The Survival of Tâi-gí
A new generation of activists revives interest in a native language as Taiwan seeks distance from China.
NOVEMBER 27, 2024
The grandmother who lives across the street from us in Tainan takes a proprietorial interest in what is happening on the block. We don’t know her name, so we refer to her as A-má — Taiwanese for grandmother. On the day my partner and I moved in last year, after relocating from Scotland, we spotted A-má standing in her doorway. Bending forward at the waist, arms spread wide and fingers splayed, she peered out at the street and, when she caught our eye, gave a fierce nod. We nodded back. Several days later, soon after we had unpacked, A-má beckoned us over. I greeted her in Mandarin.
“Zǎo ān!” Good morning! I told her we were the new neighbors.
She replied in Taiwanese, or Tâi-gí. I couldn’t understand a word.
“Nihongo?” she asked. Japanese?
“Sumimasen,” I said in Japanese. I’m sorry.
“Tâi-gí?”
“Duìbùqǐ,” I replied in Mandarin. I’m sorry.
She bent down to touch her toes in one light, swift movement. Straightening up, she held up her fingers to show us her age.
“Bāshíjiǔ?” I asked in Mandarin. Eighty-nine?
A-má nodded. She mimed having muscles, and we all laughed. I asked another couple of questions, trying to prolong the conversation in Mandarin, but she brushed them aside. Seeing we were at an impasse, we said goodbye. It was then I realized that if I wanted to speak to the neighbors here in Taiwan’s south, the Mandarin I had spent much of the last decade struggling to acquire wouldn’t be sufficient. I would have to learn Tâi-gí.
Once Taiwan’s most widely spoken language, Tâi-gí fell out of use due to the imposition of Japanese, and later Mandarin Chinese, in public life. More recently, however, thanks to a growing grassroots movement, the language is seeing a surprising resurgence.
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The emergence of Tâi-gí — and its subsequent decline — is tied to a long history of colonization. Taiwan has been sought after and partially controlled by outsiders since the early 1600s, when Dutch colonial powers secured a foothold in the western part of the island. At the time of the Dutch arrival, Taiwan was already a multilingual island, speaking a variety of indigenous languages. Over the centuries that followed, this linguistic diversity increased, with growing immigration from China bringing other languages such as Hakka, Cantonese and Hokkien. However, by far the greatest number of migrants came from China’s Hokkien-speaking Fujian province. Gradually, Hokkien became Taiwan’s predominant language, where it developed a flair distinctive to the island, becoming what is now known as Tâi-gí.
When China’s Qing dynasty ceded the island to Japan after the First Sino-Japanese War, Japan sought to make Taiwan a model colony. It waged a series of brutal campaigns against Taiwan’s indigenous communities to assert control over the entirety of the island. Meanwhile, the new rulers promoted Japanese as the language of public life. By 1920, all schools taught in Japanese, giving rise to a two-tier system: the prestige language of education and government was Japanese, while Taiwan’s other languages were relegated to the domestic and informal spheres. By the time A-má was born in the 1930s, most people in Taiwan spoke basic Japanese.
Those who used languages besides Mandarin in class or on the playground had signs hung round their necks that said, “I love speaking guóyǔ,” and were punished with beatings and fines.
All this abruptly changed when Japan relinquished control of Taiwan back to China at the end of World War II. Across the strait, China was slipping into civil war between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Kuomintang and Mao Zedong’s Communist forces. In 1949, the defeated Nationalists retreated to Taiwan thinking they’d regroup and retake the whole of China. They brought with them an influx of migrants, supporters and refugees. Estimates vary, but historians put the number of new arrivals somewhere between 1 million and 2.5 million people, adding to a population of just over 6 million already living in Taiwan. The greatest proportion of these people settled in and around Taipei, and most of them spoke Mandarin.
The Nationalists imposed martial law in Taiwan, cracking down on free association, restricting freedom of the press, legislating against the establishment of new political parties, and putting in place sweeping powers of arrest. They outlawed Japanese and introduced Mandarin as Taiwan’s new guóyǔ, or “national language.” They also banned publishing in Taiwan’s other languages, including Tâi-gí. In schools, children who had previously studied in Japanese had to switch to Mandarin, a language most did not understand. To enforce the new language policies, schools set up disciplinary patrols to root out backsliders who spoke Japanese, Tâi-gí or any other languages. Those who used languages besides Mandarin in class or on the playground had signs hung round their necks that said, “I love speaking guóyǔ,” and were punished with beatings and fines.
The end of martial law four decades later, in 1987, set in motion a transition to democracy that culminated in 1996 in Taiwan’s first multi-party elections and a renewed interest in and advocacy for Taiwan’s linguistic diversity. Over 20 years later, in 2019, this advocacy was formalized in Taiwan’s National Languages Act, which sought to recognize “the multicultural nature of the nation,” and asserted that, “all national languages shall be equal; nationals using a national language shall not be discriminated against or face restrictions.”
But the long decades of language suppression were ruthlessly effective. In Taiwan’s last census in 2020, around 66 percent of people aged 65 and over reported Tâi-gí as their primary language, compared to only 17 percent for those under 35. This generational divide can be felt on my block in Tainan. A-má’s generation grew up speaking Japanese in school and Taiwanese at home. When I wait outside for the garbage truck to roll down the street, I chat with her middle-aged son in Mandarin. He speaks Mandarin and Tâi-gí equally well. But his children, now in their twenties, speak only Mandarin.
But these days, a growing majority of people in Taiwan identify as Taiwanese, rather than Chinese. According to the Pew Research Center, 67 percent of people in Taiwan identify primarily as Taiwanese, 28 percent identify as both Taiwanese and Chinese, and only 3 percent see themselves as primarily Chinese. The statistics are even starker among people under 35: 83 percent see themselves as primarily Taiwanese, and 73 percent feel no emotional attachment to China. Given these stark numbers, language activists, educators, artists, musicians, and writers are making the case that Tâi-gí is not only the language of your A-má, but a way to rediscover Taiwan’s multifaceted, hybrid identity.
In my quest to learn Tâi-gí, I ordered the 1985 Maryknoll Catholic mission Taiwanese textbooks, still considered the best resource around for English speakers wanting to master this difficult language. At first, I struggled to understand its grammar, sentence structure and competing writing systems (some writers use Roman script, while others use Chinese characters, or a cocktail of the two). But by book three, I could translate sentences like this one: Chhù-lāi hit saⁿ chiah niáu-chhí, in-ūi i bē-hiáu phah, o͘-pe̍h phah, só͘-í kàu lō͘-bóe long phah-bô-pòaⁿ-chiah. “He struck wildly at those three rats in the house, but because he didn’t know how to hit them, in the end he didn't hit a single one.” Nevertheless, speaking was still a problem. I turned to YouTube, where I came across Chiu Ka-éng, better known as Ayo, one of Taiwan’s most well-known advocates of Tâi-gí.
“We feel Taiwanese, and yet we don’t speak the language of Taiwan,” Ayo told me.
Ayo’s YouTube channel Tâi-lâm mōe-á kà lí kóng Tâi-gí (A Tainan Girl Teaches You Tâi-gí) makes for compulsive viewing. Her videos, shot in neon pinks and purples, are relentlessly energetic, funny and off-beat. Alongside standard pronunciation drills and quizzes, she posts interviews, skits and comedy game shows all in Tâi-gí. The channel has around 37,000 subscribers and her videos have gained over 1,200,000 views.
The ebullience of Ayo’s YouTube channel is underpinned by a seriousness and sense of urgency. “I wonder if my mother tongue will vanish within my lifetime,” Ayo told me in a conversation over Zoom. “But before that, I feel as long as there are still many people who know this language, we can do a lot for it, right?”
Ayo didn’t intend to become an activist for the revival of Tâi-gí, even if the language was in her blood. Her father is a Tâi-gí novelist, poet, and singer, and the language of their family home was Tâi-gí. But in 2014, as a coalition of students and civil society organizations from across Taiwan protested a trade deal with China — a protest known as the Sunflower Movement that evolved into a defense of Taiwanese identity — Ayo was inspired to get involved. At a public political forum, Ayo fiercely critiqued Taiwan’s history of language suppression. The forum was streamed live to an online audience that peaked at over 100,000 viewers. After she spoke, young Taiwanese activists got in touch to tell Ayo they wanted to learn the language of their grandparents’ generation. A friend set up a Facebook page on her behalf. The page gained 7,000 likes overnight.
“We feel Taiwanese, and yet we don’t speak the language of Taiwan,” Ayo told me. “Our identity is complex and difficult to explain. So I think language is the simplest way for me to understand who I am.”
Beyond the work of activists like Ayo, Tâi-gí is also getting exposure in music and art. Across genres from rap to rock to indie, Tâi-gí music is newly fashionable: “Back Here Again” a song by the band EggPlantEgg has more than 167 million YouTube views. Meanwhile, films and TV shows that reflect Taiwan’s linguistic diversity have seen a renaissance. Writers and production companies have started to turn away from competing in the Mandarin-language market, in favor of presenting the distinctiveness of Taiwan’s multicultural and multilingual experience for a globalized audience. Shows such as the 2023 political drama Wave Makers move between Mandarin and Tâi-gí. Meanwhile, Port of Lies, from the same year, is even more ambitious. Tackling questions of indigenous rights and the experience of Southeast Asian migrant workers in Taiwan, characters speak Mandarin, Tâi-gí, the indigenous Amis language, Indonesian, English, Javanese and Japanese. Tâi-gí translation and publishing are also on the increase. The last few years have seen translations of works by James Joyce, Jane Austen, and at least two versions of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince into Tâi-gí. Comic series such as Yu Peiyun and Zhou Jianxin’s Son of Formosa, written in a mix of Japanese, Mandarin and Tâi-gí, have won local and international awards.
Some claim that Tâi-gí risks becoming a boutique language — fashionable, urban, middle-class, but increasingly distanced from everyday life.
This revival of interest in Tâi-gí is happening not only in the Tâi-gí-speaking heartlands of the south, but also in Taipei, Taiwan’s capital city. Last July, I paid a visit to Gutta Books&Coffee, a bookstore and community space in Taipei that holds regular Tâi-gí Mondays, where the staff operate entirely in the language. I spent a couple of hours leafing through books, reading poetry and chatting with staff and customers over beers.
“A mother tongue is not merely a tool for communication,” Siù Bâi, one of the stores’ owners, told me. “It is the core of cultural identity and emotional connection.” Even for those who do not speak the language well, Siù Bâi said, this chance to reconnect with the language of their grandparents’ generation “feels like coming home.”
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Among champions of Tâi-gí, there is a fear that the revival won’t outpace the decline. The fact is that locals can get by just fine in Taiwan with only Mandarin. Some claim that Tâi-gí risks becoming a boutique language — fashionable, urban, middle-class, but increasingly distanced from everyday life. During the days of Chinese Nationalist control, Tâi-gí was considered rural and lower-class, but its rising popularity among young highly educated individuals now shows the opposite, Ayo explained to me.
If languages die slowly over generations, they come back to life at the same glacial pace. Some linguists have argued that revitalizing a language depends on creating committed communities of speakers — and there is ample evidence in Taiwan of a growing number of people who are passionate enough about Tâi-gí to shape these kinds of committed communities.
During a recent interview on her YouTube channel, Ayo spoke with a friend who understood Tâi-gí but could only speak Mandarin. The conversation, about the afterlives of unsold books, took place in two languages. Ayo was worried about potential backlash for the hybrid format of the discussion, but the reception was broadly positive. “An audience member told me they thought it was really cool. They felt it was something unique to Taiwan — two people speaking different languages yet understanding each other. In a diverse island like ours, maybe in the future this could become the norm.”
The idea is an appealing one. When I think of A-má, with her Japanese and Tâi-gí, and her desire to connect with us newcomers, even though she knew we didn’t share a language, I imagine this is a vision of which she might approve. When my Tâi-gí is good enough, perhaps I will ask her.
✺ Published in “Issue 22: Language” of The Dial
