Premier: Taiwan's mother tongues should be respected (fwd)

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Radio Tiawan International
03/20/2007
http://english.rti.org.tw/Content/GetSingleNews.aspx?ContentID=33282

Premier: Taiwan's mother tongues should be respected

Premier Su Tseng-chang says that all the mother tongues of the people in
Taiwan should be respected and preserved. The premier however also says
that it is important to have a common language. He made the comment
Tuesday regarding the draft of a national language development bill
aimed at saving dying dialects.

Su said the purpose of the bill is to prevent native tongues from
becoming extinct because there had been inappropriate policies adopted
by the government in the past.

Executive secretary of the education ministry Chen Shueh-yu said that
the bill will list at least 55 dialects as national languages besides
Mandarin, which is the main language used in Taiwan.

"We have many different ethnic groups, and therefore many different
dialects like Minnan, Hakka, and aboriginal dialects. In just the
aboriginal language alone, we have 13 tribes and 43 different dialects.
The Hakka language has 5 different dialects. Even the Minnan language
has different accents like from Chuan-chou, Chang-chou, Yilan, Tainan,
and Haikou. In other words, there are many different versions of each
dialect. So all these should be categorized as national languages."

Once the bill is passed, all other native dialects supposedly will be
history.