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.