This book “Taiwan and Vietnam: Language, Literacy and Nationalism” in English is an overall survey of Vietnam and Taiwan from a perspective of comparative studies. In addition, this book also introduces and compares the history of language, orthography and literature in the Hanji cultural sphere, such as Vietnam, Taiwan, Korea and Japan. This book can be considered one of the rare publications introducing the history of language and literature of Taiwan to Vietnamese readers.
◎代理經銷:白象文化
Why Taiwan and Vietnam? Most works of my research are related to comparative studies of Taiwan and Vietnam. Someone may be curious to know why I chose Vietnam to compare with Taiwan?
I was a promoter of Taiwanese languages before I went to graduate school in the USA. I was trying to save the Taiwanese languages which were suppressed by the Chinese monolingual policy of the Chinese KMT regime in Taiwan. I did not know much about Vietnam at that time. My limited impressions about Vietnam were a war and the orthographic transformation from Han characters to Roman scripts. I did not have the chance to get to know the Vietnamese people until I started my graduate studies.
Taiwan and Vietnam share a similar historical experience: that is, both used to be invaded and colonized by the Chinese Empire. As a consequence, Han characters were adopted in Taiwan and Vietnam. Although ancient China had occupied Vietnam for a thousand years and consequently had great influence on the Vietnamese culture, Vietnam has created its own culture with distinct characteristics. How could Vietnam successfully retain their language and national identity? How could Vietnam have so amazingly replaced Han characters with Vietnamese Romanization? In contrast, Roman scripts such as Sinkang Manuscripts or Pe̍h-ōe-jī were the first writing systems that appeared in Taiwan. However, Han characters, which came after Roman scripts, have become the dominant orthography in current Taiwanese society. What are the factors driving different outcomes in Taiwan and Vietnam? Will Taiwan have the potential to revive Taiwanese languages or to replace Han characters with Roman scripts? Those questions stayed in my mind while I was doing my research.
All the papers collected in this book try to answer these questions from different perspectives. The papers were originally presented in conferences, journals or book chapters. They were appropriately revised and updated to make a more consistent and systematic book. I expect this book to provide readers a better understanding of language, literacy and nationalism in Taiwan and Vietnam.
Dr. Binh NGO
Director of the Vietnamese Language Program Harvard University, USA
Prof. Wi-vun T. CHIUNG (Chiúⁿ Ûi-bûn / 蔣為文) is a distinguished scholar in the field of Taiwanese and Vietnamese studies. His new book Taiwan and Vietnam: language, literacy and nationalism is an insightful and original work on comparative study of Taiwan and Vietnam in many areas, including history, linguistics and sociolinguistics.
This book is divided into eleven chapters. The first chapter introduces the history of Vietnamese-Taiwanese economic and cultural ties, Vietnamese studies in Vietnam and Taiwan, and Taiwanese studies in Taiwan and Vietnam, as well as how they were established and developed. This chapter also points out the importance of the comparative studies of Vietnam and Taiwan.
Chapter two discusses the historical background of Chinese character usage in Japan, Korea, Vietnam and Taiwan and the creation of each country’s own writing systems at different periods of time in the past. The passage which deals with the Mandarin Chinese used in Taiwan and the romanized Taiwanese writing system from the perspective of the Taiwanese is exceptionally informative.
The third chapter is a continuation of the second, with a focus on romanized writing systems in Vietnam and Taiwan. The author argues that romanized Taiwanese script, along with Chinese characters, should be adopted as Taiwan’s national writing system.
Chapter four compares the phonetic and writing systems of Chinese, Vietnamese and Taiwanese, which is invaluable from the standpoint of both contrastive analysis and language pedagogy.
Chapter five deals with the difficulties that learners of Chinese characters encounter, and with the advantages of a romanized Vietnamese writing system.
The sixth chapter introduces the diverse ethnic and linguistic history of Taiwan, including how and when different immigrant groups arrived from mainland China, resulting in the complex ethnic relations we see in Taiwan today. The author also examines the relationship between the mother tongue and ethnic identity of different groups in Taiwan based on survey data.
Chapter seven covers the origin and the eventual romanization of Taiwan’s writing system, which leads into the author’s proposed plan for language learning in Taiwan.
In chapter eight, the author argues that romanized Taiwanese script should be regarded as part of the intangible cultural heritage of Taiwan based on its linguistic and sociolinguistic origins.
In chapter nine, Chiung addresses the controversy over the terms Taiwanese (language) versus Southern Min (dialect). The author proposes that the term Lán-lâng-ōe (咱人語) be used for the dialect spoken in Southeastern China, Taiwan and several Southeast Asian countries, and that a prefix indicating the region where the respective version of the dialect is spoken be added when relevant.
The tenth chapter introduces different ways of writing Taiwanese. Based on the statistical results of the survey, the author concludes that most Taiwanese people who write using Chinese characters do not consider it necessary to learn an additional writing system. However, the author believes romanized Taiwanese script should be adopted due to its being easy to learn.
The last chapter delves into which criteria should be considered for proficiency tests in Taiwanese. This is very helpful from the perspective of Taiwanese language teaching methodology.
Professor Chiung’s book is well structured and covers a wide variety of topics within Vietnamese and Taiwanese studies with a focus on linguistic issues. Many chapters contain appendices that will prove extremely useful to those interested in learning about a particular aspect of Vietnamese or Taiwanese linguistic, historical and social studies. The book makes a significant contribution to the field.
The author Wi-vun CHIUNG is a Taiwanese researcher with many in-depth research results about Vietnam in the fields of language, culture and history. With over 20 years of research on Vietnam, professor Chiung has great contributions to introducing Vietnam to Taiwanese readers. In particular, his former book entitled “Vietnamese Spirit: Language, Orthography and Anti-hegemony” published in Taiwanese and Chinese provide readers a comprehensive understanding of Vietnam.