The 2020 census data found that 31.6% of people in Taiwan primarily use Taiwanese in daily life. Almost 66% of those over 65 primarily speak Taiwanese. Nationwide, just 7.4% of those between 6 and 14 primarily speak Taiwanese. Those numbers increase slightly older age bands: 11% for those 15-24 and 15.6% for 25-34.
Nonetheless, there is considerable regional variation. 66.7% of all people in Chiayi County primarily speak Taiwanese. 25% of those 6-14, 30.5% 15-24, and 47% 25-34.
So yes, there are younger Taiwanese who use Taiwanese primarily. And as other posters have noted, there are more in the south.
It’s probably worth pointing out that only 37% of Taipei residents primarily speak Taiwanese. Most foreigners live in northern Taiwan and are especially concentrated in Taipei. This skews their impression of how many people speak Taiwanese.
If you want to make sure your kids can speak Taiwanese, you can enroll them in the experimental school that is opening in Kaohsiung next year to provide immersive Taiwanese education.
Experimental education in Taiwan usually start with elementary school. If it is succesful, it is often expanded to cover junior high school. High school education is another matter.
Still young! Depending on the source, middle age starts at around 36, 40, or even 45. With increasing lifespans, it makes sense to push those numbers up a bit. But those are just numbers.
It is in Luzhu District but for whatever reason they have not made the name public.
Tainan apparently has 11 schools with ‘immersive Taiwanese plans’. At those schools, ‘consolidated’ , art, natural science, health, PE, and other ‘flexible’ classes are taight entirely in Taiwanese. Koupi Experimental Elementary school in Sinhua supposedly teaches half of its classes in Taiwanese.
It was also fairly noticeable that Tainan schools devote more time and effort to teaching transitional justice subjects such as 228. The only recent program in Taipei I noticed was at just our schools and was focused on general human rights education (Human Rights Declaration, Convention of Rights of Child etc.) rather than on what actually happened in Taiwan.
One of my favorite bands, Sorry Youth (拍謝少年) perform and speak to the crowd only in Hokkien. And they call out other bands for performing in Beijinghua.
I was talking to some public school admin about why Hokkien (or any of the other local languages) + Mandarin wasn’t being pushed for bilingual 2030. They said there are a few schools doing that (Hokkien and Mandarin) but the vast majority of parents complained that their children wouldn’t be learning English and that their kids were being robbed of the opportunity to learn the language that will get them ahead in life. Figures.
What is is, 80% of the world’s languages will be dead by the end of the century because the vast majority of the world prioritizes English, Spanish, and Mandarin? . The question is, will later generations of Taiwanese care? In North America, there is a LOT of anger over the death of native languages. Hawaii (which I will lump into “North America” exclusively for political reasons) has some schools opening that are exclusively in Hawaiian, even though the teachers are having to teach themselves the language as they go. Taiwan is ~30 years off from being in a similar position – virtually every native speaker is dead and now you want to revive the language?
I find the code switching used by old people incredibly fascinating. They will speak taiwanese the majority of the time including at young people but will randomly switch to mandarin and back again. It’s incredibly disorienting if you’re trying to learn the languages
Hokkien is the language spoken in SEA, which is different from Taigi from tones to grammar to vocab. It isn’t hard to achieve passable intelligibility with a little training, but they are not the same.
There are people aged 30 or above making an effort to only speak Taigi at home, including me, and once in a while I ran into people who do the same.
Then there are people who obviously know how to speak the language fairly well, but don’t speak it with their kids, and get really excited when they hear me and my wife speak it to our kid. Then they would attempt to speak it with their kid. It’s good that they are trying, but I think after the kid is 3, it might take more effort and tact to get the kid to be more receptacle.
