At the 35th Golden Melody Awards ceremony held this year, singer Makav won Best New Artist and Best Indigenous Language Album. Makav began composing music in Bunun, her mother tongue, when she was 17. Indigenous music is gaining traction at the Golden Melody Awards, which manifests the importance of Taiwan’s cultural and educational policy on the promotion of diverse native languages. Only when Taiwanese identify with their native languages and cultures can valuable music compositions be created.
I once took a field trip to China and conducted research in a Miao community. I discovered that Taiwanese value indigenous language culture and education significantly more than Chinese do. To achieve cultural and political homogeneity, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is sinicizing China’s indigenous people, eradicating their languages and cultures in the process.
In Taiwan, the government is establishing an organization for indigenous language teachers and the planning of indigenous language courses. Moreover, it is launching policies, including last year’s indigenous language teacher excellence program, as well as livestreamed indigenous language classes. To preserve rare languages and to raise the cultural awareness of indigenous students, the government is doing its best.
However, promoting indigenous languages in Taiwan is not without challenges, one of which is indigenous students’ faltering motivation to learn them. Students are encouraged to learn their native languages, but gradually run out of enthusiasm after they begin. Indigenous parents tend to be less willing to assist their children in learning native languages because of life pressure. How to stimulate indigenous students’ inner motivation to learn their native language is the first big challenge.
The second big challenge is how to make students recognize the uniqueness and importance of their native languages. They are not exposed to a natural language learning environment. Burdened by stress from their schoolwork, they find it hard to be enthused by their native languages. If they are unaware of the importance of traditional culture and customs, they would not think it is necessary to learn their native languages.
The government must help make indigenous people appreciate the distinctiveness and irreplaceability of their native languages and cultures.
Knight Chang is a political worker and holds a doctorate in education.
Translated by Chen Chi-huang
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
I have heard people equate the government’s stance on resisting forced unification with China or the conditional reinstatement of the military court system with the rise of the Nazis before World War II. The comparison is absurd. There is no meaningful parallel between the government and Nazi Germany, nor does such a mindset exist within the general public in Taiwan. It is important to remember that the German public bore some responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust. Post-World War II Germany’s transitional justice efforts were rooted in a national reckoning and introspection. Many Jews were sent to concentration camps not
RSS