No, still NOT my pictures here…
From the Front Page Sections, translated…
“Can you speak your mother’s tongue?”, more and more kids are shaking their heads; they couldn’t speak in their mother tongue, their mothers’ languages became an incomprehensible foreign language, and, the mother tongue became “a silent tongue”, awaiting awakening.
Based off of the newest estimates, there are now, over half-a-million people who didn’t originate from Taiwan, and the children of these newly migrated individuals are about 350,000. Some of the migrated mother sighed, that their kids are fifteen, sixteen years old, and still couldn’t speak in their tongue, taking them home to visit, other than the simple greetings of “hello”, “thank you”, they couldn’t speak an extra word.
Ai-Mei Chen who married over from Malaysia eighteen years ago, her two sons are in the second year of high school and the sixth grade, not only does she teach her kids to speak Malay, she also taught her kids Hakka, “You need to know how to speak mom’s language, as well as dad’s too!”
Ai-Mei Chen is also fluent in Indonesian too, in the school’s mother-tongue learning group, she’d worked as a lecturer, helped other Indonesian mothers teach their young children their language, used the shadow puppets that are traditionally Indonesian, allowing the pupils to play and learn at the same time. She said, the second generation of the migrated citizens with Southeastern Asian heritage is the key to Taiwan, entering into the realms of Southeast Asia.
“Dad, I’m sleepy!”, “Fei-Fei”, who’s almost two used Taiwanese, to play coy to her dad who is the Assistant Professor at Transportation University, Wei-Der Hsu. Wei-Der Hsu and his wife Shou-Shan Lin spoke Minangese at home, to give “Fei-Fei” the environment to practice her Minangese speaking skills.
Lin said, she’d once taught at the Hakka districts of Hsinchu before, found that there are less than ten percent of the students who can speak Hakka, and there are, less than five percent of the students who can use Hakka to hold conversations with their families, “this number was shocking to me”. fearing that the mother tongue would vanish, so, since her daughter was born, she’d started speaking Minangese to her child.
In order to better the learning environment for her daughter’s mother-tongue, Lin asked along other families with the same goals and set up the “Hsinchu Taiwanese Family Play Group”, and, the most fun every week when they gathered is for the “Minangese Party”.
The Atayal language instructor, Tsai also spoke his mother tongue with his two granddaughters, he’d said that the home is the best kind of classroom, “daily life, not instruction oriented”, the children would pick up the mother tongue on their own, and know how to use it.
In the Hakka villages, there are a lot of mother-tongue families. The local in Hsinchu, Lin spoke in Hakka with his seven and two year old sons, “naturalization”; he said, that picking up a language before school age, the kids don’t have the issue of being shamed, and, they’d absorbed it like a sponge.
“As the languages disappeared, so does the cultures”, Lin stated, that his seventy-five year-old mother hearing her two grandkids speaking in Hakka, she’d stated happily, “The mother tongue IS the best inheritance!”
So, they’re now, realizing the importance of learning the languages of the father AND the mother, whereas before, they’d only used the mainstream languages or dialects to communicate with their young, and this realization is due to how people are slowly coming to knowing, how diverse this world is.
