Taiwanese Language Revitalization｜Zine Project

Overview

Taiwanese Hokkien (Tâi-gí) was systematically suppressed under decades of Mandarin-only language policy, and today faces a quiet emergency — officially classified by UNESCO as endangered due to declining intergenerational transmission.

This zine set out to examine how its symbolic value is being renegotiated today, and what new forms of inclusion and exclusion emerge as a historically marginalized language regains cultural capital, including the risk that revival itself can harden into a new hierarchy that sidelines Hakka, Indigenous, and immigrant language communities.

The core idea traced this story as a journey — from crisis to suppression, resistance, complication, negotiation, and vision — using distorted, resistant typography to embody the language's own fractured history.

This translated into an accordion-fold A3 zine bound with red thread, pairing archival imagery with bold red-and-navy collage to make the reader physically unfold Tâi-gí's story, page by page, from caged silence to flight.