Talking Taiwanese

[Harold Schiffman]

Talking Taiwanese
Flemish reflections on Taiwanese language education

11/11/2007
Taiwan's Linguistic Genocide
WHAT IS LINGUISTIC GENOCIDE?

According to the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide, linguistic genocide
is when the State forces children to abandon the language of their
parents, through, for example, a wrong language policy at school.
Article II (e) of the Convention reads:

"Genocide is forcibly transferring children of a group to another group".

Children are learning the language that the schools teach at the cost
of the mother tongue and this represent linguistic genocide, because
it is removing a child from his or her group (Taiwanese, Hakka or an
Aboriginal linguistic group) and placing him or her in a different
linguistic group (Mandarin).

Article II (b) of the United Nations Convention definition also says that

"Genocide [also] means causing serious physical or mental harm to a group."

In Taiwan's case this would mean that the Government is causing
serious mental harm to all children who do not have Mandarin as their
mother tongue or first language (i.e. language most heard or spoken at
home).

A linguist of international reputation and advisor to UNESCO, Prof.
Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, stated in many an article and public lecture:

"If a child does not learn in his mother tongue and is forced to learn
in a foreign language [what Taiwan has done has done with Mandarin and
is increasingly doing with English – own comment], this will do
serious mental harm to the child."

"DEMI-LINGUALISM"

Taiwan's school system is making our children "demi-lingual". What
this means is that we are making children suffer serious incapacity as
a result of harming the natural development of high-level linguistic
skills in any minority / indigenous language. This prevents Taiwan's
children from developing high-level cognitive and academic
proficiency.

What is important in the use of the mother tongue or first language is
that it permits all children to develop their intelligence better.
Their cognitive progress is very much faster and gets to a higher
level (throughout the rest of their lives) if they learn through their
mother tongue / first language at school. It is not just a question of
exam results.

If we develop a child's mother tongue well, and if there is no policy
forbidding or hampering this development, (1) the child becomes
high-level literate, (2) he or she will be able to operate up to a
high level, (3) he or she will be able to study to a high level, (4)
he or she will be able to make an academic contribution to a high
level. Language is like a dynamic natural "template" or "scaffolding";
it is not just something we can describe by the mere cliché: "language
is a means of communication". Birds' chirping, too, and even
telephones, for that matter, is "means of communication." Human
language is much more than that.

If a child is "mono-lingual" to a high level (that is, he or she is
officially educated in Mandarin-only at primary school levels), that
child will still, theoretically, be able to get along in terms of
cognitive and academic proficiency. How many Mandarin-only children
manage with just one language? But, more to the good, he or she can
then become a high level bilingual or trilingual, provided that he has
reached a high level in his or her mother tongue. All recent bilingual
studies show that those who are high-level bilinguals or multilingual
become more intelligent than those who are high-level uni-linguals.
Taiwan could stand to gain immensely by changing this retrograde
policy of stifling the mother tongue.

DEPRIVING CHILDREN OF THEIR RIGHTS

Are Taiwan's politicians and language educators ignorant of the fact
that education of dominated minorities solely through Mandarin and
English may contribute in killing Taiwan's indigenous languages and
hampering a child's cognitive development? If Taiwan were a UN-member,
the Ministry of Education would either have to dramatically change its
language education policy or face being rebuked before an
international audience. Alas …

All Taiwanese, Hakka, and Aboriginal mother tongue speakers are being
educated through the medium of Mandarin and English. In many cases
Mandarin is not the children's first language (i.e. language most
often heard and spoken at home), while English is often taught in
subtractive English-only immersion classes with little or no mother
tongue support.

No research that has been done into the negative results of this kind
of education in Taiwan, while the much-anticipated positive results
continue to disappoint. Yet, international research reporting on
children deprived of education through their mother tongue are often
bad or even disastrous in terms of the children's cognitive, emotional
and scholarly development.

Why then do we, in Taiwan, do so when mother tongue medium education
would be much more appropriate and is supported by solid research
results?

Some of Taiwan's language educators, including prominent academics,
seem to have accepted or have even actively argued for measures that
harm Taiwan's minority language children. The latter are often
submerged in Mandarin/English kindergartens and put into Mandarin-only
primary classrooms. Such measures are participating in the active
killing of Taiwan's linguistic diversity. But this is never discussed
openly, neither in the press nor at local linguistic conferences.

People at language conferences overseas have asked me: is Taiwan's
public aware that Mandarin-only education is responsible – in part -
for negative educational results? How can they, I reply, when the body
responsible for educating the public on educational outcomes is overly
preoccupied with implementing popular quick-fix measures in an effort
to gain electoral votes? I used to be more generous and answer that
ignorance, lack of knowledge about what various educational models
lead to, might play a role in the lack mother tongue education in
Taiwan. But it has become increasingly difficult to uphold such view.

Taiwan's children who do not have Mandarin as first language should
have the right to become bilingual (mother tongue/Mandarin) through
formal education, and not by merely using the language at home. An
important issue is that some of the scientifically sound and
practically proven principles of how to enable children to become
high-level multilinguals with the support of the educational system
are in fact counter-intuitive: they go against common sense.

TAIWAN'S COMMON SENSE APPROACH

Such principles do not go well with Taiwan's pragmatic approach to
language education: the very specialized and sensitive areas of
bilingualism, multilingualism, and mother tongue education versus the
latest proven and unproven language education principles (Mandarin
majority language immersion, and TEFL - US-modeled) – Taiwan seems to
have made its choice.

If Taiwanese, Hakka or Aboriginal children who speak their mother
tongue at home, are to become bilingual (i.e. also learn Mandarin
well), one might, with a common sense approach, imagine that an early
start with and maximum exposure to Mandarin would be a good idea. Like
for learning many other things: practice makes perfect. But sound
research shows the opposite: the longer indigenous and
minority-language children in a low-status position have their own
language (mother tongue) as the main medium of teaching, the better
they also become in the dominant language (Mandarin and later on
English), provided, of course, that they have good teaching in it,
preferably given by bilingual teachers. Research also shows that
English-only submersion programs, which are increasingly in demand by
the Taiwan public are widely shown as the least effective
educationally for minority language students.

And if we care to look, we can also learn from solid research that
educating Taiwan's indigenous and minority-language children mainly
through the medium of Mandarin and English fosters monolingualism, not
high levels of multilingualism. This practice is responsible for most
of the linguistic genocide in schools. Indigenous and
minority-language children in Spain (autonomous regions), the UK
(Wales), southern Austria, northern Italy, western Finland and Frisia
(Netherlands) therefore have the choice to receive primary education
mainly through the medium of their own (first) language, with good
teaching of the official language(s) as subjects, taught by fully
bilingual teachers. This has lead to high levels of bilingualism or
multilingualism and to the maintenance of linguistic diversity in
these countries - ironically the same the goals that Taiwan's
politicians claim to strive for.

Schools in Taiwan are in practice doing exactly the opposite.
Politicians are refusing to discuss it and to see the contradictions
and inconsistencies by making empty promises of "language equality"
for all of Taiwan's peoples. They are, year after year and government
after government, avoiding the granting of the basic singularly
important linguistic human right to Taiwanese-, Hakka- and Aboriginal
children: a binding and unconditional right to mother tongue education
in primary schools.

Why is it so difficult to get this kind of education accepted and
legally guaranteed in Taiwan's human rights instruments? Why is the
right to mother tongue education such a 'hot potato' (a term coined by
Skutnabb-Kangas) among politicians, academics, school authorities, and
even some parents?

In language education, Taiwan follows common sense rather than
research results, even if it ought to know that common sense
linguistic recommendations are bound to very negative results. Common
sense recommends, for example, that those minority parents who would
like to have the choice to put their children in separate schools,
should be dissuaded from doing so. Taiwan's government and academic
elite are knowingly working towards solutions which have been shown to
lead to negative results. Their failure to recommend solutions which
would very likely show positive results is, according to the UN
linguistic genocide definition (1949 and revised 2003) tantamount to
intentionally "causing serious mental harm to (Taiwan's – own
addition) children".

In Taiwan's subtractive language teaching and learning, Mandarin and
English are learned at the expense of the children's mother tongue.
Additive learning and teaching is surely what the Ministry of
Education should be recommending for all. In additive language
teaching and learning the new language is learned in addition to the
mother tongue, which continues to be used and developed. For this to
happen with minority-language children, their own language needs to be
the main medium of teaching at least during the first 8-9 years of
schooling, preferably longer.

THE RESULT OF THE COMMON SENSE APPROACH

As many researchers have noted since the early 1970s: schools can in -
a couple of generations - kill languages that were spoken by millions
of people and that had survived for centuries, even millennia, at
times when their speakers were not exposed to formal education of
present-day type. Identically, schools in Taiwan can today participate
in committing linguistic genocide through their choice of the medium
of formal education. Through opting only for Mandarin and English
language education, they do. The often-heard argument that "the
position of the Taiwanese language is strong enough because it is
spoken daily by most of Taiwan's people" will thus be turning void
within two or three generations.

Educationalist and sociolinguists seem to think that the discrepancy
between what some politicians say about mother tongue education and
the measures they implement is mainly an information problem: maybe
these Taiwan-based politicians, school authorities and even
researchers do not know enough about the issues involved? We may have
"gaps in research", or the politicians do not know the research. This
would also explain the lack of proper discussion about the issues. To
me this seems a bit naïve.

The required knowledge is there. It has been there for a very long
time: since the 1953 UNESCO conference in Paris on the use of
vernacular languages in education and by some of the most foremost
language researchers since the 1970s. And yet, in Taiwan still next to
nothing happens to adhere to it.

Many a postmodern and pragmatic researcher in Taiwan may not want to
analyze this issue. Mother tongue education, after all, does not
belong in the sphere that "serious" researchers should be interested
in. Sociolinguistic research into this issue is often considered
either as a tool of political propaganda or dismissed as
un-researchable because of political manipulation - because one cannot
measure sociolinguistics with hard-core methods.

In today's Taiwan, issues connected with this kind of research, like
ethnicity, identity and mother tongues are claimed to be so blurred
and hybrid that we tend to categorize them under political and
economic denominators: supporting the "pro-Taiwan" camp in standing up
for indigenous languages makes you "pro-Taiwan" or "Green"; supporting
Mandarin education with disregard of indigenous mother tongues puts
one somewhere between the "nationalist" and "neutral/passive" camps;
in wanting English-only education for one's children, one shows one's
economic/financial aspirations under the pretense of
"internationalization" and "market values". Sociolinguistic research
is definitely not the kind of issue that can easily gain you an
NSC-project grant in Taiwan.

LANGUAGE MARKET VALUES

Mireille Delmas-Marty (2003) discusses the danger in the conflict
between concepts based on, on the one hand, "universal" market values,
on the other hand, genuinely universal non-market values. Placed in a
Taiwan context, the genuinely universal non-market values include
individual and collective linguistic rights. The legal protection of
and the public support for market values in Taiwan are much stronger
than the protection of non-market values. Minority language education
is a non-market value, and there are no Taiwan courts an individual or
group can turn to if their right to mother tongue education has been
violated. Instead, it is the Taiwan government that does the
monitoring. And since this government does not strongly support
educational linguistic rights, we have a problem.

Yet another remark by Marty which is, I believe, applicable to
Taiwan's language education is that "The market is replacing the
nation, superseding the state and becoming the law: under the law of
the market, law itself becomes a marketable commodity". Under the law
of economic internationalization, linguistic rights and language
education in Taiwan are becoming just that, a "marketable commodity".

Can Taiwan leave the responsibility for its minority languages and
linguistic diversity unconsidered in this way?

No, in addition to the "market failure" argument, a state or
autonomous territory can be neutral in relation to religions, but not
in relation to languages (e.g. Kymlicka & Grin 2003) because all
states must function through the medium of some language or languages
(seldom through religion). That would mean that Taiwan, by not
actively supporting minority languages, is in fact supporting the
dominance of Mandarin as official language unjustly. In addition,
Taiwan does not only not protect educational linguistic human rights;
through keeping primary education mainly monolingual it further
weakens the present already fragile position of Taiwan's native
languages.

REFERENCES

Delmas-Marty, Mireille (2003). Justice for sale. International law
favours market values. Le Monde Diplomatique, English version, August
2003.

Kymlicka, Will & Grin, François (2003). Assessing the Politics of
diversity in Transition Countries. In Daftary, Farimah & Grin,
François (eds) (2003). Nation-building, ethnicity and language
politics in transition countries. Budapest & Flensburg: Local
Government and Public Service Reform Initiative, Open Society
Institute & ECMI (European Centre for Minority Issues), 5-27.

Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (2000). Linguistic genocide in education – or
worldwide diversity and human rights? Mahwah, New Jersey & London:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (2004) The right to mother tongue medium education
- the hot potato in human rights instruments. 2nd Mercator
International Symposium: Europe 2004: A new framework for all
languages? Tarragona – Catalunya, University of Roskilde, Denmark.

UNESCO (1953). The use of the vernacular languages in education,
Monographs on fundamental education VIII. Paris: UNESCO.

UNESCO 2003. Recommendations for Action Plan. International Expert
Meeting on UNESCO Program Safeguarding of Endangered Languages,
UNESCO, Paris-
Fontenoy, 10-12 March 2003.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights: http://www.unhchr.ch/udhr/

-- http://johangijsen.blogspot.com/2007/11/taiwans-linguistic-genocide.html
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