Tongues of Taiwan: Culture and Identity between Languages and Empires

Organized by Shu-mei Shih (Irving and Jean Stone Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies, UCLA), Alan Dai (Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA), and Quentin Tan (Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA), this year's conference on "Tongues of Taiwan: Culture and Identity between Languages and Empires" is presented as part of the UCLA-NTNU Taiwan Studies Initiative, a partnership of UCLA and National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) that aims to create research synergies to promote cutting-edge research in Taiwan studies.

Taiwan’s rich and turbulent history has made it the home of diverse language communities and the nexus of many translingual encounters. It is the homeland or urheimat of the Austronesian languages, and still home to many Austronesian languages spoken by Indigenous groups on the archipelago today, along with growing populations of migrant workers from Southeast Asia speaking other Austronesian languages. After decades of Dutch colonialism and Spanish occupation in the seventeenth century, the island’s population has come to be dominated by Sinophone communities who have settled on the island over the past four centuries, beginning with Hoklo and Hakka peoples, and then a wave of people speaking various varieties of Mandarin and other Sinitic topolects (as well as Manchu, Mongol, and other non-Sinitic languages) after 1949. Furthermore, during its fifty years of Japanese rule, Taiwan also became the site of colonial Nipponophone discourses and cultural experimentation, connecting it not only with mainland Japan but also with Okinawa, Korea, and Manchuria.

How have vernacular and literary registers of Sinitic and other languages found their way into oral and written forms of expression in Taiwan? What impacts have repeated waves of colonial settlement had on the Austronesian languages indigenous to Taiwan, and how has the arrival of migrant workers speaking other Austronesian languages affected the linguistic landscape of the archipelago? What paths has the Taiwanese Hokkien (or Taigi) movement taken, and where does it stand at present? How did the Japanese colonial and Kuomintang governments each in turn attempt to enact language policies, why did these attempts fail or succeed, and what legacies have they left in Taiwanese society and culture today? And what of the Hakka or the Min languages spoken in the Matsu and Kinmen islands? Has Dutch colonialism and Spanish occupation in the seventeenth century left any linguistic and cultural consequences still discernable today?

This conference brings together scholars from diverse disciplines—linguistics, literature, history, media studies, and more—to reflect on the past, present, and future of the tongues of Taiwan. We invite discussions and debate around how linguistic practice has shaped cultural identity and vice versa in Taiwan, as well as explorations of the nuanced negotiations between different languages and cultural traditions undertaken by peoples living in the archipelago. 

Download the complete conference program

 Day 1 | Friday, May 29

Hershey Hall Salon, Rm 158 (1st Floor)

10:00 AM – 10:30 AM: Opening Remarks

• Cindy Fan, Vice Provost for International Studies and Global Engagement, UCLA
• Alexandra Stern, Dean of the Division of Humanities, Professor of English and History, UCLA
• Min Zhou, Director of Asia Pacific Center, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Asian American Studies, UCLA
• Nikky Lin, Director, International Taiwan Studies Center; Professor, Department of Taiwan Culture, Languages and Literature, National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU)
• Shu-mei Shih, Director of the UCLA-NTNU Taiwan Studies Initiative and Professor of Asian Languages & Cultures, Comparative Literature, and Asian American Studies, UCLA
• Quentin Tan, Ph.D. Candidate, Asian Languages & Cultures, UCLA

10:30 AM – 12:00 PM: Panel 1 – Tongues of Taiwanese Media

Moderator: Min Zhou, UCLA

• Brian Bernards (University of Southern California), Indigenous Resilience in Sunflower-Era Cinema: Leveraging Pangcah Knowledge, Skill, and Creativity in KANO (2014) and Panay (2015)
• Raymond Kun-Xian Shen (UCLA/NTNU), Sinophone Ventriloquism: Accented Mandarin, Racial Difference, and the Queer Performance of A-Han
• Spencer Chen (Hamilton College), Taigi on Track: Colonial Afterlives and Voice Labor in Taiwan's Dubbing Mediascape

12:30 PM – 1:30 PM: Lunch

1:30 PM – 3:00 PM: Panel 2 – Tongues of Taiwanese Literature

Moderator: Michael Berry, UCLA

• Satoru Hashimoto (John Hopkins University), Liberation in Multiple Tongues: How Taiwanese Writers Used Fiction to Make Sense of 1945
• Andrea Bachner (Cornell University), The Untranslatability Trap: Taiwan and the Limits of Multilingualism
• Táňa Dluhošová (Czech Academy of Sciences), When Exiles Rule: Hegemonic Exile and Asymmetrical Double Belonging in Taiwan

3:00 PM – 3:30 PM: Coffee Break

3:30 PM – 5:00 PM: Panel 3 – Languages and Empires of Taiwan

Moderator: TBA

• Yoshihisa Amae (NTNU), The Empire Writes Back: Japanophone Memoirs and the Making of Taiwanese Subjectivity in Postcolonial Taiwan
• Frederik Green (San Francisco State University), Writing Empire, One Classical Poem at a Time: Kanshi and the Paradoxes of Japanese Colonial Modernity in Taiwan
• Ann Heylen (NTNU), Language and Empire in Early Modern Taiwan: Writing Dutch Formosa in Historiography

5:00 PM – 5:30 PM: Reception

Day 2 | Saturday, May 30

Hershey Hall Salon, Rm 158 (1st Floor)

10:00 AM – 11:30 AM: Panel 4 – The Linguistic Turn in Taiwan Studies

• Cornelius Kobler (Williams College), Linguistic Change in the Penghu Islands, 1976-2026
• Gareth Price (Duke University), "Taiwanese is Kind of like a Luxury": Language Learning, Privileged Strangers, And Latitudes of Citizenship
• Hsi-Yao Su (NTNU), Hearing the Other: Zhīyǔ Jǐngchá (支語警察) and the Politics of Belonging in Taiwan

Moderator: Shu-mei Shih, UCLA

11:30 AM – 12:30 PM: Lunch

12:30 PM – 2:30 PM: Panel 5 – Plurilingualism and Polyphony in Taiwanese Literature

Moderator: Nikky Lin, NTNU

• Formosa Deppman (UCLA), Signifying the Maidservant through the Vernacular Sinitic, Hokkien, and Japanese in Lai Ho's "Alas, She Died" (1931)
• Alan Dai (UCLA), Taiwanese Kanshi as Minor Literature and Postloyalist Poetics in Orphan of Asia
• Quentin Tan (UCLA), Writing Taiwanese: Rose, Rose, I Love You and the Anarchy of Language and Script

2:30 PM – 3:00 PM: Coffee Break

3:00 PM – 3:30 PM: Special Presentation

Pei-Feng Chen (Academica Sinica), Reexamining the Taiwanese Language Movement and Its Debates: Literature, Enlightenment, Nationhood, and Modernity

3:30 PM – 4:00 PM: Concluding Forum

Moderator: Shu-mei Shih, UCLA