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The Bilingual 2030 policy in Taiwan has garnered both support and criticism since it was introduced in 2018. Specifically, while the policy has been lauded for its vision to enhance Taiwan’s competitiveness through English, its existence stands in sharp contrast with the multilingual reality of Taiwan and the fundamental principles upheld in the National Languages Development Act. In this paper, we adopt Ruiz’s (Citation1984) framework of language orientations to analyse how languages in Taiwan are positioned at the level of the state. The findings show that the manifested language orientations are multilayered and conflicting, carrying the following features: national languages as right and resource, English-centric bilingualism as resource, and Mandarin as problem, right, and resource. Although the government argues that bilingualism and multilingualism can be developed in parallel, we contend that this arrangement not only perpetuates the linguistic status quo (the dominance of Mandarin) but also exacerbates existing language hierarchies in Taiwan (national languages further marginalised by the elevated status of English). To strengthen multilingualism, we stress that state-level language policies need to be sufficiently discussed as an integrated whole so that consistency in language planning is ensured and interactions between the teaching and learning of different languages are optimised.
Chang et al. (Wed,) studied this question.