In academia and common parlance it is today costummary to speak of a Taiwanese language. Taiwanese, or Taiyu as it is known in Mandarin, is widely used as a collective term for different Southern Min dialects that were brought to Taiwan by Chinese migrants after the seventeenth century. But on what grounds can the existence of a Taiwanese language that is distinct from its Sinitic ancestor dialects spoken be claimed? Focusing on selected phonetic, syntactic, and lexical features, the first part of the lecture foregrounds some linguistic peculiarities of Taiwanese. It will be argued that although some of these features are unique to Taiwanese, linguistic analysis offers no support for claiming a linguistic distinctiveness of Taiwanese. Instead, the historical roots of Taiwanese as an independent language date back to the Japanese colonial period (1895-1945). As I will point out in the second part of the presentation, the 1920s and 1930s mark a period when young intellectuals for the first time called for the linguistic emancipation and standardisation of Taiwanese. Their demands were a direct response to the national language policies of the Japanese colonial government.
About the lecturer:
Dr. Henning Klöter is Professor of Modern Chinese Languages and Literatures and Executive Director of the Institute of Asian and African Studies of the Humboldt University of Berlin. His research interests include multilingualism and society, language planning, Taiwan Studies (language, history, literature), history of Chinese linguistics in Europe, Sinophone Studies, Chinese writing, and Translation Studies.
The Taiwan Matters lecture series has been funded by the Ministry of Education of Taiwan (ROC) through the Taipei Mission in Stockholm, Sweden.