Date of Award

2016

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Zhang, Jing

Keywords

Taiwan, Japan, Code-Switching, Linguistics, Film

Area of Concentration

International and Area Studies

Abstract

For most of its contemporary history, Taiwan was colonized by foreign governments. Taiwan was ceded to Japan by the Qing dynasty at the conclusion of the First Sino-Japanese war in 1895. Upon Japan’s defeat in World War II, the Nationalist Party [KMT] replaced Japan as the ruling government party on Taiwan. As a result of the institution of different “official” languages and cultures on the island by the ruling governments, the question of a distinctly Taiwanese identity remains highly contested. This thesis explores linguistic hybridity in Taiwanese films and the effect that language choice has on the characters’ identity formation within the film. Code-switching theories analyze characters’ motivations behind their language choices. The first chapter of my thesis centers on the question of local and national Taiwanese identities through language choices made in the film City of Sadness (1989). The second chapter will focus on the vi gender, and cultural tensions established through linguistic conflicts in the film Cape No. 7 (2008). The third chapter focuses on the film Island Etude (2006), in which an interesting mix of local dialects and global languages inform the characters’ search for distinct personal youth identities. I argue that the constantly-changing linguistic dynamic in these films reveals multivalent tension between the individual, the national, the cultural, and the political in the formation of a “Taiwanese” identity.

Download

Share

COinS