CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
1.1 Linguistic background
Taiwan is a society with multiple languages, mainly including Mandarin, Min1, Hakka, and more than ten different indigenous languages. These languages entered Taiwan during different time periods2. Unlike the aboriginal languages that have been residing in Taiwan for more than thousands of years, Min and Hakka arrived at Taiwan only hundreds of years ago. With the demographic advantage of the Min population, Min language has been the lingua franca in Taiwan for a long time before the government imposed a Mandarin-only policy since 1956 (Huang, 1993). In contrast, Mandarin is a relative newcomer to Taiwan. Despite its late arrival,
Mandarin has rapidly become the most commonly used language in formal situations due to the government’s mandatory promotion (Ang, 1997; Ang, 2002).
Nowadays, most people living in Taiwan are capable of speaking Mandarin, with different degrees of accents coming from their own substrate mother tongues if the languages are different from Mandarin. According to the “Taiwan Social Change Survey: Year 4 of Round 6 (2013TSCS)” (Fu et al., 2014) sponsored by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, Republic of China, Min is the largest ethnic group (76.2%) in Taiwan based on residents’ self-identity, followed by Hakka (9.2%), Mainlanders (6.6%) and Austro-Polynesian aborigines (1.1%).3 Figure 1.1
demonstrates the ethnic composition of Taiwan residents surveyed in 2013.
1 Min languages consist of a large group of different dialects, such as Northern Min, Southern Min, etc.
Since Taiwan Southern Min is the most popular Min language in Taiwan, it is abbreviated as Min in the current study.
2 The ancestors of the indigenous languages were reported to immigrate into Taiwan around 15,000 years ago, before the end of the last ice age (M.-l. Lin, 2010).
3 The terminologies for ethnic identities in the 2013TSCS survey were ‘Taiwan Southern Min’,
‘Taiwan Hakka’, ‘Taiwan Aborigines’, ‘people from different provinces of Mainland (China)’,
‘Taiwan Mainlanders’, ‘people from Kinmen or Matsu Islands’, ‘people from Southeast Asia countries’,
2
Figure 1.1 The distribution of the self-identified ethnic groups of Taiwan residents surveyed in 2013. Data were from the 2013TSCS survey (Fu et al., 2014) with 1952 valid samples.
With the fact that the Min ethnic group dominates the population in Taiwan, it is not surprising that Min is used much more frequently than other languages. Based on the data of 2013TSCS (Fu et al., 2014) (see Figure 1.2), Min languages are still the most domestically used (44.2 %) even in the year of 2013, ten years after another similar survey conducted in 2003. As a result, Min possibly contributes the largest substrate influence to Mandarin spoken in Taiwan. In fact, it has long been reported that Min has a profound influence on the phonology of Taiwan Mandarin. Ing’s (1985) report, for example, described various aspects of the divergences of Taiwan Mandarin from Standard Mandarin taught in school due to Min and different dialects or accents of Mandarin, including onsets, rhymes, and tones.
However, the accents of Mandarin spoken in Taiwan are not highly homogeneous in the society all over the island owing to different levels of Min fluency. Phonological systems of Min and Mandarin are competing with each other
and others. Here we combined ‘people from different provinces of Mainland (China)’ and ‘Taiwan Mainlanders’ into a single group, which is ‘Mainlanders’.
Min Hakka Mainlander Abrigine Others
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for bilingual speakers based on complex factors, such as frequency of language usage, language competence, age of onset in learning a language, etc. As we can see in Figure 1.2, Mandarin is the one with the largest growth in the domestic usage throughout the ten years (from 23.4% to 31.4%), implying a more common usage of Mandarin among the younger generation. The domestic usage population of Min seems to be relativley stable (from 45.3% to 44.2%), whereas that of Hakka and other languages has decreased throughout the time.
Figure 1.2 The most often used language at home. Data were from the 2013TSCS survey (Fu et al., 2014). There were 2016 valid samples in the year of 2003 and 1952 valid samples in the year of 2013. Mix usage of Chinese languages stands for bilingual usage of Min and Mandarin (19.5%), or Hakka and Mandarin (1.5%), or trilingual usage of Min, Hakka and Mandarin (0.8%) in the year of 2013.
Besides the aforementioned survey data, Ang (1992) has also pointed out the change of status of language usage in Taiwan throughout recent decades. Before the year of 1945, Mandarin was hardly heard in Taiwan. Min dominated the other languages in the society, while Hakka and the aboriginal languages were also frequently used in their own regions at that time. Min was still the most dominant language in most parts of Taiwan before 1960s, but Mandarin gradually suppressed
0%
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Min and other languages after half a century of ruling by the Nationalist government.
Such a change of language usage in society due to governmental enforcement led to different Mandarin proficiency levels, and thus different accents, among different generations. The older generation speaks Mandarin with a stronger influence on pronunciation from the substrate languages. Such an influence among the younger generation is weaker since they do not use substrate languages as frequently as the older generation.
Apart from the aforementioned generation difference, the frequency of usage of languages also differs across regions. According to the “Census of population and housing 2010” (DGBAS, 2011), the usage of Mandarin decreases and that of Min increases as one goes further south in the western part of Taiwan. The average percentages of domestic usage of Mandarin for the northern, the central, and the southern regions are 91.8%, 78.5%, and 73.8%, respectively, while those of Min are 73.3%, 88.7%, and 91.9%, respectively. These findings all suggest that Taiwan is not a linguistically homogeneous society. Both age and region are possible independent variables that may shape one’s accent.