Language Ideology within Shifting Political Ideology: A Critical Discourse Study of Taiwan’s Plans for Indigenous Language Revitalization

Abstract

Taiwan has 16 officially recognised Indigenous languages and all of them are endangered. Legislative efforts have been made to preserve these languages, but the results have not been fruitful. While it is often taken for granted that Indigenous language revitalisation policies are meant to promote Indigenous languages, this paper argues that other political agendas embedded in the policies may have obscured the good intentions for language revitalisation and thus resulted in the inefficacy of the policies. This paper employs a Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) framework to investigate how two successive Taiwanese governments with contrasting political positions (the DPP and the KMT) legitimise their intention for Indigenous language revitalisation. Two consecutive ‘6-Year Plans for Indigenous Language Revitalisation’, each prepared under the different government in power, were examined and compared. I draw on four legitimisation strategies applied by other CDS scholars to investigate the government’s justifications for Indigenous language revitalisation. In spite of the similar language ideology with regard to language revitalisation, the Plans reflected the particular political positionings of each government. In other words, the term ‘language revitalisation’ is recontextualised by different political powers to address opaque political agendas.