Taiwan linguist promotes indigenous language preservation

2020/02/10

Taiwan’s government has made increasing support for non-Mandarin languages in official spaces such as schools and government venues a priority in its mission to promote a truly multilingual society. Nowhere is action more urgently required than in preserving the languages of local indigenous peoples, with the Graduate Institute of Linguistics at Taipei City-based National Taiwan University leading the way.

 There are 16 different tribes officially recognized in the country alongside 16 aboriginal languages plus numerous dialects. “They’re widely considered invaluable by international linguists,” said Sung Li-may, an associate professor at GIL.

Some scholars believe Taiwan is the likely source for Austronesian languages around the world, given that nine of the 10 language families are found in the country. This has given rise to the hypothesis that Austronesian peoples originally settled in Taiwan before migrating outward to Southeast Asia and Oceania, including Easter Island in the east and Madagascar in the west, according to Sung.

 Head of the Indigenous Languages Research and Development Center under the Cabinet-level Council of Indigenous Peoples from 2016 to 2019, Sung is currently a member of the council’s Indigenous Languages Development Committee.

 The linguist has taught Austronesian languages at GIL for more than two decades since it was established in 1994. Each year, the institute’s students are sent for a five-day visit to a tribal village to talk with elderly residents. Recent trips included to an Atayal settlement in northern Taiwan’s Miaoli County and to the Tao people on Orchid Island in the southeastern county of Taitung.

In 2018 and 2019, Sung was a co-leader of an NTU project supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology’s Department of Humanities and Social Sciences conducting interdisciplinary research on Austronesian cultures, spanning such fields as anthropology, archaeology, botany, geography, history, law, linguistics, literature and sociology.

 A follow-on program at NTU is now looking to build language databanks using artificial intelligence, starting with the indigenous Seediq and Amis languages, Sung said. “Emerging technologies are giving us new opportunities to preserve and pass on languages that might otherwise die out.”

For Sung and many other scholars, it is a matter of profound regret that Taiwan was once deaf to the tongues of native inhabitants. The future is much brighter, though, after the country’s postdemocratization embrace of liberal, pluralistic values. “It’s high time for us to reevaluate and revive the country’s linguistic heritage,” she said.

Source: Taiwan Today (https://taiwantoday.tw/index.php)