Chinese is a highly complex language with internal variation unprecedented in most other languages. Yet, that does not mean Chinese is unique in the sense that it cannot be compared to other languages and new concepts need to be introduced for the description of it. This paper is dedicated to the question of how to apply the notion of…

Many English-medium instruction (EMI) classrooms in non-Anglophone countries adopt a multilingual stance, using English alongside the host country's local language(s). However, the perceptions of such multilingual practices held by students remain under-researched. Given many Asian countries' current drives to internationalize and diversify their…

This paper includes two interrelated studies. The first production study investigates the timing patterns of English as spoken by Chinese learners with different dialect backgrounds. The second comprehension study explores native and non-native speakers' assessments of the intelligibility of Chinese-accented English, and examines the effects of…

Young people with English as an Additional Language/Dialect backgrounds are often identified in public health messages and popular media as "bodies at risk" because they do not conform to the health regimens of contemporary Western societies. With increasing numbers of Chinese students in Australian schools, it is necessary to advance…

This study covers two issues: (1) the language shift process relating to two highly endangered aboriginal languages of Taiwan and (2) the correlations between some variables and their language shift. Both Kanakanavu and Saaroa peoples underwent two waves of migration: (1) a massive in-migration of another Formosan ethnic group (Bunun people) in…

In order to preserve distinctive cultures, people anxiously figure out writing systems of their languages as recording tools. Mandarin, Taiwanese and Hakka languages are three major and the most popular dialects of Han languages spoken in Chinese society. Their writing systems are all in Han characters. Various and independent phonetic…

How bilinguals' two languages interact with each other has stimulated considerable research. However, little of this research has focused on objective measures of speech production. This study aims to investigate bilinguals' production of Guoyu and Taiwanese voiceless sibilant fricatives to see how language contact and language dominance influence…

Since the lifting of martial law in 1987, the rapid liberalization and democratization of Taiwan has led to the transformation of its political structure from a single-party system to a full-fledged two-party system. Along with this political opposition are the two contrastive concepts, the North and the South. Located in this background, this…

Discusses the close relationship between historical linguistics and dialectology, pointing out, through analysis and reconstruction of Taiwanese dialects, that the tasks of dialectologists do not stop at the making of linguistic atlases and must go beyond those tasks to reconstruct the proto-forms. (two references) (Author/CB)

There are two facets to the lyric rhythm of Taiwanese folk songs: beat alignment and metrical pattern selection. Because the lyrics are metrically derived from classical Chinese verse, a prosodic line may have syllable-beat symmetry. However, syllable-beat mismatches are also common. Lexical syllables have preference over functor syllables in beat…

Research supported by grants from the United States National Institute of Mental Health and the Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago. (DD)

Describes the unicode project, which is working toward a single computer encoding scheme for all the worlds' scripts. It focuses on the special challenge of encoding Chinese characters, and uses the example of Hokkien, a Chinese dialect spoken by most people in Taiwan, to explore the problem of unorthodox, unstable, or unofficial scripts.…

The author summarizes some of the spoken language policies of the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China of Taiwan, including some statistics on dialect speakers in the population, methods for promoting Mandarin in the schools, and attitudes toward the maintenance of minority languages. (SJL)

A study examined young children's use of the Mandarin "jiu" in its adverbial form in conditional sentences. The language corpus included: (1) spontaneous speech samples of 66 children aged 4, 5, 6, and 7 years in 20 Taiwan locations and (2) story repetitions by 461 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds in 22 locations. The data indicate that children…

Papers for the fourth Foundation for Endangered Languages (FEL) Conference include the following: "Endangered languages and Literacy" (Nicholas Ostler, Blair Rudes); "Keynote Address: On Native Language Literacy: a Personal Perspective" (Ofelia Zepeda); "A Community's Solution to Some Literacy Problems: The Mayangna of…