Abstract
It is impossible to discuss Taiwan without reference to China. China constitutes a vast land mass in east Asia, consisting of 3, 745, 296 square miles [9, 671, 725 km2], with a population in excess of 1 billion people, bounded on the north by Russia, on the west and south by India, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam, and on the east by the South China sea, the East China Sea, the Yellow Sea and the Korean Peninsula. Taiwan is an island less than a hundred miles off the coast of China, [150 km] roughly between Hong Kong to the South and Shanghai to the north. It consists of 13, 892 square miles [35, 980 km2] (about the size of Ireland, Latvia, Sri Lanka, Tasmania, Togo, or West Virginia in the United States) with a population of roughly 22, 113, 250. On its south lies the Philippines, on its north lies Japan, and to the east is the Pacific Ocean. (See Appendix A, Figure 7.)
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Notes
The Opium War, ending in 1842 with the loss of Hong Kong to Britain, the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) ending with the loss of Formosa to Japan, the Boxer Rebellion, ending in 1900, the fall of the Manchu (Ch’ing) Dynasty in 1911 are all illustrative of the insurrections and foreign wars that disrupted China at the end of the 19th century.
The Ch’ing monarchy was under great pressure to introduce political reform; the First Congress of the Ch’ing dynasty was an attempt at such reform and a movement toward the development of a constitution monarchy. Lao was selected to serve in this Congress. A petition was tabled in the Congress in 1910 to mandate the use of Lao’s transcribing alphabet to facilitate universal literacy; it was enacted in 1911, but the Wu-Chang revolt and other military activity caused the collapse of the Ch’ing Dynasty in that year.
In December 1911, the Republic of China was formally established, and Sun Yat-sen (1859–1916) became its first president.
In theory, written Chinese is alleged to be dialect neutral; this is not entirely true, although the concept has been perpetuated in what is currently known as ‘standard written Chinese.’ Nevertheless, it is the case, for example, that material written by Cantonese speakers (e. g., in Hong Kong) is difficult to impossible for Mandarin speakers to read.
It is important to note that this decision had a profound effect on the written system which had been extensively debated for hundreds of years; this decision meant that Chinese characters were to be kept intact but that an auxiliary system of phonetic alphabets was to be adopted in education. In turn, this meant that a Latin alphabet was rejected. The transcribing alphabets fall somewhere between the Latin alphabet and the Japanese syllabary in function, but have the appearance of simplified Chinese characters; these special ‘characters’ served as an aid to pronunciation and were printed beside normal characters. They have never been discarded since their introduction.
Previously, the tones were marked by dots appearing on the four corners of the character; this system was confusing because it allowed for errors in type-setting, writing, and reading. The new symbols were: either no symbol or, for stressed syllables, [-] for 1st tone (level); [/] for 2nd tone (rising); [v] for 3rd tone (dipping); and [\] for 4th tone (failing).
The use of the radical system of organisation was not only a problem in dictionary compilation but also a serious problem in library organisation; see, e. g., Kaplan and Grabe 1985.
This system, devised by Chao Y. R. and Lin Yu-tang, was not revised until 1984 in Taiwan; the revision became known as NPS2. However, the Pinyin system, in use on the mainland since the 1950s is better known and more widely used. Tsao (2000: 76) believes that its creation was motivated by a desire to satisfy policy needs rather than to meet any actual demand at the time or subsequently.
The aboriginal people arrived in Taiwan 6, 000 to 8, 000 years ago from the south-east coast of the Asian continent. They became divided into two groups: The Pingpu Zu (plains people), and the Gaoshan Zu (mountain people), each group divided into 9 tribal configurations. The extent of contact with the mainland is not well known; in 230 CE, during the Three Kingdoms period, Emperor Sun Chuan tried unsuccessfully to conquer the island, and in the 13th century Kubla Khan (1260 – 1295) made two similarly futile attempts. The Dutch invaded the southern part of the island in 1624, and in 1625 the Spanish invaded the northern part of the island. The Spanish were driven out in 1648 by the Dutch, who ruled the island from 1624 to 1661. In 1662, Zheng Cheng-kong (a.k.a. Koxinga) and his family ruled Taiwan for 21 years (1662–1683). This period was followed by Ch’ing Dynasty domination from 1683 to 1895, and during the early years of this period there was a wave of immigration from the mainland, bringing immigrants from Fujian Province and, slightly later, speakers of Hakka. In 1895, following China’s defeat in the first Sino-Japanese war, the island was ceded to Japan, which occupied the island until the end of WW II in 1945. Over the long period of time (1662 – 1945) the aboriginal people were increasingly marginalised and the Han people achieved great numerical superiority—in 1895 Han inhabitants already outnumbered aboriginal people, and by 1905 there were 2, 970, 000 Chinese vs. 113, 000 aboriginal people.
Chen Yi was apparently a poor choice for the post; he imposed draconian measures, banning Japanese, and failing to understand the sociolinguistic situation in the island; he was deposed in 1947 and eventually executed.
Available teachers were drawn from several sources: Recruits from the Mainland, recruits from within Taiwan, and National Language Promoters (NLPs), the latter being most heavily involved. The Provincial Government issued regulations for the employment of NLPs in March 1946, even before the CPPNL began its work. Given the shortage of teachers, the criteria for employment were not stringent: Anyone was employable upon passing a skills test in the NL who was (i.) a college graduate in arts or education; (ii.) a normal or middle school graduate with teaching experience; (iii.) fluent in Mandarin and had attended middle school; (iv.) a native speaker of the NL and had attended training programs in the NL. NLPs were to: (i.) teach the standardised NL, (ii.) answer questions about the NL, (iii.) assist in establishing branches of the OPNL, (iv.) assist the government in the implementation of its policies, (v.) distribute publications of the Provincial CPPNL, and (vi.) investigate all dialects of Taiwanese including folk songs and tales, Special classes were established to train NLPs, but these were suspended in 1952 as a result of the civil war and the turmoil accompanying it (Tse 1986).
There was great enthusiasm for learning the NL (as a function of emerging nationalism), and the members of the CPPNL, acting as private citizens, were able to take advantage of that enthusiasm. Thus the appeal through the mass media was largely successful.
The Japanese intended to integrate Taiwan completely into the Japanese Empire. The colonial administration lost no time in implementing an assimilationist policy. (See discussion in the chapters on Japan and Korea.) Schooling was considered essential to the implementation of this policy. Japanese language instruction, codified in the Governor General’s Common School Regulations (1898), required that: “[t]he common school should teach Taiwanese children ethics and practical knowledge thereby cultivât[ing] in them qualities of Japanese citizenship and also lead them to be well versed in kokugo” (not nihongo) (quoted in Coulmas 2002: 214–215). When the Japanese took over Taiwan, 95 per cent of the population consisted of illiterate farmers. The Japanese administration sought to duplicate the elementary school system that had proven to be such an effective means of social control in Japan. The Taiwanese elite came to perceive a Japanese education as an entrée to material wealth and social advancement. The Japanese policies to accomplish these objectives were (wisely) implemented in three stages: In the 1st (pacification) stage (1895–1919) private Chinese schools (Shu-fang) were tolerated, but the government urged parents to send their children to public schools where Japanese was the language of instruction and Chinese was a required subject; in the 2nd (assimilation) phase (1919–1937), all private Chinese schools were banned and Chinese in public schools became an elective; in the 3rd (complete Japanisation) stage (1937–1945), Chinese was banned in all public registers as were all publications in Chinese. Indeed, in 1938 (at the beginning of the 2nd Sino-Japanese war), the Japanese government in Taiwan began a major ‘only-Japanese-speaking-families’ campaign to drive Chinese even out of the home registers. The latter activity was not entirely successful.
The first local (Taiwan) edition, however, did not appear until 1952.
Between 1932 and 1974, the National Bureau of Compilation and Translation had issued technical terminological lists in 66 disciplines; all approved by the MOE. It also produced 174 books on Chinese culture (The China Series). The Bureau remains active at the present time.
Many evaluations of what has been going on in language planning in Mainland China since 1949 are readily available. See, e.g., Zhou 1986. Tsao (2000: 78–79) provides some comparisons between Taiwan and the Mainland.
Teachers in Taiwan are required to teach the norm, but they do not themselves speak it (so they are unable to provide a model for their students) and the norm is removed from what students themselves speak and what they hear in their school and out-of-school environment, creating a situation in which there is a growing gap between ‘schooled’ language and home language; see, e.g., Heath 1983.
As schooling became more pervasive and as the number of students at each level increased, so did class size; simultaneously, the number of instructional hours had to be reduced.
A survey of English teaching, conducted between 1974 and 1976 as part of a co-operative project between the English Research Institute, National Taiwan Normal University, and the Linguistics Department of the University of Southern California, revealed a number of problems. The report of the project was largely ignored by the media and by the MOE. Admittedly, the project was flawed in a number of ways: much of the data in the report was left unanalysed, the statistical analysis employed was not appropriate to the data, and some of the recommendations were highly impractical. The data were re-analysed by Tse (1987); his findings suggest that: — most English teachers were inadequately trained (both in English and in methodology); — in-service training was simply unavailable; — the instructional time for language learning was inadequate; — the dominant methodology was grammar/translation; — assessment focused on reading and writing; — there was virtually no instructional support (e.g., books, tapes, films, etc.); — there was no opportunity to use the language outside the classroom This report also had virtually no impact on the cadre of English teachers or on the MOE. Additionally, the ability of Taiwanese—especially scholars, scientists and technicians—to travel easily to the United States has served to increase English fluency. See Kaplan 1993b: 158.
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Kaplan, R.B., Baldauf, R.B. (2003). Language Planning in Taiwan. In: Language and Language-in-Education Planning in the Pacific Basin. Language Policy, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0145-7_4
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