Speaker: Edith Aldridge, Linguistics, Academia Sinica

Taiwan is the homeland of the Austronesian language family, speakers of Proto-Austronesian having migrated there from southeastern China roughly 6,000 years ago before proceeding to populate the Philippines, Indonesia/Malaysia, Madagascar, and the Pacific islands. As many as twenty distinct languages were spoken in Taiwan at the beginning of foreign contact in the 17th century. Now a third of these are extinct, and the rest are endangered. The first of these to decline were languages spoken in lowland areas in contact first with the small Dutch presence in southern Taiwan in the mid-17th century and subsequently with waves of Chinese migration in the 18th and 19th centuries. Intensive contact with highland Austronesians began with Japanese colonization during the first half the 20th century and continued under the Nationalist government from 1945 until the lifting of martial law in 1987. In 2001, the government inaugurated a revitalization program with the hope of invigorating the by then already endangered Austronesian languages, for example by introducing ethnic language education into local school curriculums. This presentation sketches the history of foreign contact, government language policies (particularly in the 20th century), revitalization efforts, and some outcomes of these policies and programs.

Introduced by John Whitman, Linguistics, Cornell University.

Co-sponsored by the Linguistics Department.