When your language is an unfamiliar tongue

This article discusses the sense of alienation people feel when the standard version of the non-dominant language officially promoted and used in mainstream media differs from one's own dialect. The feeling must be all the stronger if you have fought hard and long for the promotion of your language. 

In order for a language to be promoted and institutionalized, one of the dialects has to be “arbitrarily” selected and codified. That dialect happens to be Tâi-oân Iu-sè-khiuⁿ at the moment and used to be Tōa-tiū-tiâⁿ-khiuⁿ during the Japanese period.

When this happens, there will always be some who will feel alienated because the variety being promoted differs from one’s own.

This problem is more acutely felt in places like Mindanao, where teachers are having to teach in a different dialect of their own language under the mother-tongue-based bilingual education program. This has a potential danger of accelerating language shift, because people may opt for the regional lingua franca or national language rather than having to deal with the so-called “own language” which differs from their own natural speech.

An inevitable consequence of applying monolingual assumptions to multilingual societies

This interesting article points out that Manobo languages in Mindanao are being lost to Cebuano, not to English or even Tagalog. It reports that people prefer to read the Bible in Cebuano and find the versions in their own languages "too difficult to read." It then challenges the age-old and mainly protestant claim that the Biblical messages are best conveyed in one's mother tongue.

Well, I would say such assumption derives from the linguistic nationalism arguments dating back to the Europe of Luther and Herder that needed to promote monolingualism. It fails to take into account the fact that Filipinos always code-mix and that one's primary language shifts over time and from domain to domain. That's why bible translations in a "pure" form of vernaculars are not so popular except in well-established ones like Tagalog, Cebuano and Ilocano. They sound "unnatural" with so many lengthy and unfamiliar words! They don't resemble the code-mixed form of the language they use in their everyday  lives!

Likewise, it's little wonder that some people prefer to read the Bible in English rather than in their own language. For me personally, too, colloquial translations like the Good News Bible (Today's English Translation) is far more readable than the predominant one in my language (New Interconfessional Version) which used formal register. Thanks to the GNB, my elementary-school-age daughters have access to the word of God. They will have to wait until at least after high school to have access to the formal register and unfamiliar kanjis in the Japanese bible. 

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

臺灣意識愈強，閩南語愈弱？

愈是在臺灣意識高漲、政府開始注入大筆預算推動本土語言後長大的人，愈不願意跟自己的小孩說閩南語。也難怪，就算臺灣意識繼續普及下去，約25年後閩南語在臺灣會絕響。https://www.tsatw.org.tw/up_photo/moon-system/images/20190710112043_4392.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0nkRPGxtky8SNxifm3RFl7hlDU_FWBRmaKJByGyM8Kbq53Oi1vO5k4uYg

Re editorial of Taipei Times: Language is not just a tool

My comment after reading the Taipei Times editorial on a legislator who insisted on speaking Hokkien:

While it's true that language is not just a tool but a marker of identity, it remains to be seen if pragmatic Taiwanese people will accept the inconvenience of having to communicate among themselves through interpreters, while already having a lingua franca they all understand. Just as Hokkien became the language of Taiwanese identity by replacing numerous other languages both Sinitic and Austronesian, Mandarin does have a chance to become a language of Taiwanese identity once day. Or perhaps it already has.

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2021/10/06/2003765596

The Hokkien Blog: Ho ti lai-soaN (The tiger is deep in the mountains)

This post is a translation from my previous post in Japanese.

I sometimes converse with my wife in Hokkien in order to expose our kids to Taiwanese Hokkien. (They only speak Japanese, Mandarin and English, in this order of fluency.)

She asked me to bring something over in Hokkien, so I answered: "Ho."

To this, she responded: "Ho ti lai-soaN lah!"

It took me a while to figure out she was saying: "The tiger is deep in the mountains".

What the heck could this mean?

In no time, I figured out what this word play meant.

Let me explain.

As you may know, Taiwanese Hokkien is a mixture of the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou accents. In Taipei City, the traditional accent is closer to the Amoy accent, which belongs to the Quanzhou side.

In this accent, the pronunciation of "ho (good)" is rounded, as in "hoh".

However, the mainstream accent in Taiwanese media today is closer to the Kaohsiung accent (more toward the Zhangzhou side). In this accent, "ho" is centered, as if to say "her" non-rhotically.

So this word play is used by speakers of the latter accent to ridicule the former's pronunciation of "ho". (FYI, my wife is a speaker of the former. She probably heard someone say this to her parents, who have an even stronger Tong'an accent.)

There are some other jokes that utilize the differences in these two major accents in Taiwan, but some of them are quite vulgar, and not suitable for print.

台湾閩南語ブログ:ほーてらいそあN（虎は山奥に）

日本語と英語と北京語しか話せない子供達に台湾語を教えるために、時々わざと妻と台湾閩南語で会話することがある。

妻が私に何かをするように頼んだので、台湾語で「ほー」と答えたら、「ほーてらいそあNら！」という返事が帰ってきた。

どんな意味なのかと思ったら、「虎teh內山啦」（虎は山奥にいる）ということ。一体、何の話なのか？

ちょっと考えたら、この言葉遊びの意味が分かった。

台湾閩南語は中国福建省の泉州と漳州という二つの地域の言語が混ざったものであり、極大雑把に言って台北などの北部はどちらかというと前者に近く、南部と宜蘭は後者に近い。台北の混ざり方は福建省アモイ市のものに極めて類似していて、フィリピンやシンガポール・マレーシアなどの華人と問題なく意思疎通できる。戦後は台北市が台湾華語の中心地になったので、台湾のメディアで標準的なものとして扱われている台湾閩南語は、どちらかというと高雄・台南のものに近い。これは「台湾優勢腔」などと呼ばれている。

さて、この現在の台湾で主流派の台湾語では、「好」の発音がcenteringしていて、北京語読みの「赫」に近い。つまり、「はー」に近く聞こえる。

一方、台北で話される泉州寄りの発音では、lip roundingが入り、「ほー」と聞こえる。

日本に例えると、「箸」と言ったのが、他地方の人には「橋」と言っているように聞こえるのと似ているというわけだ。

それで、台北訛りで「いいです」と言ったのに、わざと「虎は山奥だ」と言ってからかう言葉遊びが成立するのである。

これに似た、泉州訛りと漳州訛りの違いを利用した冗談もいくつかあるが、ここでは書かないでおく。

新潟弁：ごめんください

ごめんくださいの使われ方が新潟では特徴的です。

新潟では、誰かと会ったときの挨拶や、電話の会話の冒頭で相手が名乗ったときの挨拶として、ごめんくださいといいます。

私が育った東京では、そのような使い方はしなかった記憶があります。

誰かの家を訪れたとき、昔はドアベルがあまりなかったので、大声でごめんくださーいと言ったものです。

また、近畿で育った祖母は、さようなら、もう切りますよという別れの挨拶として、電話などでごめんくださいと言っていました。新潟とちょうど逆ですね。こっちから電話をかけたのに、いきなり相手からごめんくださいと言われて、キレそうになったものでした。

この使い方は、新潟で生活してしばらくしてから気づきました。新潟弁本にあまり登場しないところを見ると、おそらく、新潟人が方言だとあまり認識していないのかもしれません。他地方にもあるが意味が違う言葉でよくあることです。

ただ、多くの「透明な新潟弁」（方言だと気が付かれない言葉）とは違い、使用者は割りと年配者か、市外出身者が多いような気がします。そのうち滅びる言葉かもしれません。

Teochew people in Taiwan?

Teochew is not spoken, at least locally in Taiwan. Wikipedia says that Teochew people in Taiwan has been Hokkienized, and speak Hokkien. It also says that some of them speak Hakka.

I know for a fact that some Hokkien people claim that they trace their ancestry to Shantou-Chaozhou area. Take my mother-in-law for example. All her family members live in northern Taipei, and speak Hokkien with a marked Tong'an accent. Yet they claim that they are Teochew people. Or at least that's what their family tree chart "claims". In this post, I will talk about three kinds of people who are thought to be Teochew. And I will question if they can really be considered Teochew.

Teochew people are speakers of the language, whose center is Shantou-Chaozhou area. It is a branch of Southern Min family. Most Chinese people in Thailand and Cambodia are Teochew. Hong Kong also has lots of Teochew people, including Mr. Li Ka-Shing, the richest tycoon. They are quite powerful in Singapore and southern peninsular Malaysia as well.

Type A "Teochew" people in Taiwan are not really Teochew people at all. They are Pepo tribal people. Pepo tribes are Malayo-Polynesian people people who became Sinicized. They had to pretend to be Han-Chinese so they could own land. In order to prove that they were Han, they had to produce a family tree. But All their Hokkien neighbors knew that they are really different from them. They even spoke Hokkien with an accent. Therefore, they claimed in their family tree that their ancestors are Teochew. They thought the neighbors wouldn't know. But it's easy to tell they really have nothing to do with Teochews. Like my mother-in-law, they speak Hokkien with a Tong'an accent, which is Quanzhou-leaning. If they are really Teochew, they should sound more Zhangzhou.

Type B "Teochew" people maybe Hokkienized Hakka people that originated from western Zhangzhou areas in Fujian Province. There are many such people in Zhanghua and Yunlin Counties. The funny thing that most of those people don't recognize themselves as Hakka. They regard themselves as Zhangzhou Hokkiens. But Older generation people still remember some Hakka words. And some have admitted that they are Hakkas recently, and are engaged in reviving their Hakka culture.

Type C "Teochew" people are actually related to Chaozhou, but are not ethnically Teochew. They are mainstream Hakka people who migrated to Taiwan from Shantou-Chaozhou region. In this region of Guangdong, as in neighboring western Zhangzhou of Fujian, Hakkas and Southern Min people are coexisting alongside each other. Among the mainstream Hakka people who migrated to Taiwan en masse, some originated from this Teochew-speaking region. So their ancestry tree rightly indicate that their ancestral origin is Chaozhou. But that doesn't mean that they are ethnically Chaozhou.

By the way, in Tainan, there is a dish called Chaozhou noodles. I wrote a blog post about it in the past. I don't know if this delicacy is related to Type A or Type C psuedo-Teochews. Or maybe it's related to Chaozhou Township in Pindong.

A final word of caution: Be careful when you discuss this topic with the people concerned themselves. As I said, they may well perceive themselves as otherwise. And we must respect that. They don't particularly like being told who they are by a foreigner. The same principle applies to talking to people who might have Pepo ancestry.

Taiwanese Hokkien is an appropriate term

I think Taiwanese Hokkien is an appropriate name for the language spoken as a heritage language by the majority of people in Taiwan.

It has been called many different names, including: Taiwanese, Southern Min, Hoklo, Holo, etc.

But I think Taiwanese Hokkien is the most appropriate one.

Hokkien is the term used by the British colonial authority in East and Southeast Asia to refer to the language of the vicinity of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou. The center of this area is Amoy. So the accent of Amoy has traditionally considered to be the standard. It is into Amoy accent that the Hokkien Bible has been translated. (This might change in the future, as Amoy has accepted huge migrant population and become largely a Mandarin speaking city.) Even though the accents of Quanzhou, Zhangzhou and Amoy are a quite different from each other, they are still mutually intelligible.

Southern Min is a broader term. Even Teochew (the language of Swatow or Shantou) and Hainanese are parts of Southern Min. They are mostly mutually unintelligible with the Quanzhou-Zhangzhou. (The Teochew of Malaysia and Singapore is a different story because it has been greatly influenced by Hokkien.) So it is inappropriate to call Hokkien Southern Min. Hokkien is just one part of the Southern Min group of languages that are mutually unintelligible. This was not a problem in Taiwan, though, because there were extremely few Teochew speakers in Taiwan.

Hoklo and Holo have been used often in Taiwan in recent years. These are traditional terms. But they were seldom used by the people who spoke it themselves until after the Taiwan independence ideology became widespread. Holo is the preferred term by people from such backgrounds, understandably because it contains no word that suggests it originated from mainland China. But the use of this term is not very widespread in Taiwan. The popular term, instead, is Taiwanese, to which I shall turn later.

Hoklo, although shares the same roots with Holo, is not preferred by people who ascribe to Taiwan independence. This is presumably because the "hok" refers to Fujian Province of China.

Also, it has been suggested that "lo" is a word which means a person or a man, which has a derogatory connotation. It has been known that both Hoklo and Holo are terms used by Hakka people in Zhangzhou and Chaozhou areas to refer to Hokkien-speaking people, likely with a derogatory connotation.

When I visited the Museum of History in Hong Kong, I learned that people there refer to Teochew people as "Fuklo". If this is true, it would be totally inappropriate to call Hokkien people in Taiwan as Hoklo or its variation Holo, since they are not ethnic Teochew.

This leaves the discussion to Taiwanese. This is a popular term in widespread use. But it seems odd to me to call a language by the name of the place where only a minority of its speakers reside. (Well, you may use English as a counterargument. Only a minority of all English speakers in the world live in England. But we still call it English. But the thing is: English did originate from there, while Hokkien did not originate from Taiwan.) Another reason why this might be an inappropriate term is that it disrespects other ethnic groups who consider themselves to be "native" to Taiwan. For example, a Hakka person or an aborigine might question why their languages are excluded from being called "Taiwanese".

Even though Taiwanese Hokkien is an appropriate term, it is not without its shortcomings. It seems to be less problematic in southern part of Taiwan, namely, Jiayi, Tainan, Kaohsiung, Pindong and Taidong. In these areas, the accent of Hokkien is quite unitary. And the extent to amd ways in which Zhangzhou and Quanzhou accents are merged are very uniquely Taiwanese.

However, it is more problematic for nothern accents. For example, the accent of downtown Taipei is closer to Amoy than anything else, that of Tamsui closer to Tong'an and anything else, and that of Muzha closer to Anxi than anything else, etc. Each retains its proximity to its place of origin in China.

This being said, both southern and northern accents have large borrowed lexis from Japanese. This is uniquely Taiwanese, stemming from its colonial experience. Therefore, even northern accents, which are more closely related to their ancestral accents in China than their southern counterparts, can still legitimately be called Taiwanese Hokkien.

Mandarin as a Taiwan Language (MTL)

Mandarin used to be considered an outsider language in Taiwan. It was forced down people's throat with a high-handed "anti-dialect" campaign. But now it's become a Taiwan's language. The Taiwanese have adopted and appropriated it. So it can now carry the weight of the Taiwan identity. It's become the Language of the Heart" for the Taiwanese. They can use it unapologetically to express their Taiwanese-ness.

In the past, people were forced to feel "less than" because of their strong Taiwan accent in their Mandarin. Now, it's become an identity marker. Politicians even use it to their advantage. Many Waishengrens sometimes put on a stronger Taiwan accent when they want to emphasize their fraternity.

Well-educated urban Taiwanese think that their Mandarin is "biaozhun", just like newscasters. But that's being biaozhun in the Taiwansese standard. Mandarin speakers from outside of Taiwan recognize their so-called "biaozhun" speech as distinctly Taiwanese. Once I traveled to Japan with three of Taiwan's top news anchors. And we interviewed some scholars from mainland China. They all commented on the Taiwanese-ness of the news anchors' Mandarin. To Taiwanese ears, they just sound ""biaozhun", that's all. Taiwan Mandarin has become "transparent" to Taiwanese people. They don't notice anything special.

As you may well know, there are many "Taiwanisms" in Taiwan Mandarin. It's not my job to enumerate them here. But the Taiwanese speakers of Mandarin have invented enough new Mandarin words that can convey distinctly Taiwanese meaning. Just one example: Northern China Mandarin lacks words regarding rice. They don't eat it often. They prefer noodles. So the innovative Taiwanese borrowed words from Hokkien. So we say things like: "This mochi is very Q!"

I would go as far as to say that Mandarin is the new "Taiyu". Hokkien originated from Fujian Province in China. But nobody in Taiwan identify themselves with Fujian when they speak in it. The Taiwanese even call it "Taiyu". This is strange, come to think of it. There are more speakers of Hokkien outside of Taiwan, that is, in China and Southeast Asia, than there are in Taiwan. Yet, we still call it Taiyu. Maybe this is because the Taiwanese feel that they have already adopted and appropriated Hokkien enough to now call it a "local language".

Applying the same logic, why not call Mandarin "Taiwanese"? I know some foreigners who already do this.

Because of the historical accidents and  government educational policy, Hokkien has been in decline in Taiwan, other "dialects" even more so. But Mandarin has become the new Taiyu. This is a more powerful Taiyu, because it is shared by all who live in Taiwan. It is powerful also because it keeps creating new words and expressions to express Taiwanese minds and hearts.

Is there such a thing as the "northern accent" in Taiwan Hokkien?

2014年 新加坡 『福建人』:

http://youtu.be/yZfnBjbzWwk

Many non-linguist Taiwan people say that there are the "southern accent" and "northern accent" in Taiwan Hokkien. To that, I would answer: Yes, there's something which you may call a "southern Taiwan accent" if you want; but there's no such thing as one uniform "northern Taiwan accent."

Let me explain. I'll try to be brief and clear.

Everyone knows that there are different accents of Hokkien in different parts of Taiwan. They are all mixtures of various Quanzhou and Zhangzhou accents. It's just that they're mixed in different proportions. The Yilan accent, "suiN-suiN nuiN-nuiN" for "sng-sng nng nng", is the closest to Zhangzhou. Penang in Malaysia has a similar accent. Lugang accent is the closest to Quanzhou accent. All other Taiwan accents are somewhere in between. For example, Taipei urban accent is leaning toward the Quanzhou side in such a way that it is almost identical with the Amoy accent in China. Amoy has influenced Singapore a lot, so it's very close to Singapore Hokkien.

Without trying to oversimplify, if someone says "koe" for chicken, "tu" for pig, and "sian-siN" for a gentleman, that's Quanzhou accent. Quanzhou-oriented Taiwan accents include Amoy, Jinjiang, Tong'an and Anxi accents. It is spoken roughly along the coastal areas of Taichung, Zhanghua and various locations in the Taipei Basin. Older generation may even call you "lu", instead of "li", now prevalent all over Taiwan.

If, on the other hand, someone says a chicken should be called "ke", pig is "ti" and a mister is "sin-seN", you are hearing a Zhangzhou accent. There are not so many varieties of Zhangzhou accents in Taiwan for reasons I will tell you later, except that Yilan, Taoyuan, Nantou and inland Taichung are all Zhangzhou-dominated areas.

In northern Taiwan, there are very many different accents, caused by early migration patterns. For example in Taipei Basin alone, Amoy accent is spoken downtown, Jinjiang in Wanhua, Anxi in Muzha, Zhangzhou in Songshan, etc. In Shilin where I live, Zhangzhou accent is heard around the Mazu temple in the night market, but where I live closer to Shezi,  it's totally Tong'an accent.  (Tong'an accent is very noticeable, because they say "Tai-pak koaiN" instead of "Tai-pak koan" for Taipei County and "haiN" instead of "heng" for returning something borrowed. You still hear this often along Tamsui River in Shezi and Hougang areas of Shilin District.)

In Jiayi, Tainan, Kaohsiung, Pindong and Taidong, the situation is totally different. Everywhere you go, you hear the same accent. This is regardless of which part of Fujian their ancestors may come from. This accent is what I call the Common Taiwan Accent (CTA) or what Ang Ui-jin calls "Tai-oan iu-se im". It is closer toward Zhangzhou accent, but it's a leveled accent, meaning to say, different features of many accents are mixed together and "weird" features of each have been "flattened" toward the easier side. For example, "ke" is easier than "koe" so you go toward Zhangzhou for this word. On the other hand, Zhangzhou "sioN" is difficult to pronounce, so for this word. you choose the Quanzhou "siuN".

The reason for the uniformity is that migration from Fujian started earlier in the Jiayi-Tainan-Kaosiung area. So different accents have melted for longer time there. And Pindong and Taidong are populated with people originated from Kaohsiung.

CTA has become widespread all over Taiwan, replacing many Quanzhou-leaning accents. Amoy accent used to be considered  the standard in Taiwan in the past, because it's spoken in Taipei, and Scottish Presbyterian missionaries translated the Bible using this accent, and it had been the basis for Hokkien literacy in Taiwan. (Textbooks published in Japan mostly still use a Taipei-Amoy accent.) But it's now been replaced by CTA. The Hokkien textbooks that Taiwanese children use in schools now uses CTA. (They call it Tainan accent, which is inaccurate. For example, in Tainan accent, "good" is /hə/, instead of CTA "ho". ) The textbooks published within Taiwan for foreign learners also use CTA, much to the confusion of Japanese learners.

There are several possible reasons why CTA has become so prevalent. First, the influence of the media: Many Hokkien actors in Taiwan originated from koa-a-hi, which uses the Yilan accent, regardless of where the actor comes from. So they brought the Zhangzhou accent to TV screens. Second, Tainan has been a cultural center for Taiwan-independence-oriented people. Perhaps related to this, the vast majority of Hokkien newsreaders in Taiwan have Zhangzhou-leaning accents. (So much so that I find it easier to understand newscast from Amoy, China!) Third, because CTA is an accent which was born in Taiwan, it is not exactly the same as any accent found in China. This is quite unlike accents of northern Taiwan: For example, Taipei urban accent is almost the same as Amoy accent. So it appealed to the people who, for political reasons, wanted to dissociate themselves from mainland China. (It's the same logic as "Tongyong Pinyin"!) Finally, CTA could have spread with men who served in the military for the National Service. Perhaps because people came from all over Taiwan, and also perhaps because the ''southern-ness" of CTA appealed to the masculine identity of the military, it was used in the army and spread throughout Taiwan.

I have an anecdote that supports this last view. In my wife's family, her parents have a marked Tong'an accent. Womenfolk in her family have become Mandarin speakers, because back in their school days Hokkien was considered to be for bad girls, but retain a lot more Tong'an features than menfolk do. As for the male siblings, they have all gone CTA after completing the National Service!

Next time, I want to write about Hokkien spoken in Southeast Asia.

Cantonese as an identity marker among Malaysians residing in Taiwan

Thanks to my former student Goh Yi-yee, I've got those two  CNY TV commercials, one partly and the other entirely in Cantonese. The fact that Malay-owned companies choose to use Cantonese, not Hokkien or Mandarin, when trying to reach maximum Chinese-Malaysian audience shows how influential Cantonese is in Malaysia. Which is a bit strange come to think of it...

When I was in Malaysia, I hardly heard any Cantonese spoken except in Kuala Lumpur (KL) and Ipoh, where it is the lingua franca. So it was a mystery that almost all Chinese being heard on Malaysian TV and radio was Cantonese, when the biggest "dialect" group in Malaysia is actually Hokkien. But I was guessing that it must have been because the TV stations are in KL and many programs were imported from Hong Kong, so people had started thinking Cantonese was somehow cool.

Another big surprise, when I started having a lot of Chinese-educated Malaysians among my students here in Taiwan, was that Cantonese seemed to be an identity marker for them, regardless of whether they are ethnic Cantonese or not, or whether they come from Cantonese-speaking parts of Malaysia such as KL or Ipoh. In fact, even those from Penang, the heartland of Zhangzhou-accented Hokkien, East Malaysia where Cantonese people are almost non-existent, or southern peninsulr Malaysia, where Mandarin is much more prevalent than Cantonese because of the Singapore influence, were conversing with each other in Cantonese. And that was here in Taiwan, where practically nobody understands a word of Cantonese, perhaps with the only exception of "hou sai lei"!

Here are the results of my speculation after having lengthy conversations with my former and current Malaysian students.

Possible reason one: Identity marker
Like I said, most Taiwanese people don't have a clue when they hear Cantonese. But they do understand Mandarin spoken among Malaysians. So Cantonese can function as a fraternity language among Malaysians. That is to say, it makes them feel they are a part of the Malaysian community here. They're making themselves different from the Taiwanese who surround them. But why not other dialects? Why not Malay?

Possible reason two: Status of Cantonese in Malaysia itself
As I wrote at the beginning, Cantonese is considered something of a cool language in Malaysia, compared with other codes (=languages/dialects). Like I said in the last blog post, there is a domain segregation between Mandarin and Cantonese in central peninsular Malaysia. Mandarin is for "formal" occasions. Cantonese is for chit-chat among friends. This is exemplified in Malaysian FM stations. There, news reports on the hour are in Mandarin, and then it suddenly switches to Cantonese when the DJ's informal talk starts. Its informality makes it more suitable to be a fraternity code.

Possible reason three: The only non-Mandarin lingua franca
So Mandarin is out. Firstly because too many Taiwanese understand it! And secondly because it's too formal to be fraternal. Then, why not other "dialects", such as Hakka or even Teochew? (Hokkien is out, because Taiwanese understand it.) Well, excluding the important exceptions of Penang and Singapore where Hokkien is the lingua franca, can you think of anywhere in Malaysia where Chinese people from all ethno-linguistic subgroups speak with each other in a dialect? Nope, except Cantonese! Can non-Hakka people in some parts of Selangor or Kota Kinabalu speak Hakka? Can Hokkien people in Johor Baru speak Teochew and Foochow? Hardly, right? Cantonese is the only non-Mandarin "dialect" that is robust enough to be a lingua franca. (As for the reasons for its robustness, I've already written in another blog post. It's to do with British Hong Kong government's "clandestine" language policy.)

Possible reason four: Poor command of Malay
It's hard for non-Malaysians to believe, but it's true that there are lots of Malaysians who can't speak much Malay. Those who come to Taiwan to study are mostly from independent Chinese schools, so they've hardly had any chance to use Malay is all their lives. The Malay language is associated with ethnic Malays, who make up about the half of the total Malaysian population. And it's an open secret that many non-Malay Malaysians hold feelings ranging from ambivalent to sheer grudge towards Malays, whom many consider as receiving "undeserved" benefits. So the situation is totally different from those of Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines. There, many Chinese people are monolingual in the national languages of the respective countries. On the other hand in Malaysia, Malay cannot be an identity marker for Chinese Malaysians living in Taiwan, for the practical reason that many can't speak it well in the first place.

So its got to be Cantonese. Nei chi m chi a?

Mandarin, not Hokkien: The first vehicle of pan-Taiwan identity

Mandarin has, for the first time, united various ethnic groups in Taiwan and strengthened Taiwan identity. Ironically, this is precisely what the government’s promotion of the language  was meant to prevent.

A parallel situation can be found in Burma, where Burmese became the language that united various anti-government forces even though it was the language that the Burmese authority was promoting in order to assert its Burmese identity and to marginalize other ethnic groups. (Kirkpatrick, 2010)

Until the end of the Qing dynasty rule, various ethnic groups of Taiwan did not have any common language, although Hokkien functioned as a Lingua Franca in a limited sense. When members of different ethnic groups had to contact with each other, they used Hokkien, as it was the language of the predominant ethnic group. Many people, perhaps most people, did not need to come in contact with other ethnic groups, so they were monolingual in whatever their ethnic language was. As for smaller communities of Hakka or Austronesian people surrounded by the sea of Hokkiens, they quickly assimilated and became Hokkien-speaking. So much so that many descendants of such people, both Hakka and Pepo-aboroginal, now consider themselves as ethnic Hokkien. The reverse almost never occurred. I mean, for example, few Hokkien people living among Hakkas assimilated to Hakka culturally and linguistically.

Under the Japanese rule, the colonial authority progressively promoted the use of Japanese, first as a medium of instruction (MoI), and then even as a home language. Consequently, Japanese became the island-wide lingua franca, especially among the well-educated and elites. As the contacts among the common mass increased, Hokkien also increased its importance as the lingua franca. Needless to say, Mandarin had not yet been promoted during this period, so only some sojourners originating from northern China and very few others knew the language.

So this was the situation the KMT government found itself in, when it took over the island in 1945 and then moved the provisional capital of the nation to Taipei in 1949. It faced resistance from Japanese/Hokkien-speaking local elites, so it was important for them to spread the use of Mandarin as soon as possible. The rest is the story you are all familiar with: The high-handed measures to promote Mandarin and eradicate “dialects” with such potential penalties as “dog-tags” and fines.

Hokkien remained the language of anti-KMT resistance and pro-Taiwan-independence nationalism until the end of 80's or probably even early 90's. When I first arrived in Taiwan in the early 90's, things were pretty straightforward: Hokkien-speaking taxi driver was pro-DPP betal nut chewer; and Mandarin-speaking professor in a suit and tie was a Waishengren and therefore pro-KMT/NP/PFP. It was also extremely common to spot older people anywhere in town who spoke better Japanese than me!

But things have changed a bit since then. Twenty years on, the chairperson of the DPP is a Hakka woman who doesn’t even speak Hokkien fluently. The younger generation has an ever stronger Taiwan identity and anti-Chinese sentiments, while at the same time being largely monolingual in Mandarin. (Even their parents probably only have limited proficiency in Hokkien.) It is no longer possible to distinguish a Waishengren from Benshengren solely from the way they speak Mandarin, unlike when I first came to Taiwan two decades ago. Indeed, some even don’t know which ethnic group they belong to themselves, other than the nationalistic sentiment that they are Taiwanese. (Matsuo, 2006) Mandarin has become the language of the heart as well as the mind of the Taiwanese people.

Ironically, Mandarin has become the language that united the various ethnic groups of Taiwan and thus a vehicle of ever-growing Taiwan identity.

I just read in a Kirkpatrick’s book that this is actually nothing uncommon. In Burma as in many countries, ethnic minorities have found solidarity and united force against the chauvinistic authority in the language of the authority itself. Come to think of it, would the anti-Spanish independence movement in the Philippines have been possible, without its leaders from different regions being able to communicate with other in Spanish? Perhaps the same applies to many, many post-colonial societies. And in the countries that have already become monolingualized, it is commonsense that the rulers and the opposition debate with each other in the same national language, which is the only choice for most people in that country.

Kirkpatrick, A. (2010). English as a lingua franca in ASEAN: A multilingual model. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Matsuo, S. (2006). 台湾における言語意識と言語選択の実態. Taipei: 群學.

Why non-prevocalic /r/ and /æ/ are becoming more prevalent in ELF

I notice that more and more Europeans are starting to have rhotic accents. I also notice many of them use /æ/ for the BATH vowel. This is interesting because they are supposed to have been taught British pronunciation at school. Those two are notable features of American English. Not only I notice this among Europeans, even some Singaporeans and Malaysians are starting to manifest those features. Singaporean/Malaysian Englishes are traditionally non-rhotic, because they are British-based.

In sociolinguistics, many specialists hold that unmarked features prevail and marked ones eventually phased out when different dialects come in contact with each other. They also posit that regular features will win over irregular ones. Of course, this presupposes that all other things being equal.

So, it is understandable that why those two features mentioned above are prevailing. It makes more sense to pronounce the /r/ whenever there's an R in the spelling. Also, non-rhotic accents have complex rules on exceptions. This includes: the /r/ should be pronounced if the next word starts with a vowel; an /r/ should be inserted even if there is no R in the spelling, if a word ends with a vowel and the next word starts with another vowel, etc. It's too complicated for learners.  In the same way, using /æ/ both for TRAP and BATH vowel seems more straightforward, since both are spelled with the letter A.

There is even less reason to stick to the RP-type pronunciation, since almost half the people in the UK itself share those two features. For example, people in the north of England, Scotland and Ireland are mostly rhotic and have /æ/ for BATH.

If this is the case, why did non-rhotic and /ɑː/ came to be considered the prestige British pronunciation to be taught to foreigners, then? I think this is to do with prestige by dissociation. Groups set up linguistic rules that are difficult to master, unless you have spent a long time within this group. That's why in-group jargons are difficult for outsiders. In the same way, upper-class society in the southeast of England used those hard-to-master features as a "shibboleth" to distinguish themselves from the masses. Indeed, it's hard for an outsider to figure out why we should say pass with /ɑː/ and mass (Catholic liturgy) with /æ/!

But just because London happened to be the capital of the Empire, and people with power had such kind of accent, it was promoted as the standard, both within Britain and overseas. Later on, along with the social transformation, RP lost its prestige in Britain itself, but it was continued to be taught to foreigners because textbook writers and teachers needed an established standard.

The situation is somewhat similar to that of erhua rhoticization (兒化) in Beijing Mandarin. When to erhua and when not to erhua is quite arbitrary and difficult to learn unless you have grown up in Beijing. This is why people from Xi'an erhua practically everything, while in southern China, people omit erhua altogether.

By the way, the fact that English people are so conscious about the /ɑː/ - /æ/ issue proves that this difference does not affect intelligibility at all. All the more reason for us "foreigners" to adopt the one that is more regular!

In the international media, RP-type accent has become marked, too. So if  it's true that marked accents won't prevail, RP will likely not. Many foreigners and even Americans have positive attitude toward RP-like accents, because they associate them with imagined high-class British aristocracy and sexy men/women. Paradoxically, many sinister characters in Hollywood movies also tend to have a British accent. This shows exactly how "marked" RP has become in the American-dominated world of the media. It is used for a special effect, just because it is special. It is not plain and ordinary like the genetic American accent. So this means that few people will be putting on an RP-like accent if they are in serious or formal ELF situations, such as job interviews. On the other hand, those who can put on an RP-like accent may still be in demand for taping commercial messages that need to promote a posh image.

Is it always better for children to be taught in their "mother tongue"?

Under normal circumstances, yes. But it seems to me that the medium of instruction is not always the sole problem. There are other factors like school infrastructure, teaching materials and teacher training.

English-medium (or French, for that matter) is often blamed for poor achievements in many countries. But there are countries where the medium of instruction from Elementary 1 is not necessarily the L1 of the students, and yet have very high academic achievements. Singapore and Taiwan are good examples. Enough support existed for lower-achieving students in those countries, compared to their poorer counterparts.

Of course, the ideal is that everybody gets to study in their own language. But in societies where there are many languages, it is not easy to prepare teaching materials in all of them. As those countries often happen to be poorer ones, a lot of money that goes into developing materials in many smaller languages may actually reduce the money that can go to improving school facilities and teacher salaries.

In the meantime, students who come from richer families will always do better, regardless of what language they are taught in. They have the means to avail themselves of better support. So even if a country changes the medium into a local language, they might be disappointed to find that the economically privileged kids still do better all the same.

Is not promoting a language the best way to promote it? Examples from Hong Kong and Taiwan

I used to laugh at my mother who said in her blog posts almost everyday that she had spent the whole night writing a long post, and then it got deleted. Now the same thing has happened to me. Two lessons: First, you should not laugh at others, especially your own mother; Second, when you have written a post, publish it quickly. To do this, don't write posts that are so long that it needs to be reviewed before publishing.

Is not promoting a language the best way for the authorities to promote a language? I sometimes think it is. I'll show you two examples: Hong Kong and Taiwan.

The British authorities had a so-called laissez-faire approach toward languages in Hong Kong. But I have already written that this was a hidden way of promoting Cantonese, so that Hong Kong will have a different dominant language from mainland China. Although Cantonese-speaking people made up only half of the total population, it was possible to foresee that Cantonese would win out, given its influence in commercial and cultural spheres. In fact, Cantonese was so successful that it almost supplanted the local language of Hong Kong, Hakka, as well as other Chinese "dialects" originally spoken. Today, you could argue that Hong Kong is a pseudo-monolingual society in Cantonese. It is a symbol of Hong Kong identity, which is separate from that of mainland China. What a successful way of promoting Cantonese? And this was achieved by not promoting it.

Taiwan's example is somewhat reverse. Both the Japanese and KMT administration had very high-handed policy of trying to eradicate local languages and promoting Japanese and Mandarin respectively. They both did it by forcing those schoolchildren who transgressed the no-local-language policy to wear a dog tag that said something like "I am stupid". Intimidating local people succeeded in promoting the official language only superficially. Many Taiwanese people who grew up in that era, consciously or unconsciously, try to speak Mandarin with a very strong Taiwanese accent. Some even try to avoid the use of Mandarin altogether, sticking to Hokkien whenever they can. On the other hand, look at the younger generation who grew up after the democratic reform. The aggressive promotion of Mandarin was replaced by so-called "Mother Tongues" made a school subject. And yet, those people have now become native-speakers of Mandarin, fully comfortable with expressing their Taiwanese identity in this tongue that originated from Beijing! Recently, I often notice that some students even use the word "Taiwanese" to mean Mandarin, not Hokkien!

And what has happened to Hokkien, which is now "officially promoted" as a school subject? I'm sorry to say, but it seems that it is going the way of Irish in Ireland. Very soon, Taiwanese people will only be able to say some peculiar phrases and swear words in Hokkien, or hum some Hokkien tunes like "TiN-o'-o'" which they have learned at school, but not being able to convey any substantial message in Hokkien.

(But this will not mean the death of Hokkien; more than half of its speakers are outside of Taiwan; in China, Southeast Asia and Taiwanese communities in the U.S. and Japan. They will probably keep alive the language which will no longer be understood in Taiwan!)

Is a well-estabished community language an obstacle to second language learning?

I have heard some people say that the people in Japan, Korea and Taiwan are not as good in English as those in Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, etc. because the national languages of the former are too well-established and don't allow room for English. It's obvious this theory doesn't stand. What about Sweden, the Netherlands, etc. where the "national" languages are well-established and standardized, but people are phenomenal in English? What about Thailand? I think Thai people are as proud of their wonderful language as the Taiwanese are about Mandarin, and as insistent in using it to communicate with any foreigner who even has a tiniest bit knowledge of it, and yet do quite well in English? Conversely, what about Malaysia, which had once succeeded in codifying its national languages and even made it the sole medium of instruction in tertiary education in the 1980s, but then turned back to English afterwards?

But it is useful to know that for the majorities of people around the world, their "mother tongue" is not the same as the one that's taught in schools. Cases like Japan and Korea, where most people speak the same language at home and school and work and everywhere else, are really rare. It is a highly artificial situation, influenced by the nation-state ideology originated from Europe, i.e. France. It took many years and much effort on the part of the government of Japan, for example, to eliminate all "dialects" to arrive at the perceived "monolingual" state of today. In many countries, there are many languages that are spoken but not standardized enough to be used as a medium of instruction at school. It is expensive to develop those languages and compile textbooks in them. And most of those countries are poor. So the teaching has to be continued in their former colonial language, usually English, French or Portuguese, because materials are more readily available. (The situation in most former Spanish colonies is a bit different, because Spanish has already become the native language of the majority of people.) This creates many problems, of course. One is that it unfairly advantages rich people in urban areas, who have more access to English. (Or French for that matter.) And studies overwhelmingly show that people learn better when they are taught in the language they speak at home, or the one that's widely spoken in the community.

That leaves us with the discussion of the countries that have chosen one of the local languages as the national language. These countries can be classified into two types, I think. The type one are those which have already successfully developed and propagated that language, so much so that other languages originally used are dying out. The other are those which have taken more laissez-faire approach. Thailand is one example of the former. The government has standardized the language and developed enough vocabulary, so almost everything can be done in midland Thai. Many non-Thai speaking peoples first became bilingual in their own language and Thai, and then the young generation grew up knowing only Thai. Politically, Thai was propagated as the symbol national unity. So people started to feel very proud about this language. Minority languages became more marginalized, or even died out.

An example of the latter is the Philippines. Even though the constitution says English and Filipino are official languages, and bilingual elementary education in a local language and Filipino are propagated, it's largely up to each individual to choose which language to do what. As a result, a child from a upper middle-class Manila family may grow up speaking English or "Taglish" as his home, school and community language, all at the same time. On the other hand, another child from a remote area might speak his mother tongue at home, a regional lingua franca like Cebuano to be his community language, Filipino and English as his school languages. Obviously, under normal circumstances, it is so much harder for the second child to do well at school. Nowadays, because of the influence of the electronic media, Tagalog seems to be the winner in this laissez-faire competition. Even people from very remote places can now speak at least some Tagalog. Overseas Filipino Workers who have different first languages also seem to use Tagalog as the lingua franca once away from home.

Now which one is Taiwan, anyway? I think Taiwan was on the way to Type 1, then turned Type 2, but it's too late. During the authoritarian era, the government tried to eliminate "dialects" and promote Mandarin. The high-handed method of giving "dog tags" for those who didn't conform to this rule is notorious. When Taiwan was democratized, it moved on to a more laissez-faire style, with a renaissance of non-Mandarin languages, especially Hokkien and Hakka. But I think it's a bit too late. Very few of my students can converse fluently in Hokkien. Quite a few of them don't understand any at all, even if they are ethnically Hokkien. It's paradoxical, because those are the guys who went to elementary schools when "Mother Tongue" was already a compulsory subject. Hokkien might go down the way of the Irish language in Ireland. Significant things can be said only in English there.

I want to talk more about medium of instruction issue. I hope I'll get to doing it soon.

Is there still any point in teaching RP?

Some years back, I was attending a conference in Taiwan, listening to a senior Taiwanese scholar present on the Received Pronunciation (RP). It is roughly the same as "BBC accent" or "posh Southeastern English accent". The presenter said only 1% of the British population spoke with such accent. And yet he recommended it be taught to learners in Taiwan. So, during the Q&A session, I asked: If there are so few people using it, why should we teach it? Then my boss sitting next to me covertly reminded me that it was impolite to ask questions to senior presenters during Q&A sessions, so I backed off.

And to answer this question now myself, I think there is still a value in exposing learners to the RP, even though it's a dying (?) accent in England.

Even though RP has long lost its prestige in England, it is still widely taught to "foreigners", especially in Europe. So you are likely to come across a second-language speaker of English with an RP-inspired accent. In Hong Kong, Singapore, India and other Anglophone countries in Asia (with the exception of the Philippines), the teaching model at schools still derive from the RP. But many Taiwanese learners, especially those at lower proficiency levels, are quite unfamiliar with anything other than the idealized General American pronunciation. So they find it rather hard to understand second-language speakers who have learned British English back in their home countries.

Despite the fact that its speakers are considered "affected" and "cold" within the UK itself, the RP is a well-documented accent. There are many dictionaries and ESL textbooks that use this pronunciation, including authoritative ones like Daniel Jones's English Pronouncing Dictionary. Those are handy for teachers when they are not sure about pronunciation. On the other hand, most American dictionaries don't prescribe any one particular pronunciation. The phonetic symbols they use are designed to allow room for variation. Although language is and always will be varied (and that's the beauty of it), but that's not necessarily a comfortable situation for teachers looking for something "definitive". (Especially so for "non-native" teachers, who feel insecure for their perceived lack the authoritativeness as an authentic source of English.)

Plus, the RP has retained its prestige, in out of all places, America. I've seen many TV programs, commercials and movies where (fake) posh British accent is used for some supposedly positive effect. Even though very few people in Britain actually speak like that, Americans seem to associate it with some kind of fancy/fanciful European stuff. So if you are thinking of going to America, having an RP sort of accent might help. I must add though, that this might not apply if you are not European. My experience is that some Americans are not as favorable to non-whites with a British-derived accent. Maybe they notice you look like a foreigner and have an "unusual" accent, so they just conclude that you have a "foreign" accent. (Across the border in Canada, though, I notice that some people expect "foreigners" to be taught British English, even if their own variety is so much closer to that of the US.)

But in the context of Taiwan, all I'm saying is we should expose learners more to different accents including the RP, which is quite useful because it's taught to international learners. I'm not saying that they should all try to sound like the Queen with an exaggerated "aristocratic" intonation. Don't do this all the more if you are going to the UK. There, people with regional working class or black accents are considered cool nowadays. I'm saying that you will find it becomes easier for you to understand people from many different countries speaking English, once you are familiar with what they are being taught at school: the RP.

Will someone's "mother tongue" always be the language he's best at?

Not so, perhaps for the majority of people in the world. "Shifting L1" is a natural and common phenomenon. It means that your primary language shifts from one to another over time. For example, my wife was monolingual in Taiwanese Hokkien before she entered kindergarten. Her parents only spoke Taiwanese Hokkien at home. But after she started schooling, she became proficient in Mandarin. It was back then when the use of so-called "dialects" were discouraged in schools. She always chatted with her friends in Mandarin. So, soon, Mandarin became her dominant language. Now, although she can understand Taiwanese Hokkien with no difficulty, she's not very confident in it either; except for some limited purposes, such as chatting with elder members of the clan, or shopping in traditional markets.

The majority of people in the world live in multilingual societies. In such societies, the language you speak at home may be different from the dominant language of the particular location they live in, which may again be different from the official language or national lingua franca. For example, Juan, a Filipino adult, comes from an Ilonggo family. His parents spoke Ilonggo at home when he was a young child, so you may say that his "mother tongue" is Ilonggo, which is a regional lingua franca in some provinces in the central Philippines. However, his family lived in Manila, so none of his classmates spoke Ilonggo. They spoke "Taglish" (A mixture of English and Tagalog, the vernacular of middle-class manilenos). Soon, Taglish became his dominant language. But as the school he went to was a prestigious private school where people mostly spoke English only, so by the time he graduated from college, English became his dominant language. He can still use Tagalog to conduct casual conversations, but he can't really talk about all topics in straight Tagalog. Moreover, he has forgotten most of his Ilonggo, except some basic expressions. So does it still make sense to say that his first language is Ilonggo? And does it make sense to say that he's a non-native speaker of English, when it is the language he is most proficient in, even though he obviously does not sound like an American when he speaks it (in fact, he has a quite strong Philippine accent)?