Oleksandr Shyn, photo used with permission

Despite being a middle-size country of 23 million inhabitants, Taiwan is an extremely diverse society when it comes to languages spoken at home, at work or in the media. To understand language use and policies, Global Voices interviewed Oleksandr Shyn, a Korean-Ukrainian journalist based on the island who hosts and produces a podcast showcasing Taiwan's linguistic and cultural diversity called “In Taiwan, We Speak” on Radio Taiwan International‘s platform. The show is also accessible on YouTube.

The interview took place over email after numerous in-person conversations in Taipei.

Filip Noubel (FN): Can you share your personal journey from Uzbekistan to Ukraine, then to South Korea and to Taiwan?

Oleksandr Shyn (OS): Like many Korean-Ukrainians of my generation, I was born outside of Ukraine — in Uzbekistan, Central Asia. That is where my parents were born, and where my grandparents lived most of their lives. We are Koryo Saram, a subgroup of Korean people who historically lived across the Russian Empire’s Pacific coast, and later — across the Soviet Union.

Our history began over a century ago when many Koreans left Korea trying to escape Japanese colonisers. Many of them settled in sparsely populated and largely unclaimed territories along the Pacific coast of the Russian Empire, also known as the Far East. But later the Soviet government cut our ties with our native Peninsula: In 1937, Stalin decided to clear the Far East of the Korean population and resettled almost the entirety of them, over 170 thousand people, into Soviet Central Asia. This forcible resettlement, the “Korean Deportation”, or simply Deportation (‘deportatsiya’) to us, was conducted within just several months. People were carried by freight trains to an unknown land and allowed to bring only a handful of belongings in the middle of the Siberian autumn. Many people perished along the way, including my grandfather’s newborn siblings.

In the new land, Koreans had to build new lives: All attempts to preserve Korean education or cultural identity were suppressed. Known for their hard work, Koreans were tasked with Soviet agricultural projects and soon rose to be a model minority. They also adopted the Russian language, Russian names, and ultimately, a Russian-centric understanding of what it meant to be an educated nation.

After the USSR’s collapse in 1991, many Koryo Saram moved to Ukraine, Belarus, European parts of Russia and Germany. My family settled in the Ukrainian south. That is where I spent my childhood. Later, I left for Kharkiv to study at a high school there — the only public school in Ukraine at that time that specialised in Korean language and history education. I was guided by my desire to fill that gap within my confused and conflicting identity. That is when I started questioning, why I, as a Korean kid born in Uzbekistan and brought up in Ukraine, could only speak Russian up until middle school. When I visited South Korea in 2012 to participate in a government-sponsored summer camp for teenagers, I became the first person in my family to visit the Korean Peninsula in four generations. Naturally, I ended up going to South Korea for university. 

While studying in Korea, I visited Taiwan and realised how much more this country had to offer. I remember hearing announcements on the bus in four different languages and feeling fascinated. That sparked my curiosity about Taiwan’s diverse society. Since then, I knew that it was only a matter of time until I would move to this country. And I did.

For more, read also: Koryo Saram: The long and tragic story of Koreans in Russia

Oleksandr Shyn in a Radio Taiwan International studio, photo used with permission

FN: Given your linguistic journey, it comes as no surprise you launched a podcast about language diversity in Taiwan. Can you describe the current linguistic landscape of Taiwan? 

OS: Describing Taiwan’s linguistic landscape with brevity is a real challenge, which is why I started a whole podcast about it. First of all, Taiwan is believed to have over 20 languages with a total of more than 40 dialects. All of them are Taiwanese languages because, for their speaking communities, Taiwan is the only home in the world. That is an impressive number, given that the nation’s population is just some 23 million people.

Largely, they can be divided into two groups: Sinitic, or Chinese languages, and Indigenous Austronesian languages. Chinese languages are the most widely spoken ones, but are not Indigenous to this land — they were brought with immigrants from across the Taiwan Strait. Meanwhile, Austronesian languages are the Indigenous languages that remain endangered since Indigenous communities have historically been subjected to extreme assimilation policies by all the external powers that controlled Taiwan since the 17th century. 

While most Taiwanese nowadays speak Mandarin Chinese, the official language, this language was alien to Taiwan until it was brought by Chinese migrants and Chinese nationalist forces (Kuomintang), who retrieved to the island after losing the civil war in the mainland in 1949. What followed was decades of forced Mandarinisation of the Taiwanese population, and as a result, many other languages have perished or neared the brink of extinction. Regardless, Taiwanese Mandarin has grown to be a distinct variety: It maintains traditional Chinese characters (as opposed to the simplified characters used in China), has its own accent and has developed a distinct vocabulary with loads of borrowings from other local languages.

Taigi, which is the language’s endonym, used to be the language of the majority of Taiwan before the arrival of Mandarin. It is also known as Taiwanese Hokkien or Taiwanese Minnan and is closely related to Hokkien spoken in China’s Fujian province, and across Southeast Asia. 

Another major Sinitic language of Taiwan is Hakka, an ancestry language of some one-tenth of the population. Although Hakka culture is prominent in Taiwan, many Hakka have lost their language proficiency first in favour of Hokkien, and then — Mandarin Chinese.

Unlike Sinitic languages, Taiwanese Indigenous languages are entirely indigenous to Taiwan. All of them belong to the Austronesian language family that spans an Indo-Pacific geography including the Philippines and Malaysia, Madagascar, Hawaii, New Zealand and the Easter Island’s Rapa Nui.

Indigenous Austronesian languages of Taiwan are some of the most endangered languages of the nation. The Taiwanese government currently recognises 16 Indigenous languages and their dialects: Amis/Pangcah, Atayal, Bunun, Kanakanavu, Kavalan, Paiwan, Puyuma, Rukai, Saaroa, Saisiyat, Sakizaya, Seediq, Thao, Truku, Tsou and Tao. Three more are recognised on a local level in some areas of Southern Taiwan: Siraya, Makatao and Taivoan. Nevertheless, numerous other languages and dialects currently are not recognised, such as Taokas, Babuza, or Pazih, among others.

State recognition has become a powerful tool of revitalisation for Indigenous languages. But the very framework used to classify, categorise and grant/deny recognition is a remnant of a colonial legacy that began in the Japanese imperial times in 1895. It requires a complete reimagining in order to get rid of racial components of the time.

In a milestone decision, in 2018 Taiwanese government recognised all the languages of Taiwan as “national” languages under the National Languages Development Act (國家語言發展法) and vowed to help promote them, including Taiwanese Sign Language.

FN: What about your program “In Taiwan We Speak”? Who are your guests?

OS: Most of my guests are people whose work or expertise is related to their native or ancestral languages, such as activists, scholars, language researchers and revitalisation workers, artists, and journalists. One common thing between them is that they dedicate their lives to reviving and promoting their languages. Some of them grew up speaking these languages, and some only discovered their language in their adulthood, like me.

I like to present our programme as an “audio guide into Taiwan’s linguistic diversity”, but our interviews are never simply about languages. In fact, only sometimes do we talk about language itself; most of the time we talk about the meaning of language for its speakers — language as a right; language as a tool; language as a reason; language as a demarcation of community; language as a declaration of identity; language (or its absence) as an inherited trauma that might or might not need healing.

As an Uzbekistan-born Korean-Ukrainian, bound to our colonial language Russian by birth, I cannot help but identify with what guests come to share. I still remember how important it felt for me to finally learn how to write my Korean last name in Korean, and how precious to me is the only song I was taught in my dialect of Korean, albeit a communist song. And I know how liberating it is to be able to freely write and speak in Ukrainian today, amidst Russia’s attempts to erase it once again.

FN:  What can European countries learn from Taiwan’s experience of supporting language diversity?

OS: It is rather difficult to draw lessons from Taiwan for European contexts, as Taiwan is a migrant nation. Its Indigenous people only comprise between 2-5 per cent of the population, while the absolute majority of Taiwanese are people who descend from settlers. Although for all of these ethnic groups, Taiwan is a home, there is no popular perception that one group is more entitled to this land than others.

That is, ethnonationalism, which plays a crucial role in the formulation of language policies in Europe, is limited to the Chinese nationalism that was imposed here by the Kuomintang. But it is gradually becoming a thing of the past, and the newly emerging Taiwanese nationalism is rather a form of political nationalism detached from issues of ethnicity, race or language.

Ukraine and Taiwan’s paths of decolonisation differ greatly. Ukraine’s language planning and education policy amidst anti-Russian resistance aims to get rid of the omnipresent colonial presence by empowering Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar languages and phasing out the colonial language, Russian. Meanwhile in Taiwan, despite increasing understanding that preserving the nation’s linguistic diversity is important, full-scale “de-Mandarinisation” is not on the table anymore.

That is not to say that Taiwanese lessons cannot be learnt in Ukraine. In recent years Taiwan adopted unprecedented legislative frameworks that allowed for greater allocation of resources and efforts to revitalize, educate [people on] and promote Indigenous languages. Many public research centres emerged along with the new ministry-level body called the Council of Indigenous Peoples, which supports the expansion of further policies, including the Indigenous languages examination system, teacher certification, and curriculum development. We see original Indigenous toponymy return to public spaces across Taiwan’s cities and villages, and we see Taiwanese languages becoming more and more visible in broadcasting, popular culture and art.

In Ukraine, our first stop would be the Crimean Tatar language, the only surviving Indigenous language of Crimea and one of three that Ukraine legally recognises as its Indigenous languages. (The other two being nearly-extinct Karaim and Krymchak as per the Law ‘On the Indigenous Peoples of Ukraine’, adopted in 2021).

I hope that someday, once Ukraine liberates Crimea, it will make sure that Crimean Tatars get to formulate their language policy and guide the revitalisation efforts of their language at least as actively as Indigenous Taiwanese communities do today.

For more, read also: In the heart of Europe, an endangered Turkic language lives on