Mother Tongue Movement
The Taiwanization developed in the 1990s into a ‘mother tongue movement’ aiming to save, preserve, and develop the local ethnic culture and language of Holo (Taiwanese Hokkien), Hakka, and aborigines. The effort to save declining languages has since allowed them to flourish. In 1993, Taiwan became the first country in the world to implement the teaching of Taiwanese Hokkien in schools. By 2001, Taiwanese languages such as Taiwanese Hokkien, Hakka, and aboriginal languages were taught in all Taiwanese schools. Taiwan also has its own literary circle whereby Hokkien poets and writers compose poetry and literature in Taiwanese Hokkien on a regular basis. This mother tongue movement is ongoing.
As a result of the mother tongue movement, Taiwan has emerged as a significant cultural hub for Hokkien in the world in the 21st century. It also plans to be the major export center for Hokkien culture worldwide in the 21st century.
Read more about this topic: Taiwanese Hokkien, Sociolinguistics
Famous quotes containing the words mother, tongue and/or movement:
“When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs ... I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When a tongue fails to send forth appropriate shafts, there might be a word to act as healer of these.”
—Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.)
“The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces; what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)