Language – Page 3 – Taiwan Insight

The Search for a Shared Script: A Very Brief History of Writing Lyrics in Taiwanese

18 September 2023 Yu-Chen

Written by Cheng-Ting Wu. Imagine you are trying to write a song in Taiwanese Southern Min (hereinafter “Taiwanese”). After creating a soulful melody and heartfelt lyrics, you wonder: How should I write them down? You can choose any of the music notations you prefer for melody, from staff to numbered system. For lyrics, regardless of whether you are a native speaker or a learner of Taiwanese, you also have a choice. This brief article discusses this choice or the different strategies in the history of writing music in Taiwanese.

Hoklo Rap and Taiwanese Resistance Vernaculars

15 September 2023 Yu-Chen

Written by Meredith Schweig. Since the end of the 1980s, when rap music first took root in urban Taiwan, artists have explored the creative possibilities inherent to rhyming in the multiple languages spoken on the island. Early commercial pop-oriented performers like Yu Chengqing tended to rap in Mandarin; acts primarily associated with the underground folk and rock scenes, like Blacklist Workshop and Jutoupi, performed almost exclusively in Hoklo; and American-born Taiwanese teen sensations the LA Boyz peppered their Mandarin and Hoklo verses with English.

Indigenous popular music and language revitalisation in Taiwan

13 September 2023 Yu-Chen

Written by Karen Huang. In 2020, Paiwan singer Abao (阿爆) became an overnight sensation at the 31st Golden Melody Awards (GMA) when her Paiwan album ‘Kinakaian MOTHER TONGUE’ brought home multiple major awards, including the ‘Album of the Year’ and ‘Song of the Year’. The awards surprised many, as Mandarin popular music usually dominates these two cross-language categories. It was the first time an Indigenous-language singer had won both categories simultaneously.

Indigenous Storytelling in and Beyond the Classroom

5 June 2023

Written by Yi-Yu Lai. One afternoon in 2011, Hong-sui Lim visited a Kaxabu village due to his participation in an anthropological camp. This marked his first encounter with the Kaxabu people, one of the Plain Indigenous groups inhabiting the Puli Basins in central Taiwan. Lim was astonished by the small number of Kaxabu elders who still speak their mother tongue, as it is commonly believed that Plain Indigenous peoples have been assimilated by Han Chinese culture and have lost their own languages and traditions. As a result, Lim returned to the Kaxabu communities as an undergraduate student to learn more about their endangered cultural heritage and began collaborating with the Kaxabu people.

Leveraging Cultural Exports for Resilience: Insights from Taiwan and South Korea

19 May 2023 Adrian Chiu

Written by Tommy Hall and Margaret Siu. Global discussions about Taiwan often focus on an invasion scenario, and many observers wonder if Taiwan is adequately preparing for war. These discussions often dissect Taiwan’s hard power—military and economic factors that may dissuade Beijing. However, soft power is crucial in conflicts between imbalanced parties. Current discussion would benefit from diversifying outside hard power calculations and examining Taiwan’s soft power. Taiwan should apply lessons from South Korea’s model to bolster its ability to co-opt global support. Describing Taiwan’s soft power vision and comparing both nations’ top-down cultural promotion efforts is helpful.

The Many Faces of the Hokkien-language Internet

24 August 2022

Written by Sam Robbins. This linguistic transnationalism has never died. In the digital era, online content distinctly aimed at promoting Taiwanese Hokkien within Taiwan abounds, but there is also a wide range of content created by communities interested in Hokkien generally. Hokkien-speaking populations across national borders also found each other and formed groups on social media. They share, remix, and collate content in these spaces rather than promote particular types of language use. For example, “Min Peoples, Min Languages” (閩人閩語), a Facebook group with almost 20,000 members from Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and China, is dedicated to “sharing everything relating to Southern Min (folk) culture, (folk) songs, and Southern Min languages.”

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