The Making of a Language in Colonial Taiwan: Between Linguistics and Ideology

Southern Min (Minnan) comprises a group of closely related Sinitic varieties spoken by an estimated 35 million speakers across southeastern China, Taiwan, and ethnic Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. Characterized by a rich tone system and complex tone sandhi, Minnan dialects display considerable internal variation while also exhibiting high mutual intelligibility across regional varieties. This raises the long-standing question of whether Minnan should be considered a single language or a group of dialects – a question that cannot be resolved on purely linguistic grounds.

Focusing on Taiwan, this presentation examines Minnan from both linguistic and language-ideological perspectives, with particular attention to issues of glottonymy. A range of competing names – such as Hoklo, Hokkien, Taiwanese, and Tai-oan-oe – have been used to designate the language, each carrying distinct social, political, and ideological implications. These naming practices reflect shifting perceptions of linguistic identity rather than discrete linguistic realities.

The presentation situates these developments within the context of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan (1895–1945), outlining the aims and instruments of colonial language planning and the systematic promotion of Japanese. Against this backdrop, the emergence of a perceived common Taiwanese language can be understood as a response to colonial linguistic hierarchies. Taiwanese intellectuals such as Lien Heng 連橫 (1878–1936), and N̂g Se̍k-hui (1900–1945) and Koeh Bîng-khun 郭明昆 (1908–1943) played important roles in articulating a language ideology that advocated the writing, cultivation, and standardization of Tai-oan-oe as a distinctly Taiwanese language. In conclusion, the presentation argues that the existence of a Taiwanese language cannot be substantiated on strictly linguistic grounds. Rather, Taiwanese exists because its speakers perceive, name, and enact it as such. Notably, the glottonym Taiwanhua (‘Taiwanese’) originated as a Japanese colonial coinage and gained widespread acceptance among Taiwanese intellectuals from the late 1920s onward, illustrating the central role of language ideology in the making of linguistic entities.

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).