TSU lawmakers say they will petition the Legislative Yuan to make Hokkien Taiwan's second official language alongside Mandarin.
They plan to make the proposal next week at the legislature and if successful in their venture, demand the Ministry of Education to adjust school syllabuses to increase the number of hours that youngsters would be required to spend studying Hokkien.
They said the initiative is not intended to exacerbate ethnic tensions, but rather to ease strain between different ethnic groups by acknowledging that Taiwan is a multi-cultural society.
PHOTO: CHIANG YING-YING,TAIPEI TIMES
The idea, however, has drawn flak from opposition parties, who called upon the TSU to stop raising politically sensitive issues.
Just two weeks after the beginning of the legislative session, the pro-Taiwan political group has whipped up a media frenzy by championing highly controversial policies.
The language issue comes hot on the heels of TSU proposals to halve the number of legislative seats and to require presidential candidates to be born in Taiwan.
However, TSU legislators deflected accusations that they harbor extreme political ideologies.
"Many democratic nations have long accepted the notion that a country does not necessarily need to have just one official language. Multiple-language policy has been adopted in many countries," TSU lawmaker Cheng Chen-lung (
Singapore, Finland and Canada all have two official languages, whereas Switzerland has four, according to Cheng.
Cheng said in light of the fact that more than 75 percent of people in Taiwan speak Hokkien fluently, there is no reason why Hokkien can't be designated as an official language.
The lawmaker stated that his proposal will pacify, not inflame the ethnic tension in Taiwan if everybody speaks the same language because "the cultural gap will instantly vanish."
The lawmaker also pointed out that learning native languages for just four hours a week at the elementary-school level is insufficient. He said teaching hours should be extended for students to achieve a greater level of language ability.
Students of grades one through six are currently required to select at least one language, either Hokkien, Hakka or one of the numerous Aboriginal languages. The language course only accounts for one-tenth of the entire weekly learning hours.
Cheng's initiative won endorsement from his party's allied DPP lawmakers, but the motion was attacked by opposition parties.
Throwing his weight behind the initiative, lawmaker Wang Tuoh (王拓), a DPP caucus leader, said there is "nothing outrageous in officially designating Hokkien as the second national language," given that the language is prevalently used in society.
"This matter can be discussed, it is not sensitive anymore. It is unnecessary to politicize the issue," Wang said.
He added that officially recognizing diverse languages will benefit the government showing that Taiwan is a democratic and open society.
KMT legislator Apollo Chen (
He said the TSU's initiative favors only Hokkien. "What about other native languages such as Hakka or the Aboriginal languages?" he asked.
PFP lawmaker Diane Lee (李慶安) said there is no need to further burden already-overworked students by prolonging hours set aside for for native-language study.
"Our students already shoulder too much stress from school studies. The proposal will further burden students merely to satisfy adults' [political] considerations," she said.
The nation’s fastest supercomputer, Nano 4 (晶創26), is scheduled to be launched in the third quarter, and would be used to train large language models in finance and national defense sectors, the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) said. The supercomputer, which would operate at about 86.05 petaflops, is being tested at a new cloud computing center in the Southern Taiwan Science Park in Tainan. The exterior of the server cabinet features chip circuitry patterns overlaid with a map of Taiwan, highlighting the nation’s central position in the semiconductor industry. The center also houses Taiwania 2, Taiwania 3, Forerunner 1 and
FIRST TRIAL: Ko’s lawyers sought reduced bail and other concessions, as did other defendants, but the bail judge denied their requests, citing the severity of the sentences Former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) was yesterday sentenced to 17 years in prison and had his civil rights suspended for six years over corruption, embezzlement and other charges. Taipei prosecutors in December last year asked the Taipei District Court for a combined 28-year, six-month sentence for the four cases against Ko, who founded the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). The cases were linked to the Core Pacific City (京華城購物中心) redevelopment project and the mismanagement of political donations. Other defendants convicted on separate charges included Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Angela Ying (應曉薇), who was handed a 15-year, six-month sentence; Core Pacific
J-6 REMODEL: The converted drones are part of Beijing’s expanding mix of airpower weapons, including bombers with stand-off missiles and UAV swarms, the report said China has stationed obsolete supersonic fighters converted to attack drones at six air bases close to the Taiwan Strait, a report published this month by the Arlington, Virginia-based Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies said. Satellite imagery of the airfields from the institute’s “China Airpower Tracker” shows what appear to be lines of stubby, swept-winged aircraft matching the shape of J-6 fighters that first flew with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force in the 1960s. Since their conversion to drones, the aircraft have been identified at five bases in China’s Fujian Province and one in Guangdong Province, the report said. J.
China used fake LinkedIn profiles to harvest sensitive data from NATO and EU institutions by soliciting information from staff, a European security source said on Friday. The operation, allegedly orchestrated by the Chinese Ministry of State Security, targeted dozens of employees at the military alliance or EU organizations through fictitious accounts, the source said, confirming reports in French and Belgian media. Posing as recruiters on the online professional networking platform, Chinese spies would initially request paid reports before later soliciting non-public or even classified information. One particularly active fake profile used the name “Kevin Zhang,” claiming to be the head
RSS