Ebook: The outlook for Taiwanese language preservation

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, Department of East Asian languages and civilizations. (Sino-Platonic Papers, 172, August, 2006). — 32 p.In this paper I will discuss the history of the Taiwanese language on the island of Taiwan, and explore its potential to continue into the future. I predict that over the next 50 years Taiwanese, as a language, will become increasingly marginalized, and that the recent increase in desire to promote Taiwanese is purely the short-term reaction of the generation of Taiwanese who went through periods of linguistic and cultural suppression. This is not to say that I believe it will completely disappear. To the contrary, I believe the Taiwanese language will remain as part of a cultural legacy, but how large that legacy will be depends on whether or not today’s Taiwanese people are able to standardize a script and computer inputting system that will preserve it in a written form and open up its domain of usage.