Siraya petition

[Margaret Florey]

Hi all,

It's great to see this discussion under way.

I thought you might also like to know that Chun Huang (who is himself
Sirayan), gave a very interesting and moving paper at the ICLDC conference
in Hawaii a couple of weeks ago on "Language revitalization and identity
politics: a case study of Siraya in Taiwan".

Nick Thieberger and the other conference organizers at UH are processing the
recordings of the conference talks now, and they plan to put them up on the
conference web site <http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ICLDC09/> in the next couple of
weeks, along with PDFs of handouts etc. so you'll be able to listen to
Chun's presentation. It was an exciting and highly successful conference,
and you might like to look at/listen to some of the other talks too if you
weren't able to be there.

cheers,
Margaret


2009/4/2 William J Poser <wjposer at ldc.upenn.edu>

>
> 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
>



-- 
Margaret Florey
Margaret.Florey at gmail.com
Ph: +61 (0)4 3186-3727 (mob.)
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