The Survival of Tâi-gí

The grandmother who lives across the street from us in Tainan takes a proprietorial interest in what is happening on the block. We don’t know her name, so we refer to her as A-má — Taiwanese for grandmother. On the day my partner and I moved in last year, after relocating from Scotland, we spotted A-má standing in her doorway. Bending forward at the waist, arms spread wide and fingers splayed, she peered out at the street and, when she caught our eye, gave a fierce nod. We nodded back. Several days later, soon after we had unpacked, A-má beckoned us over. I greeted her in Mandarin.

“Zǎo ān!” Good morning! I told her we were the new neighbors.

She replied in Taiwanese, or Tâi-gí. I couldn’t understand a word.

“Nihongo?” she asked. Japanese?

“Sumimasen,” I said in Japanese. I’m sorry.

“Tâi-gí?”

“Duìbùqǐ,” I replied in Mandarin. I’m sorry.

She bent down to touch her toes in one light, swift movement. Straightening up, she held up her fingers to show us her age.

“Bāshíjiǔ?” I asked in Mandarin. Eighty-nine?

A-má nodded. She mimed having muscles, and we all laughed. I asked another couple of questions, trying to prolong the conversation in Mandarin, but she brushed them aside. Seeing we were at an impasse, we said goodbye. It was then I realized that if I wanted to speak to the neighbors here in Taiwan’s south, the Mandarin I had spent much of the last decade struggling to acquire wouldn’t be sufficient. I would have to learn Tâi-gí.

Once Taiwan’s most widely spoken language, Tâi-gí fell out of use due to the imposition of Japanese, and later Mandarin Chinese, in public life. More recently, however, thanks to a growing grassroots movement, the language is seeing a surprising resurgence.

✺

The emergence of Tâi-gí — and its subsequent decline — is tied to a long history of colonization. Taiwan has been sought after and partially controlled by outsiders since the early 1600s, when Dutch colonial powers secured a foothold in the western part of the island. At the time of the Dutch arrival, Taiwan was already a multilingual island, speaking a variety of indigenous languages. Over the centuries that followed, this linguistic diversity increased, with growing immigration from China bringing other languages such as Hakka, Cantonese and Hokkien. However, by far the greatest number of migrants came from China’s Hokkien-speaking Fujian province. Gradually, Hokkien became Taiwan’s predominant language, where it developed a flair distinctive to the island, becoming what is now known as Tâi-gí.

When China’s Qing dynasty ceded the island to Japan after the First Sino-Japanese War, Japan sought to make Taiwan a model colony. It waged a series of brutal campaigns against Taiwan’s indigenous communities to assert control over the entirety of the island. Meanwhile, the new rulers promoted Japanese as the language of public life. By 1920, all schools taught in Japanese, giving rise to a two-tier system: the prestige language of education and government was Japanese, while Taiwan’s other languages were relegated to the domestic and informal spheres. By the time A-má was born in the 1930s, most people in Taiwan spoke basic Japanese.

Those who used languages besides Mandarin in class or on the playground had signs hung round their necks that said, “I love speaking guóyǔ,” and were punished with beatings and fines.

All this abruptly changed when Japan relinquished control of Taiwan back to China at the end of World War II. Across the strait, China was slipping into civil war between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Kuomintang and Mao Zedong’s Communist forces. In 1949, the defeated Nationalists retreated to Taiwan thinking they’d regroup and retake the whole of China. They brought with them an influx of migrants, supporters and refugees. Estimates vary, but historians put the number of new arrivals somewhere between 1 million and 2.5 million people, adding to a population of just over 6 million already living in Taiwan. The greatest proportion of these people settled in and around Taipei, and most of them spoke Mandarin.

The Nationalists imposed martial law in Taiwan, cracking down on free association, restricting freedom of the press, legislating against the establishment of new political parties, and putting in place sweeping powers of arrest. They outlawed Japanese and introduced Mandarin as Taiwan’s new guóyǔ, or “national language.” They also banned publishing in Taiwan’s other languages, including Tâi-gí. In schools, children who had previously studied in Japanese had to switch to Mandarin, a language most did not understand. To enforce the new language policies, schools set up disciplinary patrols to root out backsliders who spoke Japanese, Tâi-gí or any other languages. Those who used languages besides Mandarin in class or on the playground had signs hung round their necks that said, “I love speaking guóyǔ,” and were punished with beatings and fines.

The end of martial law four decades later, in 1987, set in motion a transition to democracy that culminated in 1996 in Taiwan’s first multi-party elections and a renewed interest in and advocacy for Taiwan’s linguistic diversity. Over 20 years later, in 2019, this advocacy was formalized in Taiwan’s National Languages Act, which sought to recognize “the multicultural nature of the nation,” and asserted that, “all national languages shall be equal; nationals using a national language shall not be discriminated against or face restrictions.”

But the long decades of language suppression were ruthlessly effective. In Taiwan’s last census in 2020, around 66 percent of people aged 65 and over reported Tâi-gí as their primary language, compared to only 17 percent for those under 35. This generational divide can be felt on my block in Tainan. A-má’s generation grew up speaking Japanese in school and Taiwanese at home. When I wait outside for the garbage truck to roll down the street, I chat with her middle-aged son in Mandarin. He speaks Mandarin and Tâi-gí equally well. But his children, now in their twenties, speak only Mandarin.

But these days, a growing majority of people in Taiwan identify as Taiwanese, rather than Chinese. According to the Pew Research Center, 67 percent of people in Taiwan identify primarily as Taiwanese, 28 percent identify as both Taiwanese and Chinese, and only 3 percent see themselves as primarily Chinese. The statistics are even starker among people under 35: 83 percent see themselves as primarily Taiwanese, and 73 percent feel no emotional attachment to China. Given these stark numbers, language activists, educators, artists, musicians, and writers are making the case that Tâi-gí is not only the language of your A-má, but a way to rediscover Taiwan’s multifaceted, hybrid identity.