Dear Editor:

When I saw the articles "Don't Be an LKK! Speak Taiwanese!" and "Who Here Can Speak Taiwanese?" in the November 1998 Sinorama [they appeared in the overseas edition in December], at first nothing about the topic struck me as amiss, and the content seemed to reflect the realities of present-day society. But after finishing, my instincts told me that the articles were attempting to convey a strange message.

The province of Taiwan has four major ethnic groups: the newcomers (the mainlanders who came when the ROC central government fled the mainland in 1949), the southern Fujianese and Hakkas (both earlier arriving Han Chinese groups) and the native Taiwanese aborigines. The term "Taiwanese" shouldn't just describe people of Fujianese origin or their language, so why did the English translation refer to them as "Taiwanese"? And I wonder about the use of bespectacled figures to represent people of Southern Fujianese ancestry in the pie charts. Were the glasses meant to convey learnedness or blindness? Why did the study exclude all mention of aboriginal Taiwanese? Was it that you couldn't find samples, or that you intentionally overlooked them?

Can it be that the Republic of China on Taiwan has changed its name to just Taiwan? Is it true that the biggest group always wins? Is this the meaning of Taiwanese democracy? Has the government already capitulated to the idea that "Taiwanese" only refers to those from southern Fujian and the language that they speak? Finally, for those Hakka scholars and high officials who care about Hakka culture, let me remind them of an old expression: Don't try to bullfight in a bull pen! They shouldn't merely try to get Hakkas to speak Hakka among themselves, but should also encourage them to speak it out in society at large. Perhaps they should even ask famous people of other ethnic groups, such as Chang Hsiao-yen, Chen Kuei-miao and Su Chen-chang, to learn a few phrases.

Editor's note: For our telephone survey of households in Taipei, Taichung, Kaohsiung and Ilan, we picked 200 numbers at random from each of those city's phonebooks. Only three of these turned out to be aboriginal Taiwanese families. Because this was too small a sample upon which to base conclusions, we excluded it from our report.

Translator's note: We used "Taiwanese" and "Southern Fujianese" interchangeably in our translations for the same reason that Taiyu and Minnanyu were used interchangeably in the Chinese original: because this reflects common usage and long-standing convention. The word choice was in no way intended to convey support for any political view. The fact that this conventional designation bothers some speakers of other dialects or languages in Taiwan was duly noted in the sidebar "What is 'Taiwanese' Language?" In Chinese, Mandarin is known as Guoyu ("the national language"), and other ethnic Chinese languages have traditionally been regarded as dialects. The most commonly spoken dialect of a region is usually named after it: hence "Cantonese," "Shanghaiese" and so forth. In fact, "Taiwanese" is probably more accurate than "Southern Fujianese," since the dialect in Taiwan has already diverged somewhat from the way it is spoken both across the strait and in Southeast Asian communities of ethnic Chinese who trace their ancestry to southern Fujian. Describing these "Taiwanese" speakers of Fujianese ancestry as "Taiwanese" once again just reflects convention and common usage in both Chinese and English.