台湾語の呼称をめぐる論争

日本語という名前は良くないから、「やまと語」にしろ、「ジャパン語」にしろ、という人は多くないでしょう。でも台湾では、台湾語を何と呼ぶかについて、未解決の論争があります。

一般的に、一番良く聞かれるのは、「台語」です。運動家たちの間でも、これを支持する人が多いです。日本では、これを和訳して「台湾語」と言っているわけです。しかし、これを公式の呼称にするのには、主に客家人たちから根強い反対があります。人口70％を占める泉州・漳州系台湾人だけが、「台湾のことば」を独占することに異議があるからです。

国民党系がよく使うのは「閩南語」です。中国福建の南部地域との関連を強調できるからです。ただ、福建南部では他の言語もいろいろ話されているし、広東省の潮州語も同系統なので、正確性に欠ける、という意見があります。確かに、厦門語や台湾語だけを閩南語と呼べば、この地域の他の言語の使用者は不満でしょう。また「閩」というのは、北方漢民族から見たこの地域の住民に対する蔑称なので、使うべきではないという人もいます。

ちなみに東南アジアでは、イギリス人宣教師の伝統に従い、この言語を「福建語」と呼んでいますが、同じ福建でも閩東語（福州語）や閩北語は、全く通じない別の言語ですので、上記の問題が更に深刻なことになります。なお、台湾人の間では、東南アジアの「福建語」と、言語的に90％以上共通である自分たちのことばが同じである、という認識がそもそも薄いです。これは別のトピックですね。

民進党政権が妥協策としてよく使ったのが「台湾閩南語」という呼び方です。いろいろある閩南語のなかの、台湾で使われているもの、という意味で私もこれが妥当だと思いますが、台湾語運動家から根強い反対があります。言語というより政治的理由で、とにかく中国との関係を切りたいということでしょう。政府の「台湾閩南語検定」に対抗して、「台語検定」を立ち上げてしまった団体さえあります。（ちなみに、この人たちは、華語からの借用語を激しく糾弾するくせに、日本語からの借用語にはなぜかとても寛容です。）

最近では、「中国」語を避けるために「台湾華語」にしたし、「台湾客家語」もあるので、それに合わせて「台湾台語」にすることが正式に決まりました。しかし、この訳わからない呼称が定着する可能性は低いでしょう。

スペインでは、カタロニア語とかガリシア語とか伝統ある言語がいっぱいあるのに、王室がある場所で話されているということでカスティーリャ語だけを「スペイン語」と言っています。たった70%ぐらいの台湾人のエスニック言語であるこのことばが、「台湾語」と呼ばれる無茶を許容していく方向しかないのではないでしょうか？「批判的」言語学系のかたは不満でしょうが、多数派の言語がリングア・フランカとして機能し、少数言語話者がそれにシフトしていくことは世界でよくあることです。（敢えてそれに逆らったインドネシア語などもありますが、成功例は多くありません。）日本時代以前でも、台湾西部の平地では、異なる言語のコミュニティ同士では台湾語が使われていた形跡があります。平埔族の母語が台湾語になっている所以です。そういう意味で、台湾各地で泉州系と漳州系が混ざって成立したこの言語を、単に「台語」（英訳：Taiwanese Hokkien）とするのが得策なのではないでしょうか？

Written Taiwanese in movie subtitles 映画字幕の台湾語

Groundbreaking! Written Taiwanese, in a mixture of Chinese characters and romanized alphabet, as currently promoted by the government, accompanied solely by English, with no Mandarin in sight. In a children’s film at the National Taiwan museum. 国立台湾博物館で今日撮りました。画期的です。子供向けの映画で、教育部が推進している漢字ローマ字混じりの台湾語と英語のみの字幕。北京語は全くありません。

Parent instinct vs. government policy 親の直感 vs. 政府の政策

下に、Googleが和訳したものに若干修正を加えて貼り付けます。

The other day, I overheard a group of young children playing and talking to each other in Taiwanese Hokkien (hereafter Taiwanese). This is very rare in Taipei City nowadays. Besides them a group of young mothers were talking to each other in Taiwanese. This is even rarer. A few moments before that, I had witnessed a young Taiwanese mother talking to her young child in Taiwan-accented English, and the child answering back in an impeccable American accent. This is increasingly not rare. Parent instinct for prestige in languages is stronger than government language policies.

The fact that the young mothers were chatting in Taiwanese, which is not a common thing to do at all in Taipei, shows that they have a strong language ideology, and made extra effort to ensure their children also spoke in Taiwanese. They themselves must have grown up speaking Mandarin as their primary language. But their ideology was strong enough to compel them to want to pass on Taiwanese to the next generation. This is quite rare. The children will likely become fluent speakers of Taiwanese, but as they grow up, Mandarin is likely to become their main language for socialization, since you don't get much socialization in Taiwanese in Taipei, especially among that age group. All this is in spite of the government spending huge amount of money and effort to promote Taiwanese.

On the other hand, most parents naturally choose whatever language they think is more advantageous for their children. This is why it's more and more common to see Taiwanese families picking up English as their home language. This trend would continue, even if the government was discouraging this practice. All the more, since the government actually isn't discouraging it. Parents' instinct for a prestigious language is normally stronger than government policies. 

先日、台湾の泉漳語（以下、台湾語）で遊んだり話したりしている幼い子供たちのグループを耳にしました。これは、今日の台北市では非常にまれです。それらに加えて、若い母親のグループが台湾語で互いに話していました。これはさらにまれです。その少し前に、台湾の若い母親が台湾訛りの英語で幼い子供と話しているのを目撃しました。子供は非の打ちどころのないアメリカ訛りで返事をしました。これはますます珍しいことではありません。言語における名声に対する親の本能は、政府の言語政策よりも強力です。

若い母親が台湾語でおしゃべりをしているという事実は、台北ではまったく一般的ではありませんが、彼らが強い言語イデオロギーを持っていることを示しており、子供たちも台湾語で話せるように特別な努力をしました。彼ら自身が彼らの第一言語として北京語を話すように成長したに違いありません。しかし、彼らのイデオロギーは、台湾語を次世代に引き継ぐことを強いるほど強力でした。これは非常にまれです。子供たちは台湾語を流暢に話すようになるでしょうが、彼らが成長するにつれて、特にその年齢層の間で、台北では台湾語では社交があまりないので、北京語が社交の主要言語になる可能性があります。これはすべて、政府が台湾語を促進するために莫大な金額と努力を費やしているにもかかわらずです。

一方、ほとんどの親は、子供にとってより有利であると考える言語を自然に選択します。これが、台湾の家族が母国語として英語を採用するのを見ることがますます一般的になっている理由です。たとえ政府がこの慣行を思いとどまらせていたとしても、この傾向は続くでしょう。政府は実際にそれを思いとどまらせていないので、なおさらです。一流の言語に対する親の本能は、通常、政府の政策よりも強力です。

台湾語の第一優勢腔とイギリス英語の並行性

This post is in Japanese. If you are reading this in any other language than Japanese, it may have been machine translated automatically and may be inaccurate. 

日本や台湾、韓国におけるイギリス英語は、台湾における台湾語第二優勢腔と並行しています（状況が似ています）。

歴史的背景から、第二次世界大戦後の日本や台湾、韓国の学校教育では、アメリカ英語が標準となっており、特に台湾と韓国では、イギリス英語の綴や発音は誤りとして減点の対象になります。

ところが、上記以外のアジア諸国では、学校教育で標準とされているのはイギリス英語であり、辞書や参考書も、もっぱらイギリス英語を正しいものとしています。グローバル化によって、東アジア３国でも、アメリカ・フィリピン以外のイギリス英語を標準とするアジア諸国との交流が増えたし、南アフリカやニュージランド出身の先生も少なくないので、イギリス英語も、それが通用している国から来た人が使っている場合は、なんとか許容されることが多くなってきました。特に、日本ではイギリス英語への許容度は割と高いようです。

一方、台湾語で、中華民国教育部が辞書や文法書、小学校教科書などで正書法としているのは、高雄、屏東、台東などで、泉州訛りと漳州訛りが混合し、どちらかというと漳州訛りに近い「台湾第一優勢腔（俗称南部訛り）」です。これは、伝統的には歌仔戯で使用され、今では北京語を母語とする若いテレビのアナウンサーが、台湾語で放送する前に訓練を受ける変種です。今、台湾で外国人が台湾語を学ぼうとすると、この第一優勢腔が教えられるのが普通だと思います。火鶏をhóe-keと、生をseⁿと発音する変種です。（なお、日本では、戦前からの台湾語研究の積み重ねにより、後述する第二優勢腔を採用する教材が多いようです。）

もう一つの第二優勢腔は、俗に「台北腔」とも呼ばれ、台北市中心部の旧市街のもともとの変種です。泉漳混合の中でもどちらかというと泉州寄りで、中国のアモイ市の変種とほぼ同じです。火鶏をhé-koeと、生をsiⁿと発音します。市街地の閩南人の混ざり方の比率がアモイと似ているのが一つ、そして英国人宣教師による長老教会の聖書がアモイ語を採用しており、日本時代からエリート層がアモイに留学することが多かったのももう一つの理由だと思います。

さて、イギリス英語と第二優勢腔の共通点です。まずひとつは、第二優勢腔は現在の台湾ではマイナーな変種だということです。教育部の辞書などは、一応両方の発音が出ていますが、教材の作成など、どちらかを選ばなければならないときは、必ず第一優勢腔が採用されます。外国人の台湾語にもこれを期待するようで、私は時々台湾人に「あなたの台湾語は台北訛りになってしまっている」と言われます。（もともと台北訛りであるにも関わらず。）

もう一つ似ているのが、アメリカも台湾南部も、広範囲で同じ変種（General Americanと第一優勢腔）が話されているのに対し、イギリスも台湾北部も、ちょっと移動すると全く異なる変種が話されているという点です。イギリスに方言がとても多いのは有名ですが、同じ台北盆地でも、市街地の北西のほうは同安訛り、士林の旧市街は漳州訛り、木柵のほうは安渓訛りなどと、狭い範囲でいろいろな訛りがあります。高雄から屏東、台東までほとんど訛りが変わらないのと対象的ですね。

台湾独立に傾いている思想からすると、なるべく中国とは遠い台湾独特の発音を標準として採用したいという思惑があるだろうし、またアメリカ英語のGeneral Americanのように、広い地理的範囲で平均化（コイネ化）して、癖のある発音がなくなっている変種が、標準化するには適している、という事情もあるようです。

私が今滞在している台北市で、ホテルの部屋を修繕している大工さんが、自分の家族と私語をするときは第二優勢腔だったのに、客と話をするときは突然第一優勢腔にスイッチしました。また、テレビの番組で、かなり強い泉州訛りがあるはずの鹿港の人でも、全国ネットにインタビューされると第一優勢腔にスイッチしています。これは完全に無意識だと思います。日本人が目上の人の前に出れば自然に敬語が出るのと同じです。すでに台湾人の意識の中に、「公共の場で台湾語を話す場合は第一優勢腔」という考えが、無意識にインプットされているのかもしれません。

 

台湾語は復興できるか？難しいと思える5つの理由

 ここでは復興すべきか否か、ではなく、できるかどうか、を語ります。

言語が単なる学校の科目の一つになり、スピーチコンテストや民謡などで使われるが、家庭内の第一言語ではなくなることをフォークロア化と言います。一見、文化として尊重されているようですが、言語の活力は回復の見込みがないほど削がれています。シニカルな見方をすれば、中央の主要言語使用者側は、もう復興の可能性がなさそうだから、教育や文化活動などに予算を割いてプロモートしても大丈夫だ、と思っていることになります。例を挙げるとフランスのブルトン語や、日本のアイヌ語などです。記念館を建てて歌や踊りや昔話を披露したり、バスの駅名アナウンスを〇〇語にしたり、人気アニメの〇〇語吹替版をYouTubeにアップしたところで、もう生活言語として復興の見込みはありません。台湾語がそうなる、と言うと「エー」と言われそうですが、そうなると思います。「国民党政権の迫害で台湾語は廃れた」という台湾人は多いですが、実は、1991年に小学校で台湾語が教えられるようになって以来30年の間、台湾語の衰退は加速しています。台湾語復興の可能性はあるのか。残念ながら、私は否定的です。その理由は：

1. 強力なイデオロギーを持っている人しか、保存のために動いていない。
2. その強力なイデオロギー故、学者同士でコンセンサスが成立しない。
3. 復興の為に必要な、一種類の権威ある方言を選んで標準化し、教育やメディアを通してそれを普及させるというやり方自体が、彼らが長年反対・抵抗してきたもので、自己矛盾している。しかも民主的で価値観が多様化した台湾では実行不能。
4. 台湾では、各エスニックグループに公平な共通言語としての北京語の価値が存在する。
5. 台湾語と台湾アイデンティティが乖離している。

理由その1

イディッシュ語復興に尽力したユダヤ系社会言語学者Fishmanは、言語復興には強力なイデオロギーが前提だ、と言いました。相手が誰であれ台湾語で押し通し、自分にとっても不便なのに子供と台湾語だけで話すようにしている；そういう人は、とても強いイデオロギーを持っている人で、少数派でしょう。台湾はは優しい人が多いので、相手に不便を強いてまで自分のイデオロギーを優先させるラジカルな人はあまりいません。

常識的な親は実用性を優先しますが、実用性で決めるなら北京語を取るに決まってます。実際、台湾語よりむしろ英語のほうが大事だと考える親が圧倒的に多いことが、度々の調査でわかっています。民主化以降台湾語が学校の科目になり、歌や昔話が教えられていることに満足しているので、家庭では自分の子供と北京語で話す。そういう人が普通ではないでしょうか？その結果は、台湾語ができない、新しい世代の台湾人です。

理由その2

台湾語が普及して、「実用性がある」言語にならない原因の一つが、学校で教えられているローマ字表記法が何度も変わったことです。（ただでさえ、台湾の人々は漢字に価値を感じているので、ローマ字を軽視する傾向があります。）上記の強いイデオロギーを持った学者たち一人ひとりが、自分が長年かけて整理した表記法に強いこだわりを持っているので、お互いに妥協して一つの標準語法を決め、全国に普及しよう、ということが実現しません。例えば、台北の中華民国教育部が「台湾閩南語検定」というのをやっているのに、台南の成功大学はそれに対抗して、独自に「台語検定」をやっているという有様です。こうした背景から、外国人宣教師が教育を通して普及を図り、多くの辞書や出版物の蓄積のある「教会ローマ字（白話字）」は採用されず、却って誰にとっても学び直しが必要な使いにくいローマ字が公式に採用されているのが現状です。

ところで、ここまで無批判に「台湾語」と書いてきましたが、言語の呼称そのものに、非常に激しい論争があります。「福建語」はさておき、「台湾閩南語」、「台語」、「ホーロー語」、「ホクロー語」、そのいずれに対しても、様々なイデオロギーから目くじらを立てて怒る専門家がいるはずです。それだけに、私はここではあえて俗称の「台湾語」、「北京語」を使っています。

理由その3

次の問題が、立場の自己矛盾です。台湾語を正式な場合を含め、生活のいろいろな分野で使用される言語として普及させるには、標準化が必要です。つまり、数ある台湾語の方言の中から権威ある誰かが一種類を選び、その方言で辞書、文法書、ローマ字などを作り、学校やメディアで使用させ、それ以外の変種を排除することです。言い換えると、総督府が日本語を、国民党が北京語を台湾で普及させるために行った高圧的な手段です。ところがこれこそが、台湾語復興を叫ぶ台湾ナショナリストや民主化運動などが嫌い、抵抗してきたやり方です。

そもそも、民主化して久しく価値観が多様化した今の台湾では、過去の国民党政権や、もしくはシンガポールで福建語や広東語などを排除し英語と北京語を普及させたような権威主義的なやり方は、まず現実的じゃないでしょう。

或いは、「日本語や北京語は外来言語だから押し付けは悪だが、台湾語は本土言語だから善」と彼らは主張するかもしれません。しかし、それを言うなら台湾語も福建から来た外来言語です。「すでに台湾本土で変容したから外来言語ではない」と論じるなら、北京語（台湾華語）も本土言語、ということになり、議論が堂々巡りです。例えればインドやナイジェリア、フィリピンなどにおける英語をめぐる論争に似ていますね。「台湾のナショナリズムは善だが、中華ナショナリズムは悪」となってくると、もうほとんど人種差別の世界です。

理由その4

次に、見落とされがちなのが、本土言語の衰退と反比例する北京語の普及の原因のもうひとつは、北京語に何か台湾の人々にとって有益な面があったからです。台湾全土で問題なく通じるリンガ・フランカの登場は、北京語が初めてです。台湾語は、閩南系以外から見れば他人の言語だし、かつて教育を受けた台湾人の共通語だった日本語は、シナ・チベット系言語からかけ離れています。昔と違って人々の移動往来や異族通婚が多い現代台湾は、共通語がなかったら機能しないでしょう。「歴史上の事故」から、その言語は北京語、しかもすでに台湾現地化した北京語だったわけです。そのような役割を台湾語に負わせようとすれば、人口の30％以上を占める非閩南系から抗議が出るでしょう。この点もフィリピンやインドの英語と似ています。

理由その5

上で書いたように、家庭が台湾語を選んでいないわけですが、各種調査によると、人々はこれを好意的に受け止めていません。祖父母と孫が共通の言語を持たないことは台湾では珍しくありませんが、誰もこれを良いことだとは思っていないでしょう。「台湾語で台湾アイデンティティを伝承することは理想ではあるが、実際には北京語や英語のほうが有用なので、仕方がないが後者を優先している。」これが多くの台湾人の本音かもしれません。ならば、Fishmanが提唱したように、台湾アイデンティティをもっと鼓吹すればいい、ということになり、現に民進党政権もそれを目指しているのでしょう。ただ、これがなかなか効かなくなってくる要因があります。それは、台湾アイデンティティと台湾語の乖離の現象です。民進党の指導者蔡英文総統がほとんどの公式発言を北京語で行っているように、台湾化した北京語は、すでに今日的台湾人の文化や思想を十分に表現しうる媒体になっています。しかも、人口7割以下を占める多数派・閩南系だけのものではありません。

ここまで書くと、今後は台湾語よりも、台湾独特の北京語が台湾の主要言語であり続けることが間違いないと感じますね。しかも過去の権威主義的言語政策の「後遺症」で、標準化・文字化が完成しています。東京と同じように、台北の本屋に入れば、人々が街で話しているのと同じ言語で書かれた本がわんさか並んでいます。これは、アジアではとても稀有な状況です。マニラやクアラルンプールの本屋に入ったら、売っているのはほとんど現地語ではなく英語か中国語の本です。

ただ、フォークロア化した行事やテレビ番組、教育活動は続くでしょう。また、北京語ベースの発話の中に、ある効果を期待して台湾語の語彙を散りばめる、ということはよく行われているし、今後も続くでしょう。

ところで、北京語使用の弊害も認識されています。もし、人々の主要言語が、巨大な隣国、しかも一党独裁で言論の自由がなく、なおかつ圧倒的な文化的コンテンツ発信国が使用しているのと同じ言語だったら、どうなるでしょうか？そのリスクを回避すべく、現在民進党政権により行われている英語化政策（バイリンガル国家2030政策）の目的は、英語で以て北京語を交換することを含む、とも考えられます。これについては、また別に書くことにします。

この記事の英語版: https://peterkobayashi.blogspot.com/2022/04/can-taiwanese-be-revived-five-reasons.html

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

Tâi-gí ah-sī Tâi-gú?

Bé-á Góa iáu-sī bô bóe che, put-chí sī in-ūi Góa bōe chhēng T-shirt, chú-iàu sī in-ūi bô siá "Tâi-gú."

Prof. Higgins of Hokkien

Professor Higgins of Hokkien

A great sociolinguist and dialectologist of Taiwan

He started his Ph.D. when he was 50 years old!

He was able to tell the host's Hokkien was learned, not acquired 😆

I was inspired by Prof. Ang Uijin's work back in the late 90s when I was trying to learn Hokkien.

What LPP can teach us about BN30

I recently attended a conference here in Taipei where many discussions were over the Bilingual Nation 2030 (BN30) policy of Taiwan. Prior to attending the conference, I happened to have re-read books about Language Policy and Planning (LPP). This was helpful for coming up with some personal observations about the policy. Here are the three takeaways from the conference, informed by findings in LPP studies.  

Number one: Two languages can never coexist stably in the same domain in the same society. Therefore, trying to teach content knowledge in two languages at the same time may end up to be a futile effort unless done very skillfully. The only way for multiple languages to coexist in one society is for those languages to be used in different domains. Within the context of elementary and secondary education in Taiwan, it seems that the main vehicle for conveying content knowledge will be Mandarin; while English will be used for classroom interactions. 

Number two: It is very difficult to make people change their linguistic behavior, unless using very coercive means. Actually, Taiwan already is a very rare example of success. Under the high-handed one-party rule by the KMT, Mandarin successfully supplanted Hokkien (a.k.a Taiwanese), Japanese, and other indigenous languages in Taiwan because there was a large-scale stigmatization campaign of the latter by the government. As the democratization advanced, millions of dollars and massive effort went into revitalizing Hokkien, Hakka and aboriginal languages, but the attrition of those languages has been unstoppable. On the other hand, people tend to voluntarily shift towards the language with higher prestige that promises economic gain and ability to communicate with the larger society. This is why many Hakkas abandoned their language in favor of Hokkien, and later, Mandarin. What the KMT government succeeded in doing was artificially creating a situation where Mandarin became the prestige language. So, if English proves to be a language with real prestige and utility, people will jump at it without any coercion. (This may especially be the case, after hearing in the conference of a finding that very small percentage of Taiwanese people were worried that adopting English would threaten their cultural identity.)

Number three: Immersion approach may work best in changing the linguistic behavior of the next generation. In direct contradiction to the mainstream voice in the profession which claims using the learner's L1 to scaffold their L2 learning is the most efficient method, L2-only immersion programs are known to produce good results, where children acquired high proficiency in L2 while maintaining L1. However, it must be noted that many of these immersion success stories originate from locations where children get a lot of exposure to both languages outside classroom. It also presupposes that there is a sufficient number of teachers highly proficient in L2. 

Based on the above points, here are some observations about the prospects of BN30. If the goal of the policy is to shift the medium of instruction (MoI) from Mandarin to English, the chance of success does not seem very high under the current approach. (Indeed, the policy statement of the Taiwanese government states that one of the main goals of the policy is to increase the number of students who are capable to attending English as a medium of instruction (EMI) courses in universities.) It  may succeed, though, in replacing Mandarin with English as the language of classroom interaction between teachers and students, while the medium for imparting content knowledge remains Mandarin. This will create a situation hitherto non-existent in Taiwan, namely, English being used as a language for domestic communication, albeit in limited domains. It may have an indirect effect of creating a generation more predisposed to learning English further, so as to enter EMI programs in higher education. In any case, it is essential for the government to clarify the goals of BN30 in more concrete terms, and adopt measures that are more finely tuned to accomplish them. 

Imminent death of Taiwanese Hokkien?

Only 7.4% of kids in Taiwan speak Taiwanese. This is the generation that grew up decades after the government started spending a lot of money to promote non-Mandarin languages, including for Taiwanese as a subject in elementary education. Why does Taiwanese keep receding while Taiwan identity continues to spread? Why are parents with strong Taiwan identity choosing to raise their kids in the language of Beijing? There has to be a better explanation than that the KMT’s language policy, which ended ages ago, was extremely successful. #imminentdeathoftaiwanesehttps://www.thenewslens.com/article/157030

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

台湾語と福建語

東南アジアの人が「福建語」と呼んでいるのは、福建省南部の泉州地区と漳州地区の言葉がいろいろに混ざったものです。フィリピンは泉州寄りで、ペナンは漳州寄りです。

 

福建省南部の港町アモイはイギリスの拠点だったので、周辺から人がたくさん集まって、この二つの地域の言葉が（割と泉州寄りに）混ざりました。キリスト教の宣教師は聖書をこのアモイ語に訳したり、辞書を作ったりしたので、ある程度標準化しました。福建省の中では少数派の言語なのに、Hokkienといえばこの言語を指すようになったのは、イギリス人のおかげです。

 

台湾北部の台北盆地やシンガポールは、アモイと泉漳両語の混ざり方が似ていた（どちらかというと泉州寄り）上に、イギリスの宣教師が訳した聖書も入ったので、アモイ語とほとんど同じ言葉をしゃべるようになりました。日本人は台湾を領有したときに台北を拠点にしたので、台湾語の辞書や教科書はこのアモイ語そっくりな台北の言葉になりました。今でも日本で売っている台湾語の教科書は、ほとんど台北よりの単語や発音です。

 

台湾では、地域によって、泉州寄りの言葉を喋っているところ（主に西部の海沿い）と漳州寄りのところ（西部内陸部と宜蘭）があります。南部の台南や高雄は、この台湾中の言葉が、割と漳州寄りに混ざって、新しい台湾語が発展しました。これが台湾の教科書やマスコミで使われている台湾語で、民主化時代以降、兵役や政治運動を通して男性を中心に広がりました。

 

東南アジアと台湾の福建語の違いは、もともと福建になかった西洋的や近代的なものや概念を、何語から借りたかです。マレーシア・シンガポールではマレー語と英語から、インドネシアではオランダ語から、フィリピンではスペイン語から、台湾では日本語から借りました。例えば、スーツのことをフィリピンでは「アメリカーノ」というのに、台湾では「セビロ」と言います。ただし戦後は北京語教育が普及したので、北京語を福建語読みした「セーツォン」もよく使われます。

 

香港やマカオには、インドネシアから移って来た華人がいっぱいいて、年配の世代は今でも福建語を使っています（子供たちには北京語で話しますが、結局彼らは広東語のモノリンガルに育ちます）。

 

違いはあるけれども、私はマレーシアやフィリピンに行って台湾語を喋って、ほとんど不自由なく通じました。実際、北京語以外の中国語が禁止されているシンガポールでも、台湾のテレビドラマの録画が、年配の世代を中心に人気がありました。

 

台湾人の中には、「台湾語」というからには台湾でしか通じないのか、と思っている人もいるかもしれません。香港や東南アジアに買い物に行ったとき、普段台湾で子供や外国人に聞かれたくないひそひそ話をするときに台湾語を使う癖がついつい出て、台湾語を喋ってしまうと、何を喋っているのかバレてしまう可能性があるので気をつけて。

 

余談ですが、今、日本に住んでいる福建省出身の人の多くは、福州の近くの福清の出身だそうです。そっちの方（福建省の北東部）は、アモイ語とは似ても似つかない言語を喋っています。福建省の言葉なのだから、彼らは自分たちが喋っているのを福建語というかもしれませんが、東南アジアでいう福建語や台湾語とは全然違う言葉で、全く通じないのであしからず。マレーシアのサラワクや、インドネシアの一部で話しているやつと近くて、Hokchiu とかHokchiaとか呼んでいます。台湾が有効支配している馬祖諸島でもこれに近いものを話しています。厳密には、福清語と福州語は違うが、福清人は多くが両方のバイリンガルだとも聞きます。福建省ではこの言語を話す人のほうがアモイ語を話す人より多いそうですが、東南アジアではマイナーな言語で、一部の群居地を除いては、周辺でメジャーな言葉に吸収されているようです。

 

私は福建語の未来に悲観的です。台湾を含め華人社会全体で北京語教育や現地語教育・英語教育が普及して、福建語はお祭りの儀式や教育を受けていないお年寄りとの言葉になっています。マレーシアなどでは若者が復興運動をやっていますが、影響力が今ひとつです。福建では強制的な北京語普及が行われていて、アモイの子供は半数以上福建語を話せないそうです。

 

こうなると、福建語存続のカギは台湾です。台湾では民主化以来、マスコミでも多く使われ、小学校の科目にもなっています。ですからほとんどの人が多少できますが、ほぼ台湾全土で、台湾語だけを日常的に使っている人たちは、やはり田舎のお年寄りなどが多い印象です。台湾語の牙城台南市での調査でも、小学生はほとんど家庭で北京語と英語しか使っておらず、台湾語を使うのは学校の台湾語の授業のときだけでした。最近、台湾政府が打ち出した「バイリンガル国家2030」という政策では、バイリンガルが指すのは北京語と英語のことです。このまま行くと、アイルランドのアイルランド語のように、象徴的な存在になってしまうでしょう。例えば、中国と対抗する意識を強調したい政治家が、普段の私生活は北京語と英語で行っているのに、演説のときだけわざと台湾語を使う、といった具合です。

 

台湾で、もともとは上から押し付けられた外来言語だった北京語ですが、台湾人に半世紀使用されて台湾のことを表現できるように台湾化して、学校や役所で使う「頭の言語」だけではなく、「心の言語」にもなっています。

 

最近、日本ではこの北京語を指して台湾華語という言い方も出てきましたが、私や私の家族は、詳細をいちいち説明するのは面倒くさいので、周りの日本人たちに対しては、この台湾化した北京語のことを敢えて「台湾語」と呼ぶときもあります。福建系の台湾人だけではなく、一部のお年寄りを除いたほぼ全員の台湾人に通じるのだから、福建語よりも、もっと「台湾語」と呼ばれる資格があるような気もしないではありません。

Teochew people

I once wrote that some Taiwanese people who identify themselves as Hokkien or Hakka might actually be descendants of Teochews.

Teochews are an interesting group of people among the overseas Chinese, whose ancestral land overlaps with that of Hakkas in the eastern part of Guangdong. Today, the main city is Swatow (Shantou) but it used to be Chaozhou in the past, from which the name of the group derive.

Although geographically from Guangdong, the Teochew language is closely related to Hokkien. Teochew spoken in places like Singapore is mutually intelligible with Hokkien, perhaps because it has been under the heavy influence from the latter, who form the majority there. But I heard that Teochew spoken in Swatow today is not readily intelligible to Hokkien speakers from Amoy.

The majority of ethnic Chinese in Thailand and Cambodia are Teochews, and even the royal family of the former has some Teochew ancestry.

The first Teochews who came into personal contact with me was a refugee family from Cambodia at the Chinese mass community back when it still met at Sophia University. That made me realize that the family running my favorite restaurant Cambodia in Takadanobaba actually was also Teochew.

The Singaporean exchange student I met also at the Chinese mass was also Teochew, and so was the family I stayed with when I was in Johor Baru, Malaysia, on my way to the UK back in 1992.

While I was in Hull, I once visited a Singaporean lady who married with a local English person. I remember she was also Teochew. The wife of one of my best friends from my Hull years is also Teochew, who come from an area close to Thai border on the east coast of Malaysia. Since Teochews from the majority of Thai Chinese, her family might have also moved from Thailand.

By the way, Mr. Li Ka-shing, one of the richest tycoons in Hong Kong, is also a Teochew and there's a YouTube video of him speaking in Teochew. Unfortunately, he is not a personal friend of mine.

Do you have any Teochew friends? Tell me about them.

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。

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.

Singapore influence? Fluent Mandarin speakers in southern peninsular Malaysia

The language life of young Chinese Malaysians in southern Malaysia has been influenced by the language policy of neighboring Singapore. This could be one of the examples of an interesting situation where the language policy of one country is affecting the populace in another.

Mandarin has different functions among Chinese-educated Malaysians in different parts of the country. I learned this from a conversation with one of my former students from Malaysia. I realized that I had been overgeneralizing. Here, I'm talking about those Chinese Malaysians who come from "Independent" Chinese Schools, in which that the sole medium of instruction is Mandarin. The situation in Malaysia is complex. So I'm excluding those who were educated in "National Form" Chinese schools, in which the medium of instruction is Malay or English at least for some subjects.

In southern peninsular Malaysia, namely Johor and Malacca, Mandarin has become the dominant language for almost all domains of life for younger people. This might be due to the influence of Singapore media, especially TV. Malacca is about the furthest point Singapore terrestrial TV signals can reach. In Singapore, the Chinese "dialects" are banned from public square since of the "Speak Mandarin Campaign". Therefore, all Singaporean Chinese TV programs are either produced in Mandarin or dubbed in it. In Singapore, as in Taiwan, Hong Kong films dubbed in Mandarin. (Which, I think, really sucks, in my opinion... It's quite daft to see "Fatt Gor" speaking in flunet Bejing-accent Mandarin!) Although Malaysian TV stations carry some programs in Cantonese, people in southern Malaysia generally prefer Singaporean TV stations. Because of this, students and graduates of independent Chinese schools in Johor are very fluent in Mandarin, and have an accent akin to standard Taiwanese Mandarin. If you walk into one of those schools now, you will hear students chit-chatting and gossiping in fluent Mandarin.

The situation is a little different in the rest of peninsular Malaysia. The Chinese communities in several important cities, such as Kuala Lumpur (KL) and Ipoh, are predominantly Cantonese-speaking. TV and radio stations are largely in KL, so this explains why Cantonese is so prevalent in Malaysia, even though Hokkien is the biggest Chinese ethnic group there. The Chinese-educated residents in those areas use Cantonese to converse with each other for daily purposes. Even though the medium of instruction is Mandarin, at least nominally, it is used only for formal situations, such as public ceremonies, speech contests, etc. Thus, people there feel more comfortable in Cantonese, while feeling insecure about their strongly-accented Mandarin. So Mandarin is restricted to formal domains. (By the way, I'm very interested in Cantonese being an identity marker for Chinese Malaysians residing in Taiwan. This is another story...)

The situation is similar in other cities in northern peninsular Malaysia, except that the dominant "dialect" may be Hokkien or Hakka. I once visited a city in the extreme north, where an Islamic political party has held power for a long time. I tried to socialize with students of a so-called Mandarin-medium school. Not only they spoke almost no Malay at all, they didn't even speak Mandarin well. So how do they communicate with each other? Hokkien, when at school or in town; and their own home "dialect", such as Cantonese or Teochew, when at home.

Sorry for sidetracking, but this suddenly reminded me of another interesting episode (for me). In that city in northern peninsular Malaysia, Chinese people watched Thai TV all the time. I asked them why. They said Thai pop music sounded better than Malaysian, especially Malay music, and that Thai TV programs were more entertainment-oriented than Muslim Malaysia. But do they understand the Thai language? Nope. I found out the answer when I visited the Thai side of the boarder. Thai people there spoke Hokkien! This was because there are many Malaysian Chinese tourists who visit there from Penang, a Hokkien-speaking city! This is another example of the language situation of one country influencing another, by the way.