Lighthouse Taiwan

When my grandparents greet neighbors in Sin-káng, Ka-gī, they do so in the lilting tones they have always called “Tâi-gí”—Taiwanese. The greeting is older than the Republic of China, older than Japan’s colonization, and certainly older than the bureaucratic term “Minnan,” a label imposed in the 1970s to bury a language’s name under layers of politics. Half a century later, it is time to exhume that name and restore it to public life. A Name With a Longer Pedigree Than the State Itself The word “Taiwanese” (臺語) first appeared in print in 1852, four decades before Japan seized Taiwan from a fading Qing empire. By 1895, Japanese officers, stunned that their Mandarin‐speaking interpreters were useless on the ground, rushed out phrasebooks such as Tâi-ôan Gí to talk with local Hoklo laborers. For the next half-century Tokyo’s colonial offices, Christian missionaries, and early Taiwanese writers—among them Liân-Ông and the radical newspaper Tâi-ôan Mín-Pó —used “Taiwanese” or...

At a recent youth event organized by Hakka communities in Taoyuan, Taiwan President Lai Ching-te quoted a well-known Taiwanese (Holo) proverb "Ka-tī phāiⁿ hông-kim, koh the̍h lâng khòaⁿ hong-súi"  and asked the audience, “Do you understand Taiwanese?” What should have been a moment of cultural warmth became political fuel. Critics, including Kuomintang (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu, accused Lai of disrespecting Hakka identity by speaking in a language associated with Taiwan’s majority Hoklo population. Online voices went further, claiming this was yet another case of “linguistic oppression,” asking, “Why should Hakka people understand Taiwanese?” or “Why is Holo assumed to be the Taiwanese language?” These arguments, though cloaked in the language of cultural respect and political correctness, betray a deeper historical amnesia and a flawed understanding of Taiwan’s linguistic landscape. Let’s reframe the question. If it is controversial to ask whether Hakka people unde...