Taiwan faces complex language legacy
TAIPEI — When Taiwanese scholar Shih Cheng-feng was a boy, he was forced to speak a language that was not his own, and four decades later he still feels handicapped by…
TAIPEI — When Taiwanese scholar Shih Cheng-feng was a boy, he was forced to speak a language that was not his own, and four decades later he still feels handicapped by his education.He grew up under a nationalist regime that had fled China and now wanted him and everyone else to speak the dominant dialect of the mainland, with the right Beijing accent.This included a difficult sound not common on the island that involves rolling up the tongue, and students who lapsed into their native Taiwanese were humiliated with a tag saying "I'm no good. I speak dialect"."Sometimes people have only developed their Taiwanese to elementary-school level," said Shih, now a 52-year-old political scientist at National Dong Hwa University in east Taiwan's Hualien city."They don't know the academic terms, even if they want to use them... We lost values, traditional wisdom, everything."Millions of Taiwanese have the same experience as Shih, meaning that the island today is left with a complex linguistic legacy that determines its fate in numerous ways -- but has also meant some advantages.The ability to speak Mandarin means Taiwanese can, without difficulty, communicate with all 1.3 billion people on the mainland, taking advantage of the startling economic boom over the past three decades."Taiwanese can do business much more easily than Hong Kong people, because Chinese find it's much easier to communicate with them," said Wang Horng-luen, a sociologist at Academia Sinica, a think tank in Taipei. The Cantonese dialect is dominant in Hong Kong."Many Chinese people say Taiwanese people speak Chinese even better than they do themselves. There are many dialects in China, so many people speak Mandarin, but do it with a very strong accent," he said.Language may have been the single most important factor in allowing Taiwan to latch onto the Chinese juggernaut, with Taiwanese investors placing more than 100 billion dollars in the mainland.But this has come at a steep cost, as many of Taiwan's 23 million people have limited ability to
last modification 2010-07-30 07:15:05
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