Siraya petition

[William J Poser]

I too am unsure of how effective such petitions are likely to be,
but I think that there is one important difference between the problems
of language endangerment and the Siraya issue, namely that the difficulties
of language endangerment (at least in the kind of situation found in
Australia) are not primarily political, whereas the Siraya issue is
political. 

As I understand the situation in Taiwan, it is like this. Once upon a time
Austronesian-speaking peoples occupied all of Taiwan. Chinese colonization
gradually pushed the aboriginal people back primarily into mountainous
areas. During the period of Japanese administration, the government
distinguished between more- and less-assimilated aborigines, this distinction
being correlated with lowland vs. mountain residence. More recently, the
government of Taiwan has given official recognition to the "mountain
people" (this is the term I have heard Taiwanese people use in Chinese)
but not to the lowland people. This is significant because, after a long
period of promoting "Mandarin" Chinese at the expense of all other languages,
some years ago the government of Taiwan decided to recognize the role of
Taiwanese (the Southern Min dialect spoken by most Chinese residents of
Taiwan prior to 1948), Hakka (another Chinese dialect), and the aboriginal
languages, and in particular to promote the retention and revitalization
of the aboriginal languages. The lowland peoples do not benefit from this
as they are not recognized as aboriginal.

So, the present issue is not one of those sticky issues of how best
to maintain, revitalize, or document a language, but the much simpler
political issue of whether the government will recognize the aboriginal
status of lowland people.

Bill