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Introduction to the Corpus of
Formosan Languages
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The Formosan languages belong to a widespread language family called
"Austronesian", which include all the languages spoken
throughout the islands of the Pacific and Indian Ocean (Madagascar,
Indonesian, the Philippines, Taiwan, New Guinea, New Zealand, Hawaii and
the islands of Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia). A few languages are
found in the Malay peninsula and in the Indo-Chinese peninsula (Vietnam
and Cambodia).
The Formosan languages exhibit very rich linguistic diversity and the variations that oppose different dialects/languages are enormous. These languages are extremely useful in comparative work but though they have been known to be on the verge of extinction for years, Formosan languages, Formosan linguistics as a specific field has bloomed only very recently, with the participation of more scholars adopting different contemporary linguistic approaches to investigate individual languages or establishing cross-linguistic comparisons. Unlike Chinese, the Formosan languages do not have any writing system and the lack of written records dampen our knowledge of extinct languages. Today, while elders are still able to speak their mother tongues fluently, the young cannot, as a result of migration in the cities and the prevalence of Mandarin Chinese in every day life. We are currently making attempts to record and maintain these languages but we believe that collecting and/or editing existing texts (sentences, textbooks, folktales, narratives) in a digital format constitute the most precious legacy for future generation. In order to achieve our goal, we hope that more people will devote to
the study of the Formosan languages and integrate our project. |
