What Is Taiwan's Local Language Education Really Trying to Achieve?

A controversy was sparked by a parent's post complaining that their child was being forced to learn Hokkien at school even though the family's home language is Mandarin. The parent argued that the time would be better spent learning English instead.

Many people responded that if they felt learning Hokkien was a waste of time, they could instead choose a sign language or a Southeast Asian immigrant language.

Many of the Taiwanese Hokkien activists I spoke to said they dreamed that one day Hokkien would replace Mandarin as the interethnic lingua franca. They saw this as a way to redress the historical injustice inflicted on Hokkien under the KMT regime. At the same time, however, they admitted that this was unlikely to happen. They also acknowledged that they themselves mostly used Mandarin when speaking to strangers.

I think the Taiwanese government does not intend to change the status quo, in which Mandarin has already become the de facto mother tongue of most Taiwanese people. It is the language in which most people engage in higher-level thinking and express complex ideas. That role is taken for granted.

Rather, the government's aim is to raise awareness that Taiwan is a multicultural and multilingual society by ensuring that children have at least some exposure to the non-Mandarin languages spoken in Taiwan. The goal of local language education is not to replace Mandarin by nurturing a generation of students who write academic papers in Hokkien.

In a sense, the vision is somewhat similar to that of Ireland, where people take great pride in the Irish language even though relatively few speak it fluently. Many can at least say a few phrases or sing a song or two in Irish. The idea is something along those lines.

Were Taiwanese coerced to speak Mandarin? Yes and no.

Saw this meme on Facebook: Is speaking Mandarin really your free choice? Weren't you forced by the ROC?

Of course, Mandarin was originally brought in from outside and forced down Taiwanese people’s throats at the expense of all the other languages, which is so wrong. But that fact alone cannot explain why the shift towards Mandarin accelerated all the more after Taiwan officially adopted multilingualism and started promoting local languages. There must be something about Taiwanese Mandarin that happened to fit the needs. That may include:

1. It had already mutated into a localized version to fit the communicative needs of the Taiwanese;

2. It was relatively easy for Hokkien and Hakka speakers to acquire, belonging to the same language family;

3. It was already a standardized language and a lot of resources were available in it.

As a result, even Taiwan-independence leaning public figures made their appeals heard in Taiwan Mandarin to reach the maximum audience.

Those “Taiwanese purists” haven’t succeeded much so far because they can’t agree among themselves how to codify and standardize the language. And when they promote their views in writing, they have to do it either in Mandarin or have their thoughts in Mandarin translated into Taiwanese while taking care of their linguistic purism, resulting in passages few people can understand.

I know what I wrote here is politically incorrect and some deep-green people may take offense. But the situation is very similar to post colonial countries where intellectuals attack English (or French, etc.) as a colonial and elitist language, but localized versions of that language continue to thrive, and those intellectuals themselves have access to someone like me in the first place because they wrote in English.