Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Taiwan has undergone continuous and profound sociolinguistic changes. Modern language planning was initiated by the Japanese colonial government and its decision to establish Japanese as Taiwan’s national language (kokugo). The introduction of this policy produced three innovative moments: First, the modern concept of a national language was for the first time introduced to Taiwan. Second, by actively implementing the spread of the national language, the Japanese colonial period marks the beginning of institutionalised linguistic hierarchies. Third, the top position within this hierarchy was attributed to Japanese, a new language on Taiwan’s linguistic map. After the regime change in 1945, the Kuomintang government continued this national language policy, the only significant change being the replacement of Japanese with Mandarin. As a result of national language planning, Taiwan society at large has undergone two major language shifts. By 1945, according to historical reports, the use of the Japanese language was widespread, and had even entered private domains. At the end of the twentieth century, Mandarin had been successfully established as Taiwan’s dominant language of education, government administration, and media; its use in private domains had reached unprecedented levels. At the same time, since the late twentieth century, the reverse effects of national language planning have become increasingly obvious: a growing marginalisation and even endangerment of the mother tongues of the great majority of Taiwan’s population; that is, the Austronesian languages of native ethnicities, Hakka, and the Southern Min dialects collectively referred to as Hoklo or Taiwanese. For some 20 years, this process of marginalisation and endangerment has been an issue of closely connected debates on the redefinition of national language policies, language in education, and Taiwan identity at large.

Against this historical backdrop, this topical section brings together five essays that address recent developments in the intersections of language and society in Taiwan. Covering different levels of analysis stretching from the national macro level to the micro level of family language planning, the contributions complement one another in terms of empirical basis and interdisciplinary approach. Jean-François Dupré’s article ‘Language Politics and Recognition under Tsai Ing-wen’ places societal multilingualism into the context of recent language legislation. He sets forth how political decision-making creates spaces for language use and how this process is shaped by different political agendas. Since the beginning of democratisation, language legislation has gone through different stages of recognising linguistic diversity. Under the presidency of Chen Shui-bian (2000–2008), various initiatives aimed at the official recognition of formerly marginalised languages were taken. These initiatives, however, were largely unsuccessful due to parliamentary resistance from the Kuomintang and a fragmentation of governmental responsibility. Whereas the Ma Ying-jeou administration (2008–2016) showed little commitment towards continuing the path to official multilingualism, the incumbent president Tsai Ing-wen (since 2016) has been much more active in this regard. However, as Dupré emphasises, Tsai’s language policies are not a direct continuation of Chen’s. Instead, they are wrapped in a strategic framework aimed at gaining broad political and public support through gradual ordering, starting with the official recognition of the languages of Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples as official languages on the basis of the 2017 Indigenous Languages Development Act. Whereas Chen had been criticised for his alleged preferential support of Hoklo and thus strengthening Hoklo chauvinism, Tsai’s preferential support of the weakest languages in terms of number of speakers and, related to this, ethnolinguistic vitality, has proven a more successful path towards official language protection. Dupré also shows that the ongoing process of legislation is by no means isolated from broader social currents, as reflected in increasingly positive attitudes towards local languages among the younger generation.

Language legislation can create spaces and send ideological and motivating signals to the community. But language legislation alone does not change the way speakers make use of their linguistic repertoire. As a matter of fact, laws can be quite ineffective when it comes to individual language choices, as shown by the second essay in this section, ‘No One at School Can Speak Pangcah’: Family Language Policy in an Indigenous Home in Taiwan’ by Sifo Lakaw and P. Kerim Friedman. Their case study on language maintenance in a Pangcah (Amis) family ties in with recent trends in language planning and policy research to shift the attention to the micro level of policy implementation. This trend is evidenced by the publication of a number of groundbreaking studies on family language planning (e.g., Schalley & Eisenchlas, 2020). Whereas many studies focus on the roles of parents and their responses to official policies, Lakaw and Friedman approach the question of agency in language planning more rigorously by shifting the focus on the role of the Pangcah-speaking child and its response to the dominance of Mandarin at school. Their autoethnography reminds us that in contemporary Taiwan, children of indigenous groups are rarely native speakers of their indigenous language. By revealing the deeply ingrained dominance of Mandarin, both in terms of language ideology and range of use, their case study confirms Dupré’s claim that it is difficult to change existing language practices and ideologies through language policies. In this regard, the fate of the Pangcah language is the rule rather than an exception. Quite tellingly, Joshua Fishman’s seminal study on reversing language shift departs from the hypothesis that ‘most efforts to reverse language shift are only indifferently successful, at best, and outright failures or even contra- indicated and harmful undertakings, at worst’ (1991: 1).

Case studies such as the one presented by Lakaw and Friedman inevitably lead to the question of generalisability. To be sure, it is undeniable that Mandarin is Taiwan’s most dominant in terms of first-language speakers and most widely spoken in terms of domains of use. The younger a speaker, the more likely she or he will speak Mandarin, thus the general impression. Although stating the obvious, such claims are often based on personal observation or other kinds of anecdotal evidence. Any attempt to generalise, however, requires complementary quantitative data. Such data is provided by the article by Shu-chuan Chen who examines language use in traditional markets in the city of Hsinchu. Marked by rurality and regionality of products as well as seniority of customers, traditional markets are widely considered typical sites of local language use. What is more, since customers and vendors are often familiar with each other and chat freely and cheerfully, markets also share some important characteristics with the home domain, the latter being the most important benchmark of local language vitality and at the same time the most challenging when it comes to the collection of verifiable data. Based on a non-obtrusive observation technique, one merit of Chen’s study is the comparability of her findings with those obtained by Berg in his 1986 pioneering study that was based on a similar method. Since Hsinchu is known for its big Hakka community, the choice of this particular place as a site of data collection also allows for comparisons of language shift in two distinct ethnolinguistic communities. The gist of Chen’s study is that there has been a more than obvious shift towards Mandarin over the past 37 years as is evidenced by a strong decline in Hoklo and Hakka use in various configurations of language use in traditional markets.

Thus, whereas Lakaw and Friedman’s article exemplifies the interplay of official language ideology and grassroots responses at the family level, Chen identifies the long-term effects of language planning at the community level. It needs to be emphasised, however, that language planning unfolds on different levels, in different ways and with different outcomes. One important area of language planning is media. The way the Kuomintang used its grip on audiovisual and print media to spread Mandarin as the new standard and its nationalistic language ideology after the 1950s is a well-known chapter of Taiwan’s modern language history. But even endorsement by an authoritative government does not guarantee success, as Spencer C. Chen points out in his essay ‘From Mandarin Monopoly to Sinitic Polypoly: The Story of Dubbing (Peiyin) in Taiwan’. Analysing practices of dubbing from a historical perspective, Chen shows how the inventiveness of voice actors and the market interests of producers have turned movies and drama series into multilingual soundscapes, even at times when Mandarin was supposed to dominate the scene. Taking a historical anthropological approach by interviewing voice actors of three different generations, he points out that already in the 1970s, Mandarin had lost its exclusive status in dubbing. At the same time, programmes using different portions of Taiwanese (Taigi) gained popularity. Somewhat ironically, however, multilingual language policies initiated in the 1990s now put the dubbing industry in a dilemma. Since dubbing is no longer for the local Taiwanese market alone but also has to cater to the needs of the Sinophone audience outside Taiwan, there is now a growing trend towards standardisation. Quite tellingly, one of the voice actors quoted by Chen compares his profession to selling McDonald’s meals.

Chen’s study reveals the dual nature of language in media. On the one hand, if genres like tv series or movies want to be successful, they need to convey a certain degree of authenticity in terms of language use. However, since language choice in media is shaped by various factors such as dominant language ideologies, legal rules, and market needs, it is never a one-to-one reflection of natural language use. Vice versa, the very mechanisms that filter language use in media contexts also affect the way languages are perceived by the audience. Especially in periods of transition, such as the post-Japanese period in Taiwan, media plays a crucial role in transmitting new dominant language ideologies and reshaping the language ideological mindset of speakers. Thus, in the words of Androutsopoulos, ‘media representations reflect and reinforce existing language attitudes in the community’ (2018: 406).

The same is true for the public display of written languages on public signs and other forms of display, which are the focus of Henning Klöter’s article ‘Language Visibility and Invisible Languages: The Street Name Signs of Taipei City’. By separately examining the toponymic, linguistic, and semiotic features of street name signs, the essay takes a dissective approach before analysing the street sign as a composite whole. From a historical perspective, following the abrupt replacement of Japan-centred with Republic of China-centred ideologies, the post-war period witnessed fundamental changes in street signage which pertained to the spatial configuration of the city, the names of the streets, and the language of street signage. Placing the written street signs in the context of their multilingual urban environment, the article pinpoints the ideology-driven and reductionist nature of street signage. The unique combination of symbolic force, limited space, and material permanency of street name signs does not leave room for nuance, not to speak of variation or other expressions of intentional deviation from the standard. Against this background, street name signs are conceptualised as markers of linguistic inequality since the monolingual written display is a highly selective representation of the multilingual spoken environment. Interestingly, street name signage has largely remained unaffected by the rise of a Taiwan consciousness, the critical engagement with the uncontested position of Mandarin, and the shift away from the post-war Republic of China ideology.