Can the Taiwanese language survive?

[wix]

Wushijiao, I think you are reading a bit too much into the political situation. The use of Taiwanese is often important in making political statements and favoured by pro-independence groups. And of course "waishengren" (Mainlanders) who favour unification with China use Mandarin. However, a decline in the use of Taiwanese won't necessarily correlate to a decline in pro-independence sentiments. Taiwanese identity has many facets and language is only one.

Regarding romanisation, I think that most Taiwanese live in a vacuum of linguistic ignorance. They learn Chinese characters and zhuyin fuhao as a phonetic system for representing the sounds of Mandarin. Although most people learn English and thereby a familiarity with the Roman alphabet, few appreciate or understand how romanisation can be used as a more universal phonetic system.

It is a commonly held belief in Taiwan that Zhuyin Fuhao is the most accurate way of representing the sounds of Mandarin. Any form of romanisation is seen as somewhat inferior or not as accurate. This is of course not true, but most Taiwanese people believe this. This is one the big obstacles to the better use of romanisation in Taiwan: most Taiwanese people just don't understand exactly what it is or how it works.

[wushijiao]

Wushijiao, I think you are reading a bit too much into the political situation

You're probably right wix. I have never been to Taiwan, so I can only read about and speculate about the various situations there.

By the way, I found an interesting personal essay about diglossia and language standardization, which indirectly relates to what we are talking about.

http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~coby/essays/refdigl.htm

[atitarev]

Do Taiwanese want to preserve the Taiwanese dialect? If so, they can take steps. I find it positive that Chinese people try to speak more Mandarin, reducing diglossia problems.

I've been reading about Arabic diglossia, the situation with Modern Stadard Arabic (MSA or fuS-HA) vs spoken vernaculars is much worse than that with Mandarin vs dialects.

MSA is a written standard of Qur'aan (Koran) and mass media, education, formal situations. A much more grammatically complicated language than spoken dialects with very few borrowings and practically unchanged in centuries.

Spoken dialects are used by majority of Arabs but they are dialects differ greatly from MSA.

MSA is not a native language to anyone (unlike Chinese dialects), so exposure is limited (Quran reciting, formal news, kids have hard time to learn it before they can get formal education. The education level in Arabic countries is relatively, many explain this by the the diglossia problem. Neither MSA gets modified because of purists, nor spoken dialects get upgraded to become formal language, many of those dialects have no written form (like Chinese dialects).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic

[hkkevin]

While writing this, I subconsciously have assumed that if Taiwanese people think that their language is a branch of Chinese, usage of Mandarin will increase, which will eventually help move most Taiwanese voters towards a reunification position. Conversely, if Taiwanese were to become popularized in the print media and other forms of media, that will bode well for the people who favor formal independence. But then again, who is to say if this assumption is correct? The English, French, German, Spanish speaking worlds are all multi-polar. Canada feels no need to 「unify」 with the US, even though the two countries are speak almost identically.

The name "Chinese characters" often misleads foreigners it's an exclusive part of Chinese cultural artifacts. We better see it like alphabets. People can embrace alphabets, but not necessarily mean that they embrace the semitic or egyptian cultures.

When China was conquered by Manchu, some Asia nations, like Japan or Korea once thought that "the culture of zhongyuan" had been dead in the middle kingdom, and they inherited the orthodox Han culture. These non-Chinese nations can actually build up their own cultural identity with chinese characters too, as today Kanji is exclusive to Japan, Hanja is to Korea.

After skimming the article, I've been in doubt. The conclusion neglects the fact that Taiwanese is actually written in Traditional Chinese character. Simplfied Chinese and Traditional Chinese isn't only different in their shapes, it's also representing different cultural values behind them and their difference can be big enough to make separate cultural identity for different countries.

[Ah-Bin]

was under the impression that Taiwan-hua was simply Fukien-hua.

If that is the case, it'll survive just fine...on the mainland.

I thought the same before I came to Xiamen. But here I notice the same thing as in Taiwan, that teenagers speak Mandarin to each other. I asked some of them if they could speak Hokkien, and the reply was that they speak it at home sometimes, but that they don't speak it with their friends because it is a bit "song" (this means something like "rustic"). So I give it fifty years in Xiamen before it dies out. I haven't been to Zhangzhou yet, maybe the situation is different there.

Also I tried walking around for a whole day only speaking Hokkien, and found the following:

Most people try to speak Mandarin to me, it takes about a minute to convince them that I can't speak it, but eventually it succeeds.

Some people don't even understand the most basic Hokkien ("How much does this cost? etc.")

After pretending I can only speak Hokkien I have some good conversations with my basic Hokkien. But sometimes people have to act as translators.

[wix]

I thought the same before I came to Xiamen. But here I notice the same thing as in Taiwan, that teenagers speak Mandarin to each other. I asked some of them if they could speak Hokkien, and the reply was that they speak it at home sometimes, but that they don't speak it with their friends because it is a bit "song" (this means something like "rustic"). So I give it fifty years in Xiamen before it dies out. I haven't been to Zhangzhou yet, maybe the situation is different there.

I found a similar situation when I was in Xiamen. In fact I rarely heard the language being spoken there. However, the situation was very different in a smaller city further south where I spent a lot of time. There is probably an urban/rural divide and young/old divide in the use of Minnanhua versus Mandarin in Fujian as there is in Taiwan.

The survival of Taiwanese in Taiwan and Minnanhua in Fujian Province probably share a lot of common challenges.