師大學報;人文與社會類
民國 97 年.53(1)
.“
-81The Lexical Influence of Colonial Language
Policies on Taiwanese Novel-Writing
,
1924-1998:
A Computer-Assisted Corpus Analysis
Chin-
An
Li
Graduate Institute ofTaiwan Culture, Languages & Literature, National Taiwan Nonnal University
Abstract
In Taiwan the language of the majority of the population, Taiwanese,
historically has been subject to two “national" language policies due to political colonization. Both policies resulted in linguistic contact between Taiwanese and other languages which led to certain forms of lexical change and variation in the writing of Taiwanese novels. From 1895 to 1945, Japan occupied Taiwan and practiced a colonial language policy, making Japanese the national language. From 1941 to this day, the Chinese have practiced their own colonial language policy by replacing Japanese with Mandarin Chinese as the nationallanguage. The influence of both Japanese and Chinese languages on the Taiwanese lexicon has been overwhelming. This researcher has collected five Taiwanese novels written in Romanized Chinese by two novelists during the Japanese era,
specifically in the period 1924-1960, and has also compiled a corpus of 113,880 words after computer-aided segmentation. He has also collected another lexical corpus based on Taiwanese novels written in the 90's and using a total of 94,910 different words. Comparing these
two c。中ora, the researcher has found that the J apanese influence on
Taiwanese novel writing had not decreased as significant1y as might have been expected; on the other hand