EDITORIAL: Respecting sign language taipeitimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from taipeitimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Tainan City Councilor Lee Chi-wei (李啟維) yesterday called for the use of Romanized spellings to make Taiwanese dialects and languages internationally recognizable.
Speaking at a news conference in Tainan to mark International Mother Language Day, Lee said the use of zhuyin fuhao (注音符號, Mandarin phonetic symbols commonly known as Bopomofo) made it difficult to promote interest in, or recognition of, the nation’s dialects and languages, as the system is not commonly used outside of Taiwan.
“The legislature has already passed the Development of National Languages Act (國家語言發展法), but under the current circumstances that act is like a candle in the wind,” he
New curricula to boost local language diversity: MOE
By Sherry Hsiao / Staff reporter
Weekly classes in one of Taiwan’s
bentu (本土, “local” or “native”) languages or Taiwan Sign Language would from 2022 be mandatory for first and second-year junior-high school students, and optional for third-year students, the Ministry of Education (MOE) said on Saturday.
The announcement came at a meeting of the ministry’s curriculum review committee hosted by the Taipei branch of the National Academy for Educational Research.
Minister of Education Pan Wen-chung (潘文忠), the convener of the committee, presided over the meeting.
The curriculum changes passed include that seventh and eighth-grade students would from 2022 have one mandatory weekly session of Hoklo (also known as Taiwanese), Hakka, an Aboriginal language or Taiwan Sign Language
PTS Taigi rules are discriminatory
By Ho Hsin-han, Zheng An-zhu, and Tan Hong-hui 何信翰 鄭安住 陳豐惠
Hakka TV and Taiwan Indigenous Television (TITV) used to be the only [non-Mandarin] mother-tongue TV stations in Taiwan, while there was no TV station dedicated to Hoklo (also known as Taiwanese), the mother tongue of the nation’s largest ethnic group, until the establishment of PTS Taigi, a digital TV station operated by the Taiwan Public Television Service Foundation (PTS) that is the nation’s first around-the-clock channel dedicated to Hoklo.
At first, PTS Taigi did not have a clearly defined organizational structure or level in the governmental hierarchy. The board of directors at the time approved a temporary structure based on that of the PTS Main Channel, with ministerial-level departments set up under the station’s director, making the PTS Taigi director equal to the Hakka TV and TITV directors, which was reasonable and legal.