Tag: taiwanese

Taiwan’s government has approved a national language-development bill to protect linguistic diversity, which requires national language courses throughout preschool, elementary, and high school education. At the moment, mother-tongue education is only mandatory in elementary schools, while it is an elective course for high school students. The bill also requires elementary and high school students to learn at least one national language...

Judy Heflin delves into the complexities of the Chinese dialect or topolect spoken in the former Formosa or ‘beautiful island’ According to the 2015 edition of Ethnologue: Languages of the World, there are a total of 1.38 billion Chinese speakers in the world. However, despite the Chinese government pushing to establish a unified standardization, many variants of the language can...