Abstract
Moving from Southeast Asia to Taiwan , this chapter provides a brief account of how the island developed into a society dominated by Chinese from southern Fujian in the course of two centuries. The dominant status of Southern Min was first lost to Japanese during the colonization period of 1895–1945, and then to Mandarin after the retrocession of Taiwan and relocation of the Nationalist government to the island in the second half of the 1940s. Southern Min, despite being the second largest language spoken in Taiwan, has its functional status standing somewhere between ethnic language and inner language , with a communicative index only half of that for Mandarin. Its use is increasingly confined to family members and close friends, showing a regional, locational, and generational divergence in society: spoken more frequently in the south than in the north, more commonly in rural areas than in urban centers, and more proficiently by the older generations (from the middle-aged on). Furthermore, teaching of Southern Min is deliberately left to grandparents in some families . Compared with Mandarin, children’s Southern Min is less fluent and used less often.
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- 1.
The census conducted in 1905 recorded a total population of approximately 3,040,000 for Taiwan . Of these, about 2,490,000 (82 %) were from Fujian and about 40,000 (13 %) were from the Hakka -speaking area in Guangdong (Ito 2004, p. 145).
- 2.
Hakka settlements concentrate in Hsinchu in Northern Taiwan and adjoining counties in Central Taiwan. Kerr (1974, p. 9) notes that Hakka frontiersmen probably represented a majority in developing the tip of the island in the very south, which belongs to present-day Pingtung county.
- 3.
Starting with this section, the more neutral and academic term Southern Min is adopted to refer to the language brought centuries ago to Taiwan from southern Fujian .
- 4.
For instance, the first Japanese -Southern Min pocket dictionary,日臺小辭典/Nittai Shoojiten, was published in 1897 and the classic Southern Min-Japanese dictionary, 臺日大辭典/Tai Nichi Daijiten, was published in two volumes in 1931–1932.
- 5.
For instance, Matsuda (2012, p. 698) relates anecdotes of Okinawan Japanese struggle with standard Japanese in Taipei /Taihoku, where Taiwanese shopkeepers provided the correct name of vegetables in standard Japanese to natives of Yaeyama archipelago.
- 6.
According to Qi (2008, p. 376), the success rate of this Japanization of personal names was rather low: only about 2.1 % of the population of Taiwan acquired a formal Japanese name, as of the end of November, 1943.
- 7.
Before the introduction of shinjitai/新字体 (lit. new character form) by the Japanese government in the late 1940s, the original kanji for 写真 was 寫真.
- 8.
‘False friends’ are common in the written form between the two languages, e.g. 手紙 means ‘letter’ in Japanese but ‘toilet paper’ in Mandarin Chinese , and 新聞 signifies ‘newspaper’ in Japanese but ‘news’ in Chinese.
- 9.
This way of learning Chinese is still in practice in many schools in Hong Kong and Macao , where Chinese characters are read in Cantonese .
- 10.
The headline is printed horizontally from left to right, but the texts of the story run vertically and should be read from right to left.
- 11.
Wei (2006, p. 103) describes Taiwanese Mandarin as ‘a hybrid variety mixed with local features from different provinces in China , heavily influenced by Southern Min , and colored by Japanese and English vocabulary’.
- 12.
In a broader sense, ‘Taiwanese ’ can include both Southern Min and Hakka (cf. Huang 1995, p. 16).
- 13.
This approach is essentially identical to the writing of Cantonese in Hong Kong (cf. Snow 2004).
- 14.
As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Chinese settlement in Eastern Taiwan is rather limited. The use of Southern Min there receives little attention in the sociolinguistic literature (for a general introduction, see Ang 1994, pp. 133–143). In view of its socioeconomic conditions being similar to that of Southern Taiwan, it is conjectured that Southern Min is still the favorite oral language used in public domains there.
- 15.
Mo’s (2000) exploration of a reverse language shift in post-martial law Taiwan seems not too optimistic in light of these research findings.
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Ding, P.S. (2016). Taiwan: The Haven for Southern Min?. In: Southern Min (Hokkien) as a Migrating Language. SpringerBriefs in Linguistics. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-594-5_4
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