The Southeast Asian languages policy in Taiwan: the linguistic and nonlinguistic goals

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to examine the linguistic and non-linguistic goals of the Southeast Asian languages (SEAL) policy in Taiwan. It was proposed by former President Ma Ying-jeou’s administration to develop grades 1–12 students’ multilingual awareness, for there has been an increasingly significant presence of second-generation Southeast Asian immigrants at school. Since current President Tsai In-Wen’s first-term in 2016, the SEAL policy has been fuelled with an economic and sociopolitical agenda – the New Southbound Policy, the measure which is designed to advance the nation’s prospects in Southeast Asia. This study applies Cooper’s [1989. Language Planning and Social Change. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press] language policy as marketing and analyses the instrumentalist value of the SEAL. The Tsai government is conceptualised as a marketer; the SEAL are defined as the product; the Ministry of Education is assigned to the place as a hub which distributes the SEAL product to nationwide consumers; promotion piques the consumers’ interest in SEAL learning; price is set by making one’s profit gains larger than the sum of investment. The study concludes that the value of the SEAL product increases when its communication network is expanded from local immigrant communities and national school systems to an international business area.

KEYWORDS:

• Language policy
• instrumentalism
• Taiwan
• multilingualism
• language ideology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The SEAL policy is a conventional title for the New Residents’ Languages Curriculum.

2 To rank the number of the parents’ nationalities from the most to the least is Mainland China (41.94%), Vietnam (38.71%), Indonesia (8.44%), the Philippines (2.15%), Thailand (1.82%), Cambodia (1.79%), Myanmar (0.95%), Malaysia (0.85%), Japan (0.83%), the United States (0.61%), South Korea (0.37%), Canada (0.24%), and Singapore (0.1%) (Ministry of Education 2019). The free e-textbooks for the seven Southeast Asian languages can be retrieved from New Residents Children’s Education Website: https://newres.k12ea.gov.tw/15.

3 The universities which offer Southeast Asian language courses are excluded from this list.