Linguistic Landscapes of Taiwan: Between Polyglossia and Playfulness

Taiwan is characterized by a high degree of polyglossia resulting from successive layers of migration, colonization, and language planning. The island’s contemporary linguistic ecology includes Mandarin, Taiwanese (Southern Min), Hakka, indigenous Austronesian languages, and a range of foreign languages, each associated with distinct historical trajectories and policy regimes. After 1945, language planning under the Nationalist government strongly promoted Mandarin as the sole national language, leading to its rapid spread and to a marked decline in the public and private use of local languages. These policies not only reshaped patterns of language use but also reconfigured the symbolic hierarchies among languages in public space.

This presentation situates Taiwanese polyglossia within the analytical framework of linguistic landscape research, understood as the study of “words and images displayed and exposed in public spaces” (Shohamy & Gorter 2009: 1). From a language-planning perspective, linguistic landscapes are approached as both outcomes of past policy interventions and sites where contemporary language ideologies are reproduced, negotiated, or contested. Drawing on the concept of “invisible languages” (Langer & Havinga 2015), the analysis examines which languages dominate Taiwan’s linguistic landscapes and investigates the social, political, and ideological processes that contribute to their visibility or marginalization.

Empirically, the analysis distinguishes between official and commercial signage. It is argued that official signage largely continues to embody a “Greater China” ideology rooted in pre-1980s language planning, while simultaneously indexing modernity and global orientation through the selective use of English. In contrast, commercial signage displays a significantly higher degree of linguistic hybridity, creativity, and playfulness, reflecting more bottom-up language practices. While the main local language, Taiwanese, has achieved limited visibility, it remains largely confined to domains such as food, rurality, and local culture. Other local languages, by contrast, remain almost entirely absent from public space.

In conclusion, the Taiwanese linguistic landscape can be read as a symbolic arena in which the long-term effects of language planning intersect with contemporary struggles over ethnolinguistic identity and vitality. The visibility – or striking invisibility – of particular languages across domains reflects not only communicative choices but also the relative power of competing ethnolinguistic and social groups. In this sense, Taiwan exemplifies how linguistic landscapes come to index the outcomes of language planning, supporting the claim that “the presence or absence of rival languages in specific domains of the linguistic landscape can come to symbolize the strength or weakness of competing ethnolinguistic groups in the intergroup setting” (Landry & Bourhis 1997: 28).

Biographical notes

Henning Klöter is Full Professor of Modern Chinese Languages and Literatures at the Institute of Asian and African Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Before joining Humboldt-Universität in 2015, he held (assistant) professorships at National Taiwan Normal University and at the universities of Bochum, Mainz, and Göttingen. He received his PhD in Chinese Linguistics from Leiden University in 2003 and completed his Habilitation in Sinology at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in 2010.

His research focuses on language variation in the Sinophone world, past and present, with particular emphasis on the historical documentation of Sinitic varieties and on modern language planning in the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and Singapore. A central strand of his work examines Western missionary linguistics from the early modern period, especially missionary descriptions of Chinese vernaculars in East and Southeast Asia, and their relevance for the study of language contact, migration, and historical sociolinguistics.

His publications include Written Taiwanese (Harrassowitz, 2005), The Language of the Sangleys: A Chinese Vernacular in Missionary Sources of the Seventeenth Century (Brill, 2010), and the co-edited volume Language Diversity in the Sinophone World: Historical Trajectories, Language Planning and Multilingual Practices (Routledge, 2020). He is currently involved in the projects Chinese Grammar Platform (ChinGram), co-funded by the European Union, and Early Manila Hokkien (EMHo), which investigates missionary linguistics and migration through early lexicographic sources. He serves as Vice Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Asian Pacific Communication (with Ke Zhang).