those language activists have been fighting so fiercely against for so many years. 

The Taiwanese revivalists may argue that it's different: Mandarin is an external language while Taiwanese, is an indigenous one. Or is it really so? Didn't Taiwanese originate from Fujian in China? This kind of circular argument is also seen in countries like the Philippines over English. If you insist that Taiwanese is OK and Mandarin is not, even when both are Chinese languages, then how can you be so sure that you are not, in any sense, being racist?

Even if we do decide that Taiwanese is somehow different from Mandarin, and therefore it's OK to coerce people into using it, it is highly unlikely that such a high-handed method is workable in today's democratic Taiwan. 

Reason 4

We also have to take into account the pull-factors of Mandarin. If people willingly chose to use Mandarin, there must have been some benefits to using it. And that benefit is the fact that Mandarin is the first Taiwan-wide lingua franca, minus Japanese which was not really Taiwan-wide (its use was limited largely to well-educated sectors typically in urban areas). Taiwanese (Hokkien), especially for Hakka people, is just one of the ethnic languages in Taiwan. Mandarin, is equally foreign to both Taiwanese and Hakka speakers, but is far more accessible to both than Japanese is, since they are all Sinitic languages. And as Taiwan became increasingly modernized and people became ever more mobile, there really was a need for a Taiwan-wide lingua franca. Taiwanese people may not have chosen Mandarin voluntarily, but it happened to come in handy. This again is similar to the role of English in the Philippines and India. 

Reason 5

As I have already discussed, parents are not choosing Taiwanese as their home language. But it doesn't mean they think this situation is good. Nobody in his right mind would say grand parents and grand children not being able to communicate with each other is a good thing. The reality is that parents do think preserving the Taiwan identity through Taiwanese is important, but when it boils down to a zero sum game, they would rather choose Mandarin (or even English, for that matter). Fishman would say, then, promote Taiwanese ideology harder. And that's exactly what the government has been trying, it seems. But there's a reason why this may not work: the separation of the Taiwanese language and Taiwan identity.  

Taiwanese people have appropriated Mandarin, and turn it into a medium suited for conveying their cultures and ideas. And it doesn't belong only to the Hokken-speakers, who make up less than 70% of the population. This is why President Tsai, considered a champion of Taiwan identity, makes her public statements in Mandarin. 

There's another added advantage to Mandarin. Unlike Taiwanese, which is still in an agonizing phase of being standardized, Mandarin already is a standardized language, with a more or less fixed writing convention. In fact, it is quite unthinkable in many countries in Asia that, when you walk into a bookstore, almost all books are in the same language as the one that people are speaking on the streets, as is the case in Taiwan. 

Having said all these five reasons above, the folklorized TV programs, events, speech contests, etc. in Taiwanese will continue. And the practice of Mandarin-based code-mixing with insertions here and there from Taiwanese, is already becoming the norm.  

We should also be careful not to be just celebratory about Mandarin in Taiwan. There is a pitfall. Suffice it to say here that there are risks to sharing the same language with a gigantic cultural content provider with little freedom of speech, which also happens to be your next door neighbor, and by the way, is your country's archenemy. It is possible to argue that the current Bilingual Nation policy is an attempt to preempt this danger. A topic for another time. 

Japanese version of this article: https://peterkobayashi.blogspot.com/2022/04/5.html