Professor Khin-huann Li
TAIPEI, TAIWAN – For more than half a century the Chinese government did an excellent job of decimating the Taiwanese language. In 1949, the Chinese Nationalist Party a.k.a. the Kuomintang (KMT) fled the Chinese mainland to reconsolidate their power on the island of Taiwan. There they banned Taiwanese, the main local language, from being spoken in all public institutions. Fines and beatings were enforced to ensure compliance, and Mandarin Chinese was established as Taiwan’s official language.
When martial law was lifted in 1987, so too was the practice of punishment for speaking Taiwanese. But by then it was too late. Young people in Taiwan were now communicating almost exclusively in Mandarin Chinese. Today, some experts estimate that 80 percent of the Taiwanese population in their 20s and 30s cannot speak Taiwanese, a statistic one local professor finds infuriating.
I first met Professor Khin-huann Li (李勤岸) in the fall of 2008, while visiting my parents in Taipei. Growing up in the States, I spoke a mixture of English, Taiwanese, and Chinese at home (though most often in English, and more often in Taiwanese than in Mandarin). While I can hardly claim fluency in Taiwanese, I was struck by how much easier I was able to communicate in the once de facto mother tongue of Taiwan than some of my younger cousins in town. (Thanks mom and dad!)
