Essays on Writing and Language in Honor - Sino-Platonic Papers

Schriftfestschri!: Essq in Horror of John DeFrancis
against mainlanders in the private sector. TO some extent this has been related to the
government's language policy which seems to imply it is unnecessary for mainlanders to learn
Hokkien. Until the early seventies, mainlanders who had not learned Hokkien had to find jobs
in the military, police, teaching, or enterprises run by the government. Members of the elite who
chose to leave Taiwan during this period were more often than not mainlanders, rather than
Taiwanese. How this trend has changed and to what extent the language is a factor affecting that
change are interesting questions which need to be studied.
If a language policy affects the equal employment opportunities of the individuals as has
been noted, it can also affect the economic growth of a nation. This happens when school
children are taught things related to the Mandarin world, but unrelated to the immediate needs
of their community. When students are not taught to communicate within industry; or when the
government makes it harder for non-Mandarin speakers to access, in their dialects, market
information for particular industries, economic development suffers. In addition, preventing non-
Mandarin speakers from expressing their views or participating in legislation affecting their
respective industries in a language they can understand only serves to interfere with the growth
of their industries.
I personally spoke with a person whose job was to explain to farmers the nutrition and
market value of a newly introduced crop. He had slides with directions recorded in Mandarin.
I asked why the recording could not be in Hokkien. The reply was that for the purpose of
promoting Mandarin, he was not allowed to record the oral directions in Hokkien. He added,
however, that written instructions were generally understood and he often used Hokkien when
explaining in person.
Written information is especially a problem in these areas. Some'types of infomation on
technological know-how are more readily available in writing. Once put into writing, using
written Mandarin, it is easily translated into Hokkien or Hakka. There are types of information -
that are not easily available in writing, such as manual skills and knowledge about the plants or
insects peculiar to the local surroundings that has been passed down orally in the vernacular.
Written information is lacking partly because subject matter of this nature tend to be neglected
in school education, and partly because students are not trained to write in the native tongues.
There are many Hokkien words that have no Mandarin equivalents, thus making translation to
written Mandarin a problem. Compared with Mandarin, Hokkien has a richer vocabulary of
movement and action, and has richer and more systematic grammatical categories in time
relations. A study on the correlation between the growth of various industries and the languages
used in each may reveal something significant about language use and economic strength.
In this paper I have given a brief background of the language policies in Singapore,
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