{"id":632,"date":"2008-03-19T18:33:49","date_gmt":"2008-03-19T17:33:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/19\/talking-taiwanese\/"},"modified":"2008-03-19T18:33:49","modified_gmt":"2008-03-19T17:33:49","slug":"talking-taiwanese","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=632","title":{"rendered":"Talking Taiwanese"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/johangijsen.blogspot.com\/\">Talking Taiwanese<\/a> is the name of an interesting blog I came across today. It&#8217;s written by a linguist originally from Belgium who currently teaches English in a university in southern Taiwan, and discusses the Taiwanese language and language education in Taiwan.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/johangijsen.blogspot.com\/2008\/03\/taiwans-voluntary-language-shift.html\">most recent post<\/a> discusses the current state of the Taiwanese language and suggests that the majority of people in Taiwan are likely to shift to Mandarin within a couple of generations. Apparently many young Taiwanese already prefer Mandarin, and though most speak Taiwanese, few speak it as much or as well as their parents or grandparents. Quite a few Taiwanese-speaking parents are choosing to raise their children as Mandarin speakers as they perceive that Taiwanese is not a useful language to know. Moreover, almost all education in Taiwan is conducted through the medium of Mandarin.<\/p>\n<p>In my own experience, some of my Taiwanese friends spoke Taiwanese at every opportunity, while others only spoke it when absolutely necessary. When I asked the latter group to speak Taiwanese to me so that I could practise it, they often claimed that their Taiwanese wasn&#8217;t very fluent and that I should ask people who speak Taiwanese as their first language.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Talking Taiwanese is the name of an interesting blog I came across today. It&#8217;s written by a linguist originally from Belgium who currently teaches English in a university in southern Taiwan, and discusses the Taiwanese language and language education in Taiwan. The most recent post discusses the current state of the Taiwanese language and suggests [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,10,68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-language","category-taiwanese"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}