Usage
In 1945 when Republic of China took over Taiwan and surrounding islands from Japan, Mandarin was introduced as the official language and made compulsory in schools. A Mandarin Promotion Council (now called National Languages Committee) was established in 1946 by Chen Yi (陳儀) to standardize and popularize the usage of Standard Mandarin in Taiwan. The Council was led by 21 Chinese Scholars such as Wei Jiangong (魏建功), He Rong (何容), Qi Tiehen (齊鐵恨), Wang Yuchuan (王玉川), Fang Shiduo (方師鐸), Zhu Zhaoxiang (朱兆祥), Wu Shouli (吳守禮) etc. (From 1895 to 1945, Japanese was the official language and taught in schools.) Since then, Mandarin has been established as a lingua franca among the various groups in Taiwan: the majority Han ethnic Hoklo, the Hakka who have their own spoken language, Mainlanders whose native tongue may be any Chinese variant from mainland China, and the Indigenous Taiwanese who speak Indigenous languages.
Until the 1980s the Kuomintang administration heavily promoted the use of Standard Mandarin and discouraged the use of Taiwanese and other vernaculars, even portraying them as inferior. Mandarin was the only sanctioned language for use in the media. This produced a backlash in the 1990s. Although some supporters of Taiwan independence tend to be opposed to standard Mandarin in favor of Taiwanese, efforts to replace standard Mandarin either with Taiwanese or with a multi-lingual standard have not been successful. Today, Mandarin is taught by immersion starting in elementary school. After the second grade, the entire educational system is in Mandarin, except for local language classes that have been taught for a few hours each week starting in the mid-1990s.
Taiwanese Mandarin (as with Singlish and many other situations of a creole speech community) is spoken at different levels according to the social class and situation of the speakers. Formal occasions call for the acrolectal level of Guoyu (Standard Mandarin). Less formal situations often result in the basilect form, which has more uniquely Taiwanese features. Bilingual speakers often code-switch between Mandarin and Taiwanese, sometimes in the same sentence.
Mandarin is spoken fluently by almost the entire Taiwanese population, except for some elderly people who were educated under Japanese rule. In the capital Taipei, where there is a high concentration of Mainlanders whose native language is not Taiwanese, Mandarin is used in greater frequency and fluency than other parts of Taiwan.
Read more about this topic: Taiwanese Mandarin
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