Ecologising Seediq: Towards an Ecology of an Endangered Indigenous Language from Taiwan

Abstract

An ecolinguistic system, like a biological ecosystem, is self-regulating, yet it cannot be entirely self-contained, because words, like living species and the non-living substrates upon which they depend, are border-crossing. As a result, any ‘language’ is to some extent ‘creolised’, lexically or syntactically. Creolisation, however, may be perceived as a threat to an endangered language. The Seediq language is endangered, and, like any language, to some extent creolised. Though much less creolised than Ilan Creole, Seediq contains numerous Japanese and Chinese loanwords. Yet many of these loanwords have Seediq analogues. It may be that the Seediq language community has responded to the influx of loanwords by coining new terms based on Seediq roots. If so, their response combines linguistic purism with cultural cosmopolitanism: the loanword is a threat, the concept is not. Regardless, the coexistence of indigenous words with loanwords is part of an ongoing linguistic adaptation to modernity. I try to understand this adaptation in terms of ‘language ecology’.

Legal Indigeneities: Identity, Authenticity, and Power in Taiwan’s Indigenous Courts

“…Amid strategic decisions about attire and passing around volumes of documents, members of the Fuxing community spoke to one another in Bunun and Taiwanese Hokkien in the courtroom. Assimilationist roc laws and policies prohibiting the use of Indigenous languages, including compulsory education in Mandarin Chinese starting in 1968, means that most Indigenous people in Taiwan under the age of 50 cannot communicate fluently in their mother tongue (Sterk, 2021). Many of the hearing attendees were senior members of the community and their conversations interspersed Bunun and Taiwanese Hokkien with Mandarin Chinese.…”