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Mixed script writing in Taiwan

Language Log 2024-05-24

[This is a guest post by Kirinputra]

Something happened* a few days ago that some of your readers might find surprising. It reflects a mood change that's set in over the last few years in Formosa.
 
[*VHM:  The content of the Facebook post linked here may not be available at this time, but you can still get the gist of what it was about from the remainder of this post.]
 
My apologies — the link has been set to private. But the incident has spawned a new Facebook group that anybody can view.
 
So this guy posts a message in mixed-script Taioanese (sinographs & romanization, mixed inline) in a pro-motorcyclist Facebook activist group…. The message was aligned with the views of the group, but the first few waves of comments were almost all reactions of disgust at the post not being in Mandarin; some group members blocked the guy right away. Some of the reactions were specifically against the romanized elements, but the reaction to the sinographic elements was pretty disparaging too….

To unpack, romanized Taioanese especially has made a bit of headway in the last five years or so, so that young mainstream society is aware of it now, very much in contrast to the previous 70+ years. However, young mainstream society loves to hate romanized Taioanese. The backlash against romanized Taioanese is most of the "mind share" that it has gained. And people often take writings in straight romanized Taioanese to task for being all romanized, but — as we see here [or not, unfortunately, since the post has gone private] — the mainstream reaction to the mixed script is also disgust, first & foremost at there being romanized elements at all. I would add that the sinographic elements of the post unintentionally skewed towards Mandarin-centric, non-native usages, as sponsored by the Chinese Taipei state. Had native usages been used instead, the audience would've been even more disgruntled.
 
One of the most interesting & damning aspects to unpack is where this took place: A niche citizens' rights group, for a "niche" demographic that skews Taioanese-speaking while subsuming nearly the entire working class of Formosa, & much of the urban middle class as well. It's been my experience as well — and I was taken aback too at first — that the backlash against non-conformity to Chinese Taipei nationalism is paradoxically heightened in so-called human rights circles, and — more generally — wherever people have gathered in the name of a conventionally literate specialty (i.e., most specialties, but maybe not local botany).
 
It is striking that despite how Chinese nationalist rhetoric militates against non-sinographic scripts, non-conforming sinographic scripts are not tolerated either outside of unambiguously low contexts like ads or KTV lyrics. The intolerance for actual written Taioanese in most contexts also challenges Chinese Taipei's current image — in the Anglophone media, especially — as a tolerant, liberal polity where Taioanese is newly flourishing & prestigious.
 
Selected readings
 
COMMENT:  
 
A note that Kirinputra wrote to me separately a few days ago:

BTW written Taioanese is far from new (and written Hokkien & Teochew are older than Taioanese itself). It has just been marginalized so that it perpetually seems new to some critical mass of observers, of which I used to be one.