China's Assimilationist Language Policy

7    Language hegemony in its relationto Chinese marriage migrants’mothers’ adaptations to andeducational involvements inTaiwan

Yi-Hsuan Chelsea Kuo

Background

Taiwan has always been a multi-cultural society where various languages are spoken: Taiwanese, Hakka, the aboriginal languages, and Mandarin, imposed by the KMT as the national language in 1945. The emergence in the late 1980s of the so-called “foreign brides,” or female marriage migrants (FMMs), as more and more Taiwanese men are seeking marriage partners from Southeast Asian countries and from mainland China, has slowly reshaped the linguistic landscape. The number of Taiwanese men marrying internationally has indeed been rising rapidly in recent years. In 2003, for example, 31.9 percent ...