No, Taiwanese is not dying yet, but let us not be overly optimistic either. If children who mainly hear and speak Taiwanese at home cannot receive even primary education in their first language, they will steadily lose fluency in that language. Because Taiwanese is extensively used outside the school, this loss is slow but real nonetheless.

To my surprise, language researchers overseas with a thorough understanding of Taiwan’s linguistic situation are the ones ringing the alarm bell in this case. Researchers, the public, as well as politicians in Taiwan seem to possess an unhealthy dose of linguistic optimism vis-à-vis the future of Taiwanese. As someone having an endangered mother tongue as first language (Flemish), I hope they are right.

When the message to children is “Concentrate on Mandarin and English; leave Taiwanese at the schoolhouse door”, are youngsters not asked to leave part of their identity behind as well? Research shows that this situation is detrimental in a child’s linguistic as well as cognitive development (Hickey, Lopez, Tallowitz, Cummins).

Shouldn’t we therefore discuss the current situation in Taiwan’s mother tongue education rather than who speaks what language and how?

How so? Could you elaborate a bit more?

2. Lots of people speak Taiwanese in Taipei. It’s just that Mandarin-speaking foreigners tend to tune it out. I was amazed at how much Taiwanese was spoken in Taipei by people in all walks of life after I started studying it. I just wasn’t listening.

I also find that very few people that I’ve met in Taipei support the “Taiwanese-ation” programmes of the DPP. It could be because most of the people I talk to are waishenren or Hakka, I’m not sure, but people’s sense of identity seems fairly well tied to a Chinese history, even if they see themselves as separate to the state on the mainland.

Of course, all this is speculation as I have no better idea than most people what’s going to happen in a hundred years. But to support my theory, a couple of points:

1. ‘Mandarinisation’ of Taiwanese

I talked about the dissolution of the tonal difference in the Taipei area – like you my Taiwanese is nowhere near good enough to spot this myself. I’m relying on academic studies I’ve read (will try to find the links later). Another area is the adoption of more Mandarin-like words in Taiwanese. Fruit was commonly called góe-chí thirty years ago, but young people today almost always use chúi-kó (adapted straight from the Mandarin shuĭguŏ). This in itself is not dangerous to the survival of the language, but I think it’s indicative of a shift in the way Taiwanese is used by people.

2. ‘Non-fluency’ of the younger generation

The topics which younger people are able to discuss in Taiwanese are more limited than those they can discuss in Mandarin. OK, there are still some areas where Taiwanese has the upper hand (e.g. cursing, fighting and political grandstanding), but this is a minority of situations. As an anecdotal subject I give you my better half, who is from a Zhanghua family of Taiwanese speakers. She was raised in an exclusively Taiwanese-speaking home and yet struggles to talk about subjects which fall outside the realm of home/family/friends. I don’t feel she’s alone in this, because Taiwanese for many young people has become limited in scope – it’s something they use to talk to grandad but not to the shuàigē who works at the garage.

This is an intermediate stage in the evolution of the language and if the next generation don’t teach it to their kids (which is already happening to some extent) then it is doomed. The effect will accelerate as the older generation pass on and the current youth generation drop a language that they can’t use to express the full range of things they want to talk about. The speakers in Fujian will be faced with the same pressures as Taiwanese speakers face and the language there will also decline unless supported, I feel. Add to this the PRC’s current drive to get everyone speaking standard Mandarin (no sniggering, now!) and I give mainland Minnanyu a similar life expectancy.

For my part, if and when I have kids here I would like them to grow up speaking English, Mandarin and Taiwanese, but while the first two would be equally important to me, if the child doesn’t learn great Taiwanese I’m not going to worry about it too much.

Again, this is all speculation and I appreciate your points, but I still feel that Taiwanese will decline unless the political and educational climate change dramatically. Perhaps I was a little over-pessimistic in my 100 year limit, but a situation whereby in the year 2100 the Taiwanese that exists is a moribund form, remembered only in pithy interjections into otherwise Mandarin speech, seems pretty plausible to me.

Again, I can’t address the linguistic aspects of Taiwnaese tonal changes, but the same kinds of things have been observed in other Chinese dialects-i.e. the consonant shifts that occured in certain northern Mandarin dialects in the 17th and 18th centuries, presumably as a result of the Manchu rule.

Loan words are not signs of a language’s decline; they can be a source of renewed vitality. Going by this argument, English and Japanese are in serious trouble.

You may be right about the decline of Taiwanese, but frankly, I’m just not convinced. I find it hard to believe that a language which is the first tongue of by far the majority of Taiwanese (15 million), not to mention parts of Fujian, with more than 50 million speakers, is in any real danger of dying out soon; certainly it will see out the century.