Language
and Ethnic Identity in Taiwan
Wi-vun
Taiffalo Chiung
The University of Texas at Arlington
Taiwan is a multilingual and multicultural society. There are
currently four basic ethnic groups: indigenous people (1.7% of Taiwan’s
population), Hakka (12%), Holo (73.3%), and Mainlanders (13%). Unlike the
first three groups, which have resided in Taiwan for hundreds of years,
Mainlanders are the latest immigrant group which moved to Taiwan with the
Chinese KMT regime in the 1940s. Under KMT’s monolingual policy, the
foreign Mandarin language was adopted as the official language of Taiwan
in 1945. This paper examines the relationships among three
characteristics, i.e. mother tongue, language ability, and ethnic identity
among the Hakka, Holo, and Mainlanders.
An investigation was conducted with a total of 244 students with
different ethnic backgrounds from Tamkang and Tamsui Universities in
Taiwan. The subjects’ mother tongue, language ability, and ethnic
identity were determined by their self-reports on a survey. The results of
chi-square tests show that there are significantly different relationship
patterns on the three characteristics among the Hakka, Holo, and
Mainlanders categories. First, only the Holo category shows substantially
interdependent relationships among self-identified Holo mother tongue,
Holo language ability, and Holo identity. That is, if a person identifies
her/his mother tongue as Holo, then she/he is more likely to have Holo
language ability and Holo identity. Second, the Hakka category shows
partly interdependent relationships among the three characteristics. The
survey reveals there is a one-way dependency between Hakka mother tongue
and Hakka identity. That is, a person with Hakka mother tongue is more
likely to show her/his Hakka ethnic identity. However, a person with Hakka
identity is not more likely to regard her/his mother tongue as the Hakka
language. Third, for the Mainlanders category, there is no interdependent
relationship among the three characteristics.
The different relationship patterns among the Hakka, Holo, and
Mainlanders reveal the effects of monolingual policy on the ecology of
languages in Taiwan. The one-way dependent relationship in Hakka category
reveals that people are losing their Hakka mother tongue faster than their
Hakka identity. Since the Hakka are a minority compared to the Holo, the
monolingual policy has had a greater impact on the Hakka than the Holo. As
for the Mainlanders category, the interdependent relationships among the
Mandarin mother tongue, Mandarin ability, and Mainlanders are not yet well
established since Mandarin was introduced as the official language only
about 55 years ago.
Key words: Taiwanese,
ethnicity, identity, Hakka, Holo, Mainlanders