Reflections on Orthography in Formosan Languages

In the past 400 years of Taiwan history several kinds of writing systems have been adopted in an attempt to transcribe Formosan languages, including romanisations, Chinese characters, Japanese syllabaries, and even Mandarin phonetic symbols. However, it was not until 2005 that a formal writing system based on romanisations was officially promulgated. It is advocated that romanisations is the best kind of orthography for these languages. Since 2016 several public hearings have been held by Indigenous Language Research and Development Centre, where representatives of each ethnic group discuss this matter with Formosan linguists. This article reviews the problems about the use of certain letters and symbols from a linguistic perspective. It also proposes to implement orthographic standardisation, which is intended to serve as advice for language policies on orthography.