Photos of Historic Taiwan

Historic photographs along with a theme song from the I-Lan International Children's Folklore and Folkgame Festival. The KMT county magistrate discontinued the festival (inventing a lackluster "Rain" festival in 2009 when there was large objection to the loss of the international festival) but now that the new magistrate is from the DPP maybe they will start it back again.

Merry Christmas and Reminders to practice speaking Taiwanese.

It is great to see Taiwanese young professionals enjoying their Taiwanese language even though for their whole school life, they have been forced to use Mandarin and they are sometimes out of practice in expressing certain things in Taiwanese.

Here's a rough translation of their comments:

"Merry Christmas..." (speaker is originally from Chiayi)
"Merry Christmas, pastor... You must remember to practice Taiwanese language every day..." (speaker is originally from Pingtung)
"I'm sorry but I am too busy at the moment [to say anything on the video]..." (speaker is from Taipei)
"Merry Christmas, pastor. We all practice Taiwanese every day, how about you?" (speaker is Hakka)
"Do you remember how to speak Taiwanese? (This college student is from Kaohsiung and spoke too fast for me to catch two words...)"
"Merry Christmas, pastor. Thanks for letting us use your apartment to celebrate Christmas. ...(in Mandarin: "Goodbye.")...Sorry, I should not say [goodbye in Mandarin], I should say, "Goodbye." [in Taiwanese]... Come back soon." (speaker is from Pingtung)


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If anyone has video links of other young folks in Taiwan using their non-Mandarin language mother tongue, please let me know. Use your digital camera to take video and you can upload your video clipping easily. Especially please take opportunities to video-tape young folks speaking Austronesian languages in Taiwan.


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Here's another video of someone in Australia discussing mother-tongues in Hoklo Taiwanese. Notice how he still calls Mandarin "Kok-gí" [國語]-- the "national language." This propagandistic designation continued from the KMT authoritarian era creates a prestige-language environment that demeans other mother tongues in Taiwan.

The more appropriate designation of Mandarin would be "Hôa-gí" [華語] which is the international standard designation for Mandarin. Such usage would remove any problems in Taiwan, but still causes problems in China since it still propagates both a "prestige" title as well as misinformation. The Hôa 華 refers to ethnic "Chinese". That is like calling French "Latin" to the exclusion of other Latin-derived languages.

In Taiwan, there are three mutually unintelligible classical-Chinese derived languages: Taiwanese, Hakka, and Mandarin. There are many more mutually-unintelligible Chinese-derived languages in China including Cantonese, Shanghainese, etc. Mandarin is the furthest from classical Chinese because it was heavily influence by the non-Chinese Manchu conquerers who ruled China and other east and central Asian countries in an empire that lasted for four hundred years. It could be argued that because of the forced usage in authoritarian communist China, Mandarin is becoming the main "Chinese" language and so the designation is appropriate. At any rate, the designation "Hôa-gí" [華語] is the international standard and should be used in Taiwan instead of "Kok-gí" [國語] for clarity and neutrality. One could also call it Pak-kiaⁿ-gí Beijing-Speach [北京語] -- but in most people's minds, this designation has come to refer to a northern dialect of Mandarin.