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<header class="gmail-item-header gmail-content-width-responsive"><h1>Taiwan’s laws on language are showing China what it means to be a modern, inclusive country</h1>
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<i class="gmail-icon-camera"></i>All are welcome. <span class="gmail-featured-image-credit gmail-has-space"> (Reuters/Tyrone Siu)</span>
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<h5>Written by</h5>
<a href="https://qz.com/author/nsonnadqz/" class="gmail-author-name">Nikhil Sonnad</a>
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<h5>Obsession</h5>
<a href="https://qz.com/on/language/">Language</a>
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<span class="gmail-timestamp">1 hour ago</span>
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<p>Taiwan was once considered an economic miracle. Now economic progress there has slowed<a href="https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/taiwans-sluggish-economy-on-the-brink-of-death-says-economist"> to a halt</a> as China, Taiwan’s imposing neighbor, grows bigger by the day.</p>
<p>But in terms of social progress, Taiwan is decades ahead—showing
people in China that a modern, multicultural, and tolerant Chinese
society is possible.</p>
<p>Consider the difference between Taiwan and China’s language policies.
Legislators in Taiwan are preparing to redefine what constitutes a
“national language.” If the new definition is enacted, which<a href="https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3424192"> is likely</a>,
Taiwanese—the local variant of the Minnan language of southern
China—will receive equal treatment with Mandarin. That would be
unthinkable in China, where Mandarin’s status as the sole standard
language is absolute.</p>
<p>The Taiwanese language is everywhere in Taiwan. It is spoken at home
by over 80% of the population. Would-be politicians feel the need to
campaign in Taiwanese in order to win elections. Yet it has not been
given the status of a national language. That is in part because the
language has endured long periods of inequity relative to Mandarin, even
in Taiwan. When the Kuomintang party arrived on the island in the
1940s, fleeing its losing battle with the Chinese communists, it banned
the use of Taiwanese in schools and in the media, declaring that
Mandarin should be the language of the island.</p>
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<p>The new rule would change that, expanding on a <a href="http://www.loc.gov/law/foreign-news/article/taiwan-new-indigenous-languages-act/">separate act</a>
passed last year that gave several indigenous languages “national”
status. Areas with large populations that speak Taiwanese will be
allowed to use them in official documents and legal affairs. And the
government will have an obligation to teach Taiwanese and the indigenous
languages<strong>//such as?//</strong> as part of the standard, 12-year curriculum, as well as to develop writing systems and dictionaries in those languages.</p>
<p>That level of commitment to minority languages would be impressive
even for a Western country. In the United States, for example, it is
hard to find national efforts to support any language other than
English. But more than anything, the new rule reveals the growing
cultural distance between Taiwan and China, and how much Taiwan has
developed socially.</p>
<p>China doesn’t like the Minnan that can be heard in shops and food
stalls across Taiwan. It considers Minnan, or Taiwanese, the language of
the Taiwan independence movement. The prospect of possible retaliation
from Beijing has long delayed Taiwan from giving the language a more
official status.</p>
<p>China’s policies on minority languages, meanwhile, are stuck in the
20th century. Linguistically, China is extremely diverse. It is home to
at least 100 distinct languages. Yet the Chinese government’s policy is
based on the Stalinist assertion that a nation must have a single shared
language, and that everyone in the nation must speak it. “A national
community is inconceivable without a common language,” Stalin<a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1913/03a.htm#s4"> wrote</a> in 1913. In 2000, China enacted<a href="http://www.gov.cn/english/laws/2005-09/19/content_64906.htm"> a law</a> to that effect, establishing <em>putonghua</em>—or
“common speech,” as Mandarin is called in China—as the sole national
language for the “unification of the country.” That means that Mandarin
should come before all other languages.</p>
<p>The official rules in China don’t ban minority languages. And the
same law that established Mandarin as the national language states that
citizens “shall have the freedom to use and develop their own spoken
and written languages.”</p>
<p>But in many cases, the Communist Party perceives minority languages
as being in conflict with higher-priority concerns, such as the
nationwide promotion of Mandarin, national sovereignty, and cultural
unification of the kind that Stalin advocated.</p>
<p>“If you promote the use of those [minority] languages in public
domains, then the government might have a different view,” says Minglang
Zhou, a professor at the University of Maryland who studies minority
language policy in China. “They think that threatens the use of <em>putonghua</em>, and citizens’ identification with the Chinese nation.”</p>
<p>The Tibetan language is a good example of how these priorities shake out in practice.</p>
<p>“If you look at Tibetan, you can see this gradual shift from using
Tibetan for instruction in classrooms to using Chinese,” Zhou adds. This
is mostly the result of the 2000 language law. China might allow
minority groups to develop their own languages, but the national effort
is focused on getting<a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-39484655"> 80% of citizens</a> speaking Mandarin.</p>
<p>The two goals can be mutually exclusive. Mandarin-speaking teachers
are sent to areas where Chinese is not spoken as well, and where they
might not be able to speak the local language. The result is that in
Tibet, the local language is, at best, relegated to a language class,
and not used as the medium of instruction.</p>
<div class="gmail-inline-ad gmail-is-visible" id="gmail-inline-1271795-4"><div id="gmail-google_ads_iframe_/56091333/qz_6__container__" style="border:0pt none"></div></div><p>In
addition to challenging the primacy of Mandarin, the party views the
Tibetan language as a threat to Chinese sovereignty and identification
with the nation of China. It doesn’t want citizens seeing themselves as
Tibetans first. A strong Tibetan language movement might bring that
about. China may claim that minorities have the right to develop their
languages, but it also<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/04/tibetan-activist-trial-china-inciting-separatism-tashi-wangchuk"> put on trial</a> an activist who wanted more Tibetan in schools, accusing him of “inciting separatism.”</p>
<p>Essentially, China is not concerned with making minority languages
more frequently spoken. It wants them to be preserved as interesting
bits of Chinese history, like artifacts in a museum.</p>
<p>Therein lies the difference with Taiwan. Giving Taiwanese equal
status will allow the language to thrive in everyday life, whether in
schools, official documents, or popular media. It is not meant to be a
historical artifact. If Mandarin is preferred in some setting, it will
be because it is a common language, not because it has been deemed so
from on high.</p>
<p>Taiwan has had enough time being governed independently from China to
develop its own identity. The renewed emphasis on the Taiwanese
language is one symptom of that. At the same time, its language policies
show how Taiwan has developed into a pluralistic democracy, even as
China moves in the opposite direction, toward greater unification.
Taiwan’s renewed promotion of indigenous languages tries to reckon with
historical injustices, even as China arrests Tibetan language activists.
Last year, Taiwan<a href="https://qz.com/990669"> legalized</a> same-sex marriage as China<a href="https://qz.com/1020474"> shut down</a> a popular lesbian dating app.</p>
<p>In addition to being an act of pluralism, Taiwan’s proposed language
law probably has political motivations. It sends a message to China that
Taiwan does not need, or want, to abide by Beijing’s rules. But it
also shows people in China that top-down unification is not the only way
to govern an ethnically and linguistically diverse country where
Mandarin is the <em>lingua franca</em>.</p></div></div></div>
<br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com" target="_blank">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/" target="_blank">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------</div>
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