The UCLA Asia Pacific Center (APC) hosted its ninth UCLA-National Taiwan
Normal University (UCLA-NTNU) Annual Taiwan Studies Initiative Conference, “Tongues of
Taiwan: Culture and Identity between Languages and Empires,” on May 29–30, 2026 (inperson). The key theme was to explore how linguistic practice has shaped cultural identity across Taiwan's past and present. Thirteen scholars from linguistics, literature, history, and media studies presented their research in the two-day international event, which investigated how Taiwan's multilingual landscape has been affected by successive empires and how it has
continued to evolve.
Dr. Min Zhou (Director, UCLA Asia Pacific Center) delivers welcoming remarks
on Day 1 of the 2026-UCLA-NTNU Conference
The UCLA Asia Pacific Center (APC) hosted its ninth UCLA-National Taiwan Normal University (UCLA-NTNU) Annual Taiwan Studies Initiative Conference, “Tongues of Taiwan: Culture and Identity between Languages and Empires,” on Friday and Saturday, May 29–30, 2026. The conference was co-organized by Dr. Shu-mei Shih (Irving and Jean Stone Chair in the Humanities and Dr. of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies, and Director of the UCLA-NTNU Taiwan Studies Initiative at the APC), Alan Dai (Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA), and Quentin Tan (Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA). This conference brought together scholars from diverse disciplines—linguistics, literature, history, and media studies—to reflect on the past, present, and future of the tongues of Taiwan, exploring how linguistic practice has shaped cultural identity. Thirteen speakers presented their work across five panels and one special presentation over the two days, with additional scholars contributing as moderators or discussants. Dr. Cindy Fan (Vice Provost for International Studies and Global Engagement), Dr. Alexandra Stern (Dean of Humanities), Dr. Min Zhou (Director of the APC), Dr. Shu-mei Shih (Director of the UCLA-NTNU Taiwan Studies Initiative), and Quentin Tan, conference co-organizer, offered welcome remarks.
Five panels addressed a range of related topics: Languages and Empires of Taiwan; Linguistic Difference and Identity in Taiwanese Literature; The Linguistic Turn in Taiwan Studies; Mediated Polyphony in Contemporary Taiwan; and Plurilingualism and Polyphony in Taiwanese Literature. A special pre-recorded presentation revisited Taiwanese language movements and questioned why debates have overlooked the idea that “literacy exists for the sake of reading,” followed by a concluding forum reflecting on colonial legacies, identity formation, and the tensions between linguistic preservation and standardization. The event drew over 100 scholars and students from UCLA and the local community in Los Angeles, with 80 attendees on the first day and over 60 attendees on the second. The conference reaffirmed APC’s commitment to advancing Taiwan Studies and strengthening UCLA-NTNU collaboration.
Dr. Shu-mei Shih (Director, UCLA-NTNU Taiwan Studies Initiative)
offers opening remarks on Day 1 of the 2026 UCLA-NTNU Conference
Panel 1 was moderated by Dr. Min Zhou (Distinguished Dr. of Sociology and Asian American Studies, UCLA), focusing on “Languages and Empires of Taiwan.” Dr. Yoshihisa Amae (NTNU) examined prison letters written in Japanese by Indigenous intellectuals arrested during the White Terror and focused on the Hochungshan (Pastaza) Incident. Amae posited that these Japanophone writings functioned not merely as colonial residue but as a medium through which Indigenous subjectivity, political dissent, and personal intimacy were expressed and preserved in the face of KMT suppression of both Japanese and Indigenous languages. Following Dr. Amae’s presentation, Dr. Frederik Green (San Francisco State University) examined how two early Japanese colonial officials in Taiwan, Nakamura Ōkei and Momiyama Ishū, used kanshi (poetry written in classical Chinese) to negotiate the paradoxes of Japan’s imperial modernity. Rather than treating classical verse as mere nostalgic classicism, Green maintained that these poems circulated in newspapers and elite social networks as a politically consequential medium of empire, mobilizing classical Chinese as cultural capital while aestheticizing colonial landscapes and translating colonial domination into the moral idiom of civilization. Dr. Ann Heylen (NTNU) adopted a historiographical approach to examine the use of Dutch as an administrative, legal, and missionary language during VOC-era Taiwan (1624–1662, 1664– 1668), tracing how language shaped colonial power, knowledge production, and cross-cultural interaction among Dutch officials, missionaries, Indigenous peoples, and Chinese settlers, and reassessing the role of Dutch as both a practical tool and a symbolic marker in the historical writing of Dutch Formosa.
Conference Panel 1 – Languages and Empires of Taiwan
Left to right: Dr. Min Zhou (UCLA), Dr. Ann Heylen (NTNU), Dr. Frederik Green (San
Francisco State University), and Dr. Yoshihisa Amae (NTNU)
Panel 2, moderated by Dr. Michael Berry (Dr. of Asian Languages and Cultures and Director of Chinese Studies, UCLA), turned to the theme of “Linguistic Difference and Identity in Taiwanese Literature.” Dr. Satoru Hashimoto (Johns Hopkins University) considered Taiwan’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945 through the lens of a fundamental shift in the language game, examining how writers Zhong Lihe, Yang Kui, and Wu Zhuoliu mobilized fiction to grapple with the challenge of historicization posed by that rupture, and what their works reveal about modes of historical reckoning in the ruins of Japanese imperialism. Dr. Andrea Bachner (Cornell University) investigated what she termed “the untranslatability trap,” turning not to examples of Taiwan’s celebrated polyvocity but rather to literary scenes, drawn
from works by Zhan Bing, Chen Li, Wu He, and others, in which the problems and even the impossibility of translation and communication are strategically foregrounded, asking what such scenarios can teach us about more ethical disciplinary approaches to the heterogeneous languagescapes of our worlds and times. Dr. Táňa Dluhošová (Czech Academy of Sciences) proposed the concept of “hegemonic exile” to describe the post-1949 Mainlander formation in Taiwan, in which a displaced population simultaneously institutionalized Mandarin and a mainland-centered nationalist habitus within a multilingual society; examining the work of Yang Shuang-zi, Dluhošová traced how literature registers the gradual normalization of this asymmetry across generations, extending exile theory to demonstrate that exile can coexist with dominance and persist as a formative structure within multilingual national space.
Conference Panel 2 – Linguistic Difference and Identity in Taiwanese Literature
Left to right: Dr. Michael Berry (UCLA), Dr. Satoru Hashimoto (Johns Hopkins University), Dr.
Andrea Bachner (Cornell University), and Dr. Táňa Dluhošová (Czech Academy of Sciences)
Panel 3, “The Linguistic Turn in Taiwan Studies,” was moderated by Dr. Hongyin Tao (Dr. of Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA). Dr. Cornelius Kubler (Williams College) presented a study of Southern Min dialects across three generations of speakers in the Penghu Islands, drawing on fieldwork conducted in 1976–78, 2003–04, and 2025–26. Kubler found that dialect differences among sub-groups are being leveled, that knowledge of the literary register is rapidly disappearing, and that the younger generation is far stronger in Mandarin than Southern Min—a trend that local educational efforts appear unlikely to reverse. Dr. Gareth Price (Duke University) explored metapragmatic stances by long-term foreign residents of Taiwan toward acquiring, or deliberately not acquiring, the island’s national and local languages, drawing on interview and social media data from a multi-sited ethnographic project. Calling these migrants “privileged strangers,” Price argued that their flexible “latitudes of citizenship” embed them in complex politics of belonging that fundamentally frame their stances on language nonacquisition, and that these individual stances reproduce and reconfigure Taiwan’s national projects of modernity. Dr. Hsi-Yao Su (NTNU) investigated how ordinary Taiwanese netizens police Mainland Chinese expressions in everyday online interactions, observing three orders of enregisterment, the process through which linguistic features become socially recognizable as belonging to specific speaker types, and arguing that such bottom-up language policing connects everyday digital interactions to broader claims of linguistic authority shaped by the entanglement of Taiwan and China at the linguistic, cultural, and political levels.
Conference Panel 3 – The Linguistic Turn in Taiwan Studies
Left to right: Dr. Hongyin Tao (UCLA), Dr. Cornelius Kubler (Williams College), Dr. Gareth
Price (Duke University), and Dr. Hsi-Yao Su (NTNU)
Day 2 of the conference commenced with Panel 4, “Mediated Polyphony in
Contemporary Taiwan,” moderated by Dr. Shu-mei Shih (Dr. of Comparative Literature, Asian
Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies, UCLA). Dr. Brian Bernards (University
of Southern California) examined two collaboratively directed Indigenous-themed Taiwanese
films—KANO (dir. Umin Boya, 2014) and Panay (dir. Cheng Yu-chieh and Lekal Sumi,
2015)—arguing that their Indigenous co-creators leveraged prized forms of knowledge, skill, and
creativity (athletic, agricultural, musical, storytelling, and multilinguistic) to resist minoritized
assimilation into Han settler-dominant expressions of Taiwanese multicultural solidarity, and to
address issues of name rectification, community revitalization, and self-determination.
The next presentation by Dr. Raymond Kun-Xian Shen (UCLA/NTNU) focused on the Taiwanese online performer A-han, whose queer cross-dressing portrayals of accented Mandarin-speaking female figures, including a Vietnamese housewife, a Japanese travel-show host, and a Taiwanese fortuneteller, circulate as comedic sketches that simultaneously produce and destabilize Sinophone differences; Shen argued that A-han’s performances operate within a distinctly ambivalent register in which humor and discrimination are held in unresolved tension, at once foregrounding the heterogeneity of Sinophone Taiwan and registering a desire to domesticate and exoticize the migrant other. Dr. Spencer Chen (Hamilton College) examined Taiwan’s dubbing industry as a site where the afterlives of multiple language regimes: Japanese, KMT, and now transnational market logics, continue to haunt everyday practices of speech, performance, and mediated identity; drawing on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork with Taiwan’s dubbing professionals, Chen contended that dubbing studios function as “postcolonial soundstages” in which Taigi voice labor simultaneously challenges and reproduces colonial hierarchies, giving rise to two parallel linguistic infrastructures that marginalize regional variation and hybrid speech even as they gesture toward decolonization.
Conference Panel 4 – Mediated Polyphony in Contemporary Taiwan
Left to right: Dr. Shu-mei Shih (UCLA), Dr. Brian Bernards (University of Southern California),
Dr. Raymond Kun-Xian Shen (UCLA/NTNU), Dr. Spencer Chen (Hamilton College)
Panel 5, “Plurilingualism and Polyphony in Taiwanese Literature,” was moderated by Dr. Ann Heylen (Dr. of Taiwan Culture, Languages and Literature, NTNU). Formosa Deppman (UCLA) examined how Lai Ho’s 1931 short story “Alas, She Died” synchronizes an integration of distinct vernacular forms (the vernacular Sinitic, Hokkien, and Japanese) with a narrative of the female maidservant protagonist’s extreme suffering, arguing that Lai Ho grappled with three spheres of linguistic authority (Western-inflected May Fourth ideas, local Hokkien, and the colonial silence of Japanese censorship) and that it is ultimately the protagonist’s body that absorbs but cannot resolve the contradictions of linguistic and physical commodification. Following Formosa’s presentation, Alan Dai (UCLA) investigated how Wu Chuo-liu’s use of kanshi in his Japanese-language novel Orphan of Asia defies simple classification as either “Japanophone” or “Sinophone,” arguing that kanshi occupied a curiously liminal position in East Asian literature during the twentieth century—neither fully Chinese nor purely Japanese, neither obsolete nor modern, neither national nor cosmopolitan—and that Wu’s insertion of multiple kanshi in the novel constitutes both an act of minor literature and a practice of postloyalist poetics. Quentin Tan (UCLA) turned to Wang Zhenhe’s novel Rose, Rose, I Love You, which weaves through Mandarin, Taiwanese Hokkien, English, and Japanese while deftly alternating between Sinitic characters, the alphabet, and Zhuyin; Tan argued that the novel’s irreducible heterogeneity and refusal to settle on any single mode of representation enacts the tensions and interrelations between languages in Taiwanese history, pointing not toward linguistic nationalism but toward a Taiwanese that is simply part of the open totality of languages spoken in Taiwan.
Conference Panel 5 – Plurilingualism and Polyphony in Taiwanese Literature
Left to right: Dr. Ann Heylen (NTNU), Formosa Deppman (UCLA),
Alan Dai (UCLA), and Quentin Tan (UCLA)
The conference also featured a Special Presentation by Dr. Pei-feng Chen (Academia
Sinica), delivered in a pre-recorded format in Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles translated
by Quentin Tan (UCLA). Chen’s presentation, “Reexamining the Taiwanese Language
Movement and Its Debates: Literature, Enlightenment, Nationhood, and Modernity,” analyzed
why various pre- and post-war movements and discourses concerning the Taiwanese language
have consistently overlooked language’s function as a conduit for acquiring knowledge of
modernization—taking “literacy exists for the sake of reading” as its central problematique.
Dr. Shu-mei Shih moderated a concluding forum, in which all participants were invited to
reflect collectively on the themes that had emerged over the two days. Discussion ranged across
the politics of postcolonial memory and identity construction, the persistence of colonial
language hierarchies in contemporary media and everyday life, the tensions between linguistic
preservation and standardization, and the possibilities and limits of translation as a framework
for understanding Taiwan’s multilingual literary and cultural history. Presenters and attendees
alike contributed their insights, generating a robust conversation about the diverse, and often
contradictory, ways in which the tongues of Taiwan have been inhabited, contested, performed,
and imagined across languages and empires. This annual conference remains a cornerstone of
APC’s vibrant Taiwan Studies Program and continues to strengthen the institutional partnership
between UCLA and NTNU since the initiative’s inception in 2017.
Dr. Shu-mei Shih (UCLA) moderates the concluding forum
Published: Monday, November 2, 2026
