External Influence and Internal Recomposition in Taiwan’s Sociolinguistic Landscape

Taiwan is an island of more than 23 million inhabitants in 2023, of diverse origins and languages. The ethno-linguistic composition and plurilingual/multilingual habits of the Taiwanese people are the result of a complex history, marked in particular by major political events in the 20th century: colonization by Japan (1895-1945), the establishment of the Republic of China government in Taiwan (1949), the first election of a Taiwan-born president (Lee Teng-hui, 1984), then of an independence-leaning president (Chen Shui-bian, 2000). These events have had an impact on the composition of the population (notably the massive arrival of Mainland Chinese in 1949), but also how Taiwanese perceive their languages, whether autochthonous or “national”. The insular nature of Taiwan has favored a gradual shift between two opposing dynamics, facilitated by the historical and political context mentioned above: a dynamic of importation (of language – “Guoyu”; of concepts – the “national language”), then a dynamic of internal recomposition (expansion of Guoyu but also of the dominant “Taiwanese” dialect; attention to vernacular languages; and, finally, legitimation of a plurality of “national languages”).This chapter examines how these two dynamics have played out in three key phases of the sociolinguistic construction of the island: the adoption of the national language since 1945, the rediscovery of Sinitic multilingualism in the 1980s, and the large-scale documentation of Austronesian languages since the 2000s, that led to their integration into an assertively multilingual landscape.