Can you speak taiwanese

Zach Hollo. While many people in Taiwan grew up speaking Taiwanese at home, they spoke Mandarin at school and work. This phenomenon caused a gradual decrease in Taiwanese language skills, with each successive generation losing bits of nuanced vocabulary and proper syntax. Today, many in Taiwan only use it to express greetings and basic phrases. This trend troubles people in Taiwan not only because it marks the loss of cultural heritage, but also because the Taiwanese language is imbued with historical and political significance.

This fed into a notion many Taiwanese have regarding their history that when imperial Japanese troops, who ruled the island as a Japanese colony from to , were replaced by KMT forces following World War II, Taiwan simply changed hands from one foreign colonial ruler to another. Meili Fang, a linguist specializing in Taiwanese who grew up in southern Taiwan, remembers being reprimanded in elementary school in the early s for accidentally blurting out Taiwanese.

Her memory sheds light on the ambitious project of social engineering undertaken by the KMT to make the island Chinese. The period of KMT rule from to came to be known as the White Terror period of Taiwanese history, marked by authoritarian repression and incidents such as the Massacre, a government crackdown on civil unrest on February 28, that left thousands dead.

According to Lee, her grandfather was a victim of the White Terror and served time as a political prisoner. Her father then moved the family to the United States, where he became active in organizations run by Taiwanese living in the U.

During this period, many of these civil society groups used the Taiwanese language to gauge the likelihood that a potential member was a spy. The use of the Taiwanese language to differentiate the island from China, though, is not without irony. The Taiwanese language, or the Minnan dialect of southern Fujian, is not merely a peripheral Chinese language, but can be traced to the heart of Chinese civilization.

A portrait of Koxinga, a general who led his troops from China to Taiwan in , painted by Huang Zi. It is common knowledge that the Taiwanese language arrived in Taiwan via migrants in the s from Fujian. Poor and isolated, it bred adventurers who sought their fortunes at sea: fishermen, traders, and pirates.

One of these dialects, proto-Quanzhou, came to Fujian in the early 4th century when scores of Han Chinese fled south to escape violence as a series of rebellions overthrew the Western Jin dynasty. The other dialect, proto-Zhangzhou, came to Fujian from Henan three and a half centuries later, when the Tang dynasty sent scores of troops to quell uprisings in the south, resulting in substantial Han migration. These two dialects, situated in adjacent regions in southern Fujian, amalgamated over hundreds of years to form the Minnan, or southern Min, language group.

While the Taiwanese variant of Minnan evolved on the island to be somewhat different from its counterparts in Fujian, a Taiwanese speaker would likely have no trouble conversing with Minnan speakers in the Fujianese cities of Quanzhou, Xiamen, and Zhangzhou today.

There, also, the Minnan language faces an uncertain future because of decades of government policy favoring official use of Mandarin. The gradual decline of the Minnan dialect in Taiwan and Fujian is symptomatic of a global trend of declining linguistic diversity. According to Ethnologue, a publication focusing on linguistics statistics, more than half the people in the world speak only 23 languages.

These healthy languages — English, Mandarin, Hindi and Spanish, among others — have as many as hundreds of millions of speakers, while more than 1, languages now have less than a thousand speakers. According to Jeff Good, a professor of linguistics at the University of Buffalo, languages have always been rising and falling, but the current global trend toward less linguistic diversity is a stark departure from most of human history. Languages with smaller numbers of speakers survived because they were integral to the identities and political structures of tribes.

Multilingualism was valued because more languages opened up more avenues for trade with different tribes. Good says that a turning point came at around with the age of European exploration, followed by colonialism and the Industrial Revolution.

During this time, urbanization and an unrestrained appetite for profit caused the main western European languages to consume smaller ones, while European colonial activities began to upend patterns of tribal interactions in many regions of the world. For example, Good notes that Canada, the United States, and Australia all had policies, at the highest levels of political orthodoxy, to systematically exterminate indigenous languages by separating children from their parents to interrupt transmission.

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Useful Taiwanese phrases A collection of useful phrases in Taiwanese with Romanization and some recordings. Jump to phrases See these phrases in any combination of two languages in the Phrase Finder. Am I fulfilling my duties to you as a host? I'm not bad, thanks, and you? My name is Where are you from? If your background is in technology, Taipei has a thriving start-up scene.

There are a lot of foreigners working in start-ups or involved with blockchain technologies, so you can start networking and getting to know lots of people very quickly. One place to start getting connected would be with the MOX crowd.

Of course, if you live in a more rural area, there will be less opportunities to socialize with expats. One way to do this is by joining language exchange events. Taipei has a ton of language exchange social events, which are often held at cafes or bars, and are often listed on the site Meetup.

Overall, people here are pretty friendly, so if you put yourself out there, you should be able to make some local friends. Although you can get by in Taiwan using English, as I mentioned already, I still highly recommend learning Chinese. A great resource to speak Chinese faster and better is Glossika. Glossika offers language training in both Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese, with programs for Chinese used in Beijing and Chinese used in Taiwan.

And whether you are a beginner or an advanced language learner, Glossika's audio-based training improves your listening and speaking at native speed. Sign up and get reps of audio training for free now:. Learn how to say "A new year comes around again.