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Questions of language are the focus of several chapters, with contributors seeing them from different perspectives. Scott Sommers views the Taiwanese language as a major conduit for the emergence of a Taiwanese identity. After Japanese was imposed as the language of public life and schooling, the Taiwanese language became a form of resistance against Japanese colonialism. The restrictions of the colonial government notwithstanding, this was a golden age for Taiwanese writing. Scholars advanced the idea that the weakness of Taiwanese was its lack of a written script. By the end of the 1920s, a clash occurred between those who advocated a localized form of Mandarin and a written form of Taiwanese. Ann Heylen has found that, unfort u n a t e l y, t h e v a s t m a j o r i t y o f t h e sophisticated and lively debates between the two groups have been lost to history. Sommers continues that a Taiwanese language was never able to make the transition from theory to functional script, even before the KMT
formal curriculum and in the form of private tutoring outside it. Given the increasing business ties between Taiwan and China, Sommers might have made the same point about market forces determining the need for fluency in Mandarin. The author concludes that virtually nothing has been able to penetrate the powerful monopoly that Mandarin has established in public education. As is perhaps appropriate for a nation that is still a work in progress, the book has no conclusion. The authors have succeeded in producing a well-crafted mosaic of the evolution of Taiwan society and its formative influences up to the present. As always, the future cannot be predicted.
arrived and imposed a Mandarin-only policy. After 40 years, the Taiwanese language became virtually irrelevant in the professional and educational aspirations of the Taiwanese. This attitude changed when Chen Shui-bian was elected president in 2000. The freedom to speak in one’s language of personal choice was quickly established, with all elementary school children receiving at least one class a week in mother-tongue language instruction – which could also be Hakka or one of the indigenous languages such as Ami or Paiwan. An examination was commissioned that contained questions written in Chinese script representing spoken Taiwanese. However, resistance came not only from pro-China groups but from Hakka leaders within the DPP, with the result that the examination was never implemented. At the same time, driven by commercial considerations, an enormous expansion in English-language instruction has occurred, both within the
— June Teufel Dreyer is professor of political science at the University of Miami, Florida.
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