Written by By Steven Crook / Translated by 布蘭特潘

This Tainan County-based group is endeavoring to reconstruct Sirayan culture and win government recognition for the Siraya tribe, a lowland aboriginal group that used to dominate Southwest Taiwan, but whose language has not been spoken for a hundred years. 

In 2008, Huang was awarded a grant by the Foundation for Endangered Languages, a charity registered in the United Kingdom, to help fund the preparation of Sirayan-language teaching materials and the compilation of a Sirayan dictionary. Highway 11 recently interviewed Huang, a PhD student at the University of Florida, by e-mail.

H11: When did you realize you were of Siraya descent?

HUANG: In the summer of 2005, I came back to Taiwan and visited the National Museum of Prehistory in Taitung. There I saw a display entitled ‘Siraya tools’ that included fishing equipment, bamboo utensils and a cradle. I realized that these things were common in my own home. I was confused because back then I had thought of myself simply as a ‘Taiwanese’ – ethnically speaking, Southern Min. I called my native home in Jiali Township, Tainan County, to ask about my identity. Surprisingly, the elders in my home told me, “Oh yes, our family is actually ‘fwan-a’ [‘barbarian’ in Taiwanese].” That’s when I first learned I was in fact a Siraya aborigine.

The discovery of my true identity got me into thinking about issues such as the social connotation of labeling and the survival of minority languages in modern nation-states: Why did my folks feel ashamed about our aboriginal ethnicity? Does this have to do with the fact that we were labeled ‘fwan-a,’ which means ‘savages’? Does this feeling of shame have to do with the fact that the Sirayan language is no longer spoken by my folks? But today more and more Siraya people are embracing their aboriginal identity. Does this have to do with the fact that mainstream Taiwanese society has replaced the derogatory term ‘fwan-a’ with a more positive term ‘yuan zhu min’? Or is this newfound self-respect related to the changing political climate? So, as you can tell, my research into Sirayan is not just academically driven. It is greatly related to my own personal journey.

H11: Does Sirayan resemble any other languages?

HUANG: Sirayan is an indigenous language, and like other indigenous Formosan languages, it belongs to the Austronesian language family. This group includes most of the languages spoken in the Pacific region such as the Filipino languages and the Indonesian languages. The Austronesian language family ranges from Taiwan in the north to New Zealand (but not Australia) in the south, west to Madagascar and east to Easter Island. Within Taiwan, Sirayan is closest to Paiwan and Amis. As an Austronesian language, Sirayan is distinctively different from the Han languages (Southern Min, Hakka, Mandarin) spoken in Taiwan.

HUANG<: Sirayan uses a lot of reduplication mechanisms in its morphology: ‘talag’ means home/house; ‘tatalag’ means welcome; ‘alid’ means god; ‘alilid’ means to thank. Also, while all three Han languages spoken in Taiwan have tones, the Formosan Austronesian languages do not.

What really fascinates me is the fact that languages differ in terms of how they encode a worldview. For example, Mandarin encourages the dominance of a single race (the Han) and a single gender (male). Hierarchy and comparative ranking are not just general aspects of Chinese culture and/or Confucianism: They are prevalent in the Chinese language and grammaticized as such. On the other hand, one does not find such morphemes as comparative or superlative in Sirayan. Historical documents also indicate that in traditional Siraya society, all individuals were equal and no person could boast of his or her superiority over others. There were no rulers, no kings or queens, no chiefs of any sort. This is a cultural difference informed by and observable in linguistic difference.

HUANG: Sirayan was last spoken natively in 1908, but we who work on Siraya revitalization hate to call it a ‘dead’ or ‘extinct’ language. These labels have negative connotations – they imply the Siraya people and culture have disappeared. We would like to think that the language is just sleeping, or dormant. Since we Siraya folks are still strongly alive, we have a chance to bring our mother tongue back. We will re-learn it and we will wake it up by speaking it again.

H11: How is your work with the SCA related to your research?

HUANG: As a linguist I am interested in sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics. That is, I do not care so much about the universality of language (e.g. the linguistic capacity in human cognition) as linguistic and cultural diversity. I am interested in the socio-political conditions of ‘human beings as language users.’ In my PhD dissertation I will discuss the sociopolitical history of Taiwan, examining its colonial history, the language policies of each regime, and changes in political ideology and political discourse. Also, I will focus on the current revitalization effort of the modern day Siraya folks as a grassroots cultural movement that’s also political. The former is a top-down influence, the latter bottom-up. I will braid them together and see how they interact. I would like to see how in this context today’s Siraya identity is co-constructed by the nation-state and the individuals. I believe that language revitalization as a social activity certainly plays an important role here.

As a Siraya native, I have a sense of mission to bring the mother tongue back to my folks. That’s why I work for the SCA. My job in the association includes analyzing old Sirayan-language documents to relearn the grammar, assisting in the compilation of a modern Sirayan dictionary, designing Sirayan-language teaching materials, and teaching the mother tongue. It’s a dream of mine and my folks to awaken the ‘dormant’ Sirayan language.