‘The loss of language is the loss of heritage:’ the push to revive Taiwanese in Taiwan

"You can't completely express Taiwanese culture with Mandarin - something is bound to be lost in translation," says one advocate for the local language.

Before he first left Hong Kong for Taiwan in 2016, former research assistant professor Frank Wong began learning Taiwanese. His reasoning was straightforward: he believed most people in Taiwan conversed in that language.

“I thought it was logical that most Taiwanese people would be able to speak the Taiwanese language… I thought Mandarin was the official language on formal documents, but in daily life, most of the time they would speak the Taiwanese language,” he told HKFP from his office in Taipei.

The Hongkonger soon realised he was mistaken. “When you go to the streets, not many people will talk if you speak in the Taiwanese language.”

The rare usage of Taiwanese, particularly on the streets of its capital Taipei, is a legacy of decades of colonial rule. During 50 years under Japanese rule, and the Kuomintang’s subsequent martial law from 1949 to 1987, generations of Taiwanese were banned from speaking their mother tongue in public.

“A whole generation’s learning in this language was washed away, and with this language a culture and identity was also washed away,” said Lí Sì–goe̍h, a Taiwanese language advocate.

Before the arrival of the Kuomintang, Taiwanese – a language from China’s Fujian province also referred to as Taigí, Taiwanese Hokkien, Hoklo or Southern Min – was spoken by most Han immigrants who arrived on the island from the 17th century onwards. Other languages, including other Chinese languages such as Hakka and dozens of different Austronesian indigenous languages, were also spoken on the island, a reflection of the diversity of ethnic groups that have lived on the island for centuries.

Today on the streets of Taipei, Mandarin – the language imposed on the island by the Kuomintang – reigns as the lingua franca.

A stigmatised tongue

Wong’s initial false assumption, however, did not stop him from continuing to study Taiwanese Hokkien – something of an uphill battle, following the decades of oppression which sought to erase the use of Taiwanese in public life.

“Nowadays, most Taiwanese can’t see the usefulness and importance of the Taiwanese language, and they believe that being able to speak Mandarin will be enough,” he said.

Frank Wong (L) and Taiwanese author Lin Kuoyu. Photo: Supplied.

The academic’s attempts to use Taiwanese in his daily life have been polarising. Although some Taiwanese have hailed his efforts to engage with a long-oppressed facet of Taiwanese life, some have also taken offence at his use of the language in professional settings.

“Some Taiwanese stigmatised the language and believe that it should not be used in formal situations,” he told HKFP. “I had an experience in southern Taiwan where a Taiwanese said to me angrily, ‘How can you speak the Taiwanese language in such a formal situation? I am very surprised that the university employed this kind of faculty member!'”

This anger speaks to the threats facing the Taiwanese language in the island today, where its use is almost confined to certain social milieus.

“You often hear construction workers or police officers speaking Taiwanese… so there’s always been these environments [to speak it], even though it’s been formally suppressed,” Catherine Chou, a Taiwanese-American history professor, told HKFP.

Photo: 台文博覽會 Tâi-bûn Expo via Facebook.

“That’s the tricky thing when a language becomes very context-specific, there’s the danger of actually losing it, because the mentality becomes ‘It’s not for general use, it’s for the home, it’s for very specific business relationships, it’s for people that I know, it’s not for people I don’t know’,” she continued.

Although census figures show Taiwanese is spoken by around 80 per cent of the island’s inhabitants, most younger Taiwanese, particularly in the capital, use Mandarin in public and among themselves.

“In Taiwanese society, there’s an unconsciousness of language loss, people see it as a natural process. They see it as natural that now we speak Mandarin, but people don’t really think about how that happened,” Joshua Yang, a Taiwanese computational linguist who specialises in the role of technology in language preservation, told HKFP.

Promoting Taiwanese

The fear of losing the language has prompted a push to revive use of Taiwanese in everyday life, a mission some Hongkongers now living on the island have also made their own.

Wong, 43, now teaches business information systems at the National Taiwan Normal University, where he incorporates Taiwanese in his courses as much as he can, posting bilingual announcements on social media and inviting Taiwanese guest speakers. Because of this initiative, some of his students have begun to learn Taiwanese.

Recently, he has also enrolled in a PhD course in Taiwanese Literature at the National Cheng Kung University. He is determined to teach future classes solely in Taiwanese.

“From a Hongkonger’s perspective, I believe that speaking the Taiwanese language can give Taiwanese an impression that we don’t consider Taiwan as a lifeboat,” he told HKFP. “By using the Taiwanese language, we can demonstrate our determination to build our new home with the local Taiwanese.”

Wong’s not the only Hongkonger who feels this way.

Lí, the Taiwanese language advocate, moved from Hong Kong to the southern city of Kaohsiung with her Taiwanese husband Ngô͘ Hê-bí five years ago. She initially asked her husband to teach her Taiwanese to communicate with her elderly in-laws. The two quickly realised that they both needed to take formal lessons, when Ngô͘, who could communicate in Taiwanese, struggled to teach Lí the basics of the language.

The 37-year-old told HKFP she soon found that many Taiwanese friends were blind to the limits of their knowledge of their ancestral tongue, because they lacked everyday opportunities to converse in it.

Photo: Tâi-gí Niau 台語貓 via Facebook.

“It’s not like they don’t know the language at all, most can understand it and can say simple phrases. But if you want them to try and speak only in Taiwanese for three whole minutes, many of them couldn’t do it.”‘

The discovery prompted the couple to promote the use of the language in a quintessentially Taiwanese fashion — by creating a mascot, the Taiyu Mao or Taiwanese Cat, to prompt Taiwanese speakers to use the native tongue.

Lí first created a series of Taiwanese Cat stickers for Line, a popular messaging app, to trigger curiosity. “If we don’t use it in their daily lives, that’s how language dies out. So it was important to promote this language,” she said. “You can’t completely express Taiwanese culture with Mandarin – something is bound to be lost in translation.”

The couple now also sell merchandise to promote the cause, including an illustrated book to teach the Taiwanese tones to children, funded by a grant from the Ministry of Culture. Their most popular product is a T-shirt which says Kong Taigí, or “Speak Taiwanese”.

Photo: via Pinkoi.

The two have also arranged Taiwanese exhibitions to raise awareness. “Taiwanese is not a language that many people will take the initiative to learn, like Japanese or Korean, so we want to promote the language among people who may not normally have contact with it.”