TAIPEI—Aversion to China’s Communist government has pushed many in Taiwan to stop seeing themselves as Chinese. Now, increased pressure from Beijing is helping fuel a movement on the self-ruled island to speak differently, too.
One enthusiastic participant is
Lala Sin,
a 35-year-old mother of three, who has largely avoided speaking Mandarin Chinese, the most used language in both Taiwan and China, since last winter, instead talking with her children exclusively in Taiwanese Hokkien, or Taigi (pronounced “dye-ghee”).
“Speaking our mother language is the most effective vaccine” against a more assertive China, said Ms. Sin, one of a growing group of Taiwanese parents who are trying to steep their children in the island’s local languages—while also brushing up themselves—in what they see as a form of resistance against China’s authoritarian influence.
China’s Communist Party, which considers Taiwan a part of China and has vowed to take control of it by force if necessary, has been steadily increasing diplomatic and military pressure on the island of 23 million, partly in response to a tightening of relations between the Taiwanese and U.S. governments under Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen.
Amid the tensions, more Taiwanese people are disavowing their connection with China. Roughly 63% of people polled on the island identify themselves exclusively as Taiwanese, according to a survey conducted by Taiwan’s National Chengchi University in June, up from 54% in 2018, when Beijing stepped up efforts to lure away the island’s allies and increased military drills nearby.
According to the poll, 2.7% of people in Taiwan see themselves exclusively as Chinese.
Beijing’s muscle flexing, which lately has included sending hundreds of military aircraft on regular sorties near the island, naturally encourages Taiwanese people to re-examine the language they give priority to, said Ho Sin-han, an associate professor of linguistics and literature at National Taichung University of Education.
“A subservient language is often regarded as a weapon against an assertive culture or even an authoritarian regime,” Mr. Ho said.
Taigi is sometimes written in Chinese characters but sounds unintelligible to Mandarin speakers. It is one of a host of local languages spoken in Taiwan, alongside another branch of Chinese called Hakka and several indigenous languages with Austronesian roots.
Mandarin was strictly imposed on Taiwan by Chiang Kai-shek, whose Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party, fled to the island after losing China’s civil war to Mao Zedong’s Communist forces in 1949. An expanding trade relationship with China in recent decades has helped secure its dominance. More than 95% of the island’s 23 million people speak Mandarin, according to Taiwan census data.
In recent years, however, the local languages have staged the beginnings of an unlikely comeback.
Teachers of Taigi have experienced surges in enrollment. The number of people registering to take proficiency tests in Taigi and indigenous languages has almost tripled to nearly 45,000 in 2020 from less than 16,000 in 2012, according to government data.
Tan Kim-choa, a veteran Taigi teacher and an elder at a Presbyterian church in Taipei, said he has been overwhelmed with a surge in enrollment. This summer, he taught classes at his church, three community colleges, a nursing school and several elementary schools—reaching more than 1,000 students altogether, he estimated.
“When people feel a sense of crisis, they hurry to learn,” Mr. Tan said.
The trend has left its mark on pop culture as well. A song in Taigi by a Taiwanese indie rock band was the most watched YouTube music video in Taiwan in 2021, receiving more than 34 million views in just the past nine months. A melodrama with dialogue predominantly in Taigi was the top local film in Taiwan’s box office in 2020, grossing the equivalent of about $7 million domestically.
Though efforts to revive local languages in Taiwan date back many years, the recent increase in tensions with Beijing has helped give it significant momentum, according to linguists and language activists.
“This language is to fight against China,” said Taiwanese writer Tenn Sun-tshong, adding that the China factor was one of the reasons behind a surge in demand for Taigi speakers, especially in publishing. Mr. Tenn, who previously hosted a weekly radio show on the use of the language, is working on his fifth book in Taigi.
Linguists estimate that as many as 50% of the world’s roughly 6,000 languages are in danger of disappearing by the end of the century, as the practical appeal of dominant languages like English and Mandarin continues to increase. Taiwan is poised to join Ireland, Catalonia and Macedonia on the shortlist of places to push back against the tide, according to Ann Heylen, a linguistics professor at National Taiwan Normal University.
Linguistic conflicts on Taiwan date to the 17th century, when Dutch and Spanish colonizers arrived alongside flocks of Hokkien-speaking migrants from the Chinese province of Fujian, whose languages began to crowd out those spoken by the island’s dozen or so indigenous tribes. Hakkas, members of another Chinese ethnic group, also crossed the Taiwan Strait, adding their own tongue to the mix.
After the island came under Chinese control for the first time in 1662, Taiwanese Hokkien, which evolved into what is now known as Taigi, emerged as the dominant language. It absorbed new words through a half-century of Japanese occupation that ended in 1945, then came under steady attack with the arrival of Chiang Kai-shek, whose Kuomintang banned songs in local languages and demanded that only Mandarin be spoken at schools until the lifting of martial law in 1987.
“‘Speaking our mother tongue is a way for our generation to resist oppression and authoritarianism.’”
In 2018, the Taiwanese government passed the National Languages Development Act, which aims to reverse the damage. It requires all schools below the college level to teach local languages as mandatory subjects in curricula.
Preserving Taigi won’t be easy, even with government support, given how dominant Mandarin has become and how important it is for business with mainland China, some linguists warn.
More than half of native Taigi speakers no longer use their mother tongue at home, according to a poll of more than 70,000 people conducted by Mr. Ho, of the National Taichung University of Education.
Yet more than 80% of the people Mr. Ho surveyed also said they were interested in learning their mother language from their parents.
Chen Shu-ting, a 39-year-old stay-at-home mother of two children, decided to adopt a Taigi-only rule at home following student protests against a trade pact with China in 2014. Before she could do that, however, she had to relearn the language she hadn’t spoken since she was a child.
After studying at home for an hour a day over more than six months, Ms. Chen passed the intermediate level Taigi proficiency test last year. “It was really difficult,” she said, but it was worthwhile. “Speaking our mother tongue is a way for our generation to resist oppression and authoritarianism.”
China’s effect on the language debate was visible at a demonstration in Taipei that broke out in September after Taiwan’s defense minister got into a spat with a lawmaker over the use of Taigi during a legislative hearing. At least three protesters had repurposed signs from an earlier demonstration, scrawling anti-Mandarin messages on the back of posters that originally said “No China.”
“Speaking our mother tongue is a basic human right,” filmmaker A-yo Chiu said in Taigi at the rally. “Taiwan is a treasure island with multiple languages and cultures, which is where our value lies.”
Write to Joyu Wang at joyu.wang@wsj.com
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