Language, Culture and Identity: Romanization in Taiwan and its Implications

Abstract

Historically, language and power have been intricately intertwined, especially during colonial periods or under authoritarian rule. Over the past one hundred years, writers and intellectuals in Taiwan have expressed diverse opinions regarding the medium of language, not only when demonstrating their linguistic preferences but also when expressing their cultural inclinations and aims of enlightenment. As the indigenous languages Hoklo and Hakka do not have a standardized writing system, Romanization served as a convenient system, employed by foreign missionaries, to communicate with the local Taiwanese population. Although traditional Chinese characters have been the dominant scripts in Taiwan since the second half of the twentieth century, intellectuals and writers in modern and contemporary Taiwan have continued to adopt Romanization in different socio-historical contexts in order to eliminate illiteracy and to write in their native tongue. The Romanization system advocated by Cai Peihuo, an intellectual from colonial Taiwan, represents the former, whereas the aboriginal authors’ bilingual writing represents the latter. This paper provides a historical overview of the various Romanization efforts made throughout Taiwanese history. The first section will analyze how it was first devised for Taiwan’s indigenous population by missionaries, then by intellectuals and linguistic activists such as Cai Peihuo whose interest was in Taiwan’s Hoklo people and, more recently, by Taiwan’s aboriginal writers. As the foreign missionaries’ use of Romanization was mainly limited to religious texts, this paper will focus primarily on the case of Cai Peihuo and on contemporary aboriginal authors’ bilingual writings. The second section will look at Cai’s enlightenment motive of promoting Romanized script. It will also scrutinize the evolution of Cai’s Romanization project - from the earlier Romanization, based on the phonetic transliteration of the spoken Taiwanese language, through the revised system based on the Japanese kana and, finally, to the Romanization based on the Chinese phonetic system around 1948. In order to explore the reasons why Cai was unable to fully realize his Romanization project, the third section will compare the contexts of colonial Taiwan and colonial Vietnam in terms of the colonizers’ attitudes toward Romanization. Finally, the paper will discuss Romanized transliteration in the works by Taiwan’s aboriginal authors.