Language Policy and Planning in Japan, Nepal and Taiwan + Chinese Characters: Some Common Issues

Robert B. Kaplan

Professor Emeritus, Applied Linguistics, University of Southern California Mailing Address: PO Box 577, Port Angeles, WA 98362 USA

Richard B. Baldauf Jr.

Professor, TESOL, School of Education, University of Queensland, QLD 4072 Australia

Introduction

This volume brings together three language policy and planning polity studies related to three countries in Asia as well as a study of Chinese characters, the dominant script form in the region. (See the 'Series Overview' for a more general discussion of the nature of the series, Appendix A for the 22 questions each study set out to address, and Kaplan et al. (2000) for a discussion of the underlying concepts for the studies themselves.) In this paper, in addition to providing an introductory summary of the material covered in these studies, we want to draw out and discuss some of the more general issues that these four studies have raised.

The polities covered do not in any useful sense constitute a geographic cluster, though as we note they do share some common elements in addition to the fact that all of them are in Asia. While both the Nepal and Taiwan study were initially completed about a decade ago – and have now been updated as unquestionably matters in those polities have changed over time – there are still some commonalities.

One of the important general issues raised by these studies has to do with literacy. Both China and Japan, at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, recognized and began to try to solve the complex problem of trying to overcome widespread illiteracy in an environment of extremely complex writing systems. Character standardisation and simplification in China in the decades after the middle of the 20th century was driven by the need for mass literacy to push social reform. Literacy is still a pressing issue in Nepal, with women and minorities having very low literacy rates.

A second issue which has arisen out of the initial literacy concern is related to the use of script-based writing (except in Nepal) in the modern technological era and the ensuing problems of selecting, standardising and modernising character-based systems. A common standard based on Unicode for the overlapping character systems used in Japan, Taiwan and the People's Republic of China would increase the ease of intra- and inter-lingual written communication, making technological communication on the internet and on mobile devices like phones more reliable, and therefore making possible more widespread characters use. However, the mystique of the traditional forms, and their cultural associations, as well as different political agendas, have made agreement on standard forms of characters nearly impossible to achieve (see Zhao & Baldauf, 2008). One of the interesting things about these standards for characters is that they apply to government use and more generally to printed work. Although a guide for handwriting has fairly recently been published in Taiwan, handwritten texts in Japan and P.R. China are unregulated.

A third common issue is the increasing use of, demand for, and teaching of English as a first foreign language. It has even been suggested in Japan and Taiwan that English should be a second de facto national language (Kaplan & Baldauf, 2007). In all of the polities, there has been a move to begin the study of English earlier in order to gain communicative advantages that many people believe this will bring, and this demand has meant that English has begun to spread to primary schools, despite a lack of resources, especially of trained teachers (see, e.g., Butler, 2007 for Japan; Li, 2007 for P.R. China). In the character-using polities this spread also has implications for literacy in the national languages, as students are required to learn a new script form before mastering their own writing system. Furthermore, the growth of English as a world language has increasingly marginalized the study of other foreign languages in all these polities (see Baldauf et al., 2007) as the demands for English take increasing quantities of language-related space in the curriculum.

A final common issue relates to the status of minority languages in each of these polities. In recent years, we have seen greater support for indigenous minority languages, especially in Taiwan where their study and greater public acceptance has become a mark of an alternate Taiwanese identity. Nevertheless, minority languages still remained squeezed by the need for the national language to be taught on the one hand and by the demand to learn English, the world language, on the other. In Japan, exogenous minority languages like Spanish, Portuguese or Korean, spoken by guest workers or returning ethnic nationals, are generally ignored by the government and the educational system, and students with these backgrounds are faced by submersion language-in-education policies. In Nepal until recently, there has been an almost total disregard of minority languages and their teaching, although some signs of bilingual programs are emerging.

Nepal

In the intervening decade since the initial study was first written, Nepal has been marked by continuous instability – protests, riots, civil war, bombings, strikes, school closures, and general unrest. The elected government and the parliament have been quite unstable; Parliament was frequently dissolved, and several political parties and their respective policies have been overturned. The Maoist 'people's war' commenced, and the build-up of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), as well as a larger people's militia, continued to undermine the elected government. At one point, the Maoists claimed to control two-thirds of the nation. Over 13,000 deaths can be attributed to both sides of the insurgency; schools were taxed or closed, often converted to training grounds and barracks. Originating in west Nepal, the unrest and civil war soon spread throughout the country.

On June 1, 2001, a massacre took place in the palace, murdering the reigning royal family and everyone in the immediate line of succession to the throne, an action regarded as devastating in a Hindu country where the king and his family were considered to be of divine descent. The official investigating commission blamed crown prince Dependra (who also died) for the massacre, but conspiracy theories were plentiful (see, e.g.,...