Only One National Language in Taiwan?

The Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) administration has already officially abandoned Taiwan's home-developed Tongyong system in favour of People Republic of China's Hanyu Pinyin romanization system claiming that Hanyun Pinyin is of "international standard,". Many felt that this decision was based less on Hanyun Pinyin's benefits than on an ideological drive to create a unitary national language such as that in PRC. These suspicions no longer seem far fetched following comments from President Ma Ying-jeou of the KMT government made on 9th June 2009 in talks with the Chinese Benevolent Associations. He was reported to have repeatedly mentioned Mandarin as “the” national language in Taiwan. He also completely lacked to mention the fact that Taiwan has at least three Sinitic languages( Mandarin, Hoklo and Hakka), and more than a dozen Austronesian languages (The languages of the various indigenous cultures). All of these languages are equally entitled to be considered as national languages of Taiwan and Mandarin should not take sole precedence.

This is a giant step backward by Ma and the KMT government from the declaration by the former Democratic Progressive Party government that all languages spoken or used by our citizens should equally be considered and appreciated as Taiwan national languages with two or three of these languages selected for official use. Therefore, Ma's attempt to phase out the various languages of Taiwan in favour of Mandarin constitutes a denigration of Taiwan's democratic system.

The attachment of Ma and KMT ideologues to Mandarin as an unitary national language reflects their continued colonialist imposition of a racial and patriarchal conception of Chinese culture on Taiwan's multi-ethnic, multicultural and multilingual democratic society, as reflected by the declaration of his inaugural address last May 20 in which he said "all the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to the Chinese race nation".

Instead of compromising Taiwan's cultural sovereignty and democratic pluralism, the KMT government should demand that the People's Republic of China should fulfil its own international commitments and converge with the world community by implementing full freedom of expression, freedom of the press and freedom of thought.