Languages of Taiwan
Encyclopedia : L : LA : LAN : Languages of Taiwan
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A large majority of people on Taiwan speak Standard Mandarin, which has been the only officially sanctioned medium of instruction in the schools for more than four decades. Native Taiwanese and many others also speak one of the Southern Fujianese dialects, Min-nan, also known as Taiwanese locally. Recently there has been a growing use of Taiwanese in the broadcast media. The Hakka, who are concentrated in several counties throughout Taiwan, have their own distinct dialect. As a result of the half century of Japanese rule, many people born before 1940 also can speak fluent Japanese.
The Wade-Giles system is commonly used for Chinese romanization on Taiwan, but Chinese romanization on Taiwan tends to be highly inconsistent. Unlike mainland China, Taiwan does not use Roman letters in teaching pronunciation in schools but rather uses a system called Zhuyin. There have been efforts by the educational system to move toward a Roman-based system, but these have been slow due to bureaucratic inertia, political reluctance to follow mainland China's footsteps and the huge cost in teacher retraining. The central government adopted Tongyong Pinyin as the official romanization in 2002 but local governments are permitted to override the standard as some have adopted Hanyu Pinyin and retained old romanizations that are commonly used.
National language
Mandarin
In 1945 when the island of Taiwan came under the control of the Republic of China Kuomintang, Mandarin was introduced as the official language and made compulsory in schools. (Before 1945, Japanese was the official language and taught in schools.) Since then, Mandarin has been established as a lingua franca among the various groups in Taiwan: the majority Taiwanese-speaking Hoklo, the Hakka who have their own spoken language, Mainlanders whose native tongue may be any Chinese variant in mainland China, and the aboriginals who speak aboriginal languages.
Until the 1980s the Kuomintang administration heavily promoted the use of Standard Mandarin and discouraged the use of Taiwanese and other vernaculars, even portraying them as inferior. Mandarin was the only sanctioned language for use in the media. This produced a backlash in the 1990s. Although some more extreme supporters of Taiwan independence tend to be opposed to standard Mandarin in favor of Taiwanese, efforts to replace standard Mandarin either with Taiwanese or with a multi-lingual standard have remained stalled. Today, Mandarin is taught by immersion starting in elementary school. After the second grade, the entire educational system is in Mandarin, except for local language classes that have been taught for a few hours each week starting in the mid-1990s.
Taiwanese Mandarin, like Singlish, is spoken at different levels according to the social class and situation of the speakers. Formal occasions call for the acrotectal level of Guoyu, which in practice differs little from Putonghua. Less formal situations often result in the basilect, which has more uniquely Taiwanese features. Bilingual Taiwanese speakers often code-switch between Mandarin and Taiwanese, sometimes in the same sentence.
Mandarin is spoken fluently by almost the entire Taiwanese population, except for some elderly people who were educated under Japanese rule. In the capital Taipei, where there is a high concentration of Mainlanders whose native language is not Taiwanese, Mandarin is used in greater frequency than in southern Taiwan and more rural areas where there are fewer Mainlanders.
Chinese alphabet
Zhuyin Fuhao (Traditional Chinese: 注音符號; Hanyu Pinyin: Zhùyīn Fúhào; Wade-Giles: Chu-yin fu-hao), or "Symbols for Annotating Sounds", often abbreviated as Zhuyin, or known as Bopomofo (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ) after the first four letters of this Chinese phonemic alphabet (bo po mo fo), is the national phonetic system of the Republic of China (Taiwan) for teaching the Chinese languages, especially Standard Mandarin, to people learning to read and write and/or to people learning to speak Mandarin. (See Uses). The system uses 37 special symbols to represent the Mandarin sounds: 21 consonants and 16 vowels. Each symbol represents a group of sounds without much ambiguity.
These phonetic symbols sometimes appear as ruby characters printed next to the Chinese characters in young children's books, and in editions of classical texts (which frequently use characters that appear at very low frequency rates in newspapers and other such daily fare). In advertisements, these phonetic symbols are sometimes used to write certain particles (e.g., ㄉ instead of 的); other than this, one seldom sees these symbols used in mass media adult publications except as a pronunciation guide (or index system) in dictionary entries. Bopomofo symbols are also mapped to the ordinary Roman character keyboard (1 = bo, q = po, a = mo, and so forth) used in one method for inputting Chinese text when using the computer.
Unlike pinyin, the sole purpose for Zhuyin in elementary education is to teach Standard Mandarin pronunciation to children. Grade one textbooks of all subjects (including Mandarin) are entirely in zhuyin. After that year, Chinese character texts are given in annotated form. Around grade four, presence of Zhuyin annotation is greatly reduced, remaining only in the new character section. School children learn the symbols so that they can decode pronunciations given in a Chinese dictionary, and also so that they can find how to write words for which they know only the sounds.
Pinyin, on the other hand, is dual-purpose. Besides being a pronunciation notation, pinyin is used widely in publications in mainland China. Some books from mainland China are published purely in pinyin with not even a single Chinese character. Those books are targeted to minority tribal groups or Westerners who know spoken Mandarin but have not yet learned written Chinese characters.
Zhuyin will probably never replace Traditional Chinese just as hiragana has never replaced characters in Japanese texts even though substituting hiragana for characters is always an option. Not only are the characters valued for esthetic and other axiological reasons, but (once they have been learned) reading characters required fewer eye fixations and eliminates the ambiguities in any alphabetic or syllabic writing system caused by the immense number of homonyms in Chinese.
Romanization
- Main articles: Wade-Giles, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II, Tongyong Pinyin, Hanyu Pinyin
Other languages
Taiwanese
Taiwanese is a variant of Min-nan which is spoken in Taiwan. Taiwanese is often seen as a Chinese dialect within a larger Chinese language. On the other hand, it may also be seen as a language in the Sino-Tibetan family. As with most "language or dialect?" distinctions, how one describes Taiwanese depends largely on one's political views (see Identification of the varieties of Chinese). In any case, the classification may be represented hierarchically as:
- Sino-Tibetan ⊃ Chinese ⊃ Min ⊃ Min-nan ⊃ Taiwanese
Recent work by scholars such as [Ekki Lu], [Sakai Toru], and [Lí Khîn-hoāⁿ] (also known as Tavokan Khîn-hoāⁿ or Chin-An Li), based on former research by scholars such as Ông Io̍k-tek, has gone so far as to associate part of the basic vocabulary of the colloquial language with the Austronesian and Tai language families; however, such claims are not without controversy.
Hakka
Formosan
The Formosan languages are the aboriginal Austronesian languages of Formosa (mainland Taiwan). They are spoken by 2% of the population. The Formosan languages do not form a single group, but rather comprise several primary branches of Austronesian. There are around 20 Formosan languages known, a number of them already extinct.
Nowadays, all Formosan languages are slowly being replaced by the culturally dominant Mandarin-Chinese, but in the last decades the Taiwanese government started an aboriginal reappreciation program that included the reintroduction of Formosan mother tongue education in Taiwanese schools.
Japanese
External links
- [How to Forget Your Mother Tongue and Remember Your National Language] by Victor H. Mair
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