Lesser-Known Languages (LKL): Yami | Tao Language

The fascinating and only non-Formosan indigenous language of Taiwan.

Oct 05, 2023

Picture from Chun-Hung Eric Cheng, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Welcome back to another Lesser-Known Languages Deep Dive edition!

This month, we’re turning to a small island’s indigenous tribe and its language, both filled with surprises: the Yami people and the Yami language.

Oh. Let me correct this: the Tao people and the Tao language.

While most information about it online calls them “Yami”, this is not the name they embrace. The one they do is Tao, as in Tao no pongso (Tao people) and ciciring no Tao (Tao Language).

The word Tao itself means “person.”

Everywhere online and in research documents, the main word still in use is Yami, even though it’s now officially the wrong way to talk about the language and its people.

I discovered this language while looking for an indigenous language in Taiwan that stood out.

As the only non-Formosan language, it clearly did.

I began digging. And wow.

The people’s history being still unclear, the intricate cultural habits, and the typical features of a Philippine language for a language only 76 km (47 miles) away from Taiwan are all worth a look.

Also, how could you not be curious about an island called Orchid Island?1

So let’s dive right into that first point.

Because, yes, nobody really knows when the Tao people arrived on Orchid Island.

A short history

The original supposition was that they arrived around the 13th century sailing north from the Philippines. This belief comes from the language being a Batanic language like others further south in the Philippines.

Yet, a research paper in 2011 proved this is most likely wrong because the Tao people are genetically closer to Mainland Taiwanese people than people from the Philippines.

In short, this means the Tao people arrived and most likely conversed using a language long gone until some people brought their language from the south. A curious evolution considering these Batanic languages are Austronesian languages and these originally came from… prehistoric Taiwan!

An interesting case of people and a language coming from the same place originally but not going through the same path to get there.

The Tao people lived on their 45-square-meter island in peace pretty much until the Japanese came to occupy them. The Qing Dynasty had apparently tried to occupy them but without much effect so they ceded it with Taiwan in 1895.

The Japanese renamed the island Kōtōsho (紅頭嶼) and named it an ethnological reserve, prohibiting anybody from stepping foot there. They analyzed the Tao tribes but also heavily tried to assimilate the locals.

Many common words used in today’s Tao language come from Japanese as Wikipedia shows such as:

sinsi (先生, sensei) = Teacher
kipo (切符, kippu) = Ticket
gako (学校, gakkō) = School

After World War II, Orchid Island was ceded to the Republic of China, and a process of "de-Japanization" began.

The island was renamed its current name of Lanyu (蘭嶼, Orchid Island).

The Tao people faced a new set of challenges. Taiwan pushed to assimilate them into Han Chinese culture, forcing schools to be taught in Mandarin, as they did with indigenous tribes within Taiwan.

A nuclear waste storage facility was built in 1982 without consent from the islanders. It’s been, since then, the matter of protests and complaints, especially in 2011 and 2012 after the Fukushima disaster.

President Tsai Ing-wen promised compensation until a solution for the waste would be found. This was in 2016, when she became the first president to visit the island and yet, not much seems to have evolved since then.

A few cultural wonders

All this being said, it’s important to note the island was not open to tourists until 1967. This means it stayed relatively isolated and succeeded in keeping much of its traditional culture.

And it has the most peculiar and interesting ones I’ve seen in a long time!

Let’s start with the traditional Tao houses. To survive typhoons, the Tao people used to live in semi-underground dwellings where only the roof would be above ground.

See the houses on the left? — From WU PEI HSUAN, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Like most other islanders, the Tao people’s lifestyle revolves around fishing. Their boats—called tatala for 1-3 passengers and cinedkeran for 6-10—hold beautiful and meaningful patterns on them. For example, the eye-like circles on both sides of the bow and stern are said to expel evil and show the way, while the human-like figure symbolizes the earliest man in legend.

You can check the first picture of this piece to see what these boats look like.

Finally, the Tao people also have an important celebration called the Flying Fish Festival (飛魚季 in Chinese). During it, many tasks need to be done and certain taboos must be avoided.

While they call it a “Festival,” we’re not talking a few days here. We’re talking about a festival that starts in February and finishes around nine months later!

The festival includes three main ceremonies:

The Meyvanwa (Calling Fish Ritual): A ceremony to pray for a rich catch
The Mamoka (Flying Fish Storage Ritual): A ceremony to wish a happy next life for the fish, at the end of the last month of the flying fishing season
The Manoyotoyon (Fish Cleanup Ritual): Last time to eat the dried flying cod. After that, the remaining ones are discarded

As mentioned above, there are many taboos to care for during the Festival but the most important ones are to not interfere with the underwater world (ie. not swimming, snorkeling, etc.), not touch the traditional boats, and remove shoes when walking on traditional verandas.

These behaviors are said to bring bad luck to fishermen and curse the ones who violate these rules.

Language Structure

As a language from the Malayo-Polynesian language family, it’s no surprise Tao follows most features found in this language family.

The most crucial part of it is the reliance on its Verb-Subject-Object (VSO) sentence structure. Indeed, most languages of this family follow this pattern.

This being said, the main research paper about Tao, published in early 2006, mentions people under 40 (at the time) tended to prefer SVO, likely due to the language’s contact with Mandarin. I haven’t been able to find more recent data about this though so I wonder how this has evolved.

Still, the language seems to have continued to evolve in that direction. Indeed, the only truly active website with information about the language is this one which contains sentences, courses, and vocabulary for all Indigenous languages of Taiwan.

Looking at some sentences on the Chinese version of the website shows the sentence order chosen nowadays is mostly SVO. Here’s one example sentence taken from it:

Namen masaray a ya mianowanood. → We like to sing.2

The original word order would have meant the sentence should have been masaray namen a ya mianowanood or maybe even masaray a ya mianowanood namen, depending on whether the singing part would have been considered as the verb (which I don’t reckon would be the case).

This is proof of how quickly a language can evolve in a short span of time. Not even 20 years after this evolution was first spotted, this seems to be considered the norm.

Now, don’t get me wrong. The website still showcases some sentences following the “old” word order, such as ya aro o kois namen (which means “We have a lot of pigs”) but this word order seems to now be kept for shorter sentences mostly related to possession.

Even a 2015 textbook fully in Mandarin seems to set the personal pronouns at the start of many sentences apart from questions, as in:

ko koman so wakay → I am eating a sweet potato. (with ko being the subject)

This also makes Tao widely different from its companions of the Batanic family since the others seem to have kept the VSO order.3

Pronouns

When it comes to pronouns, Tao’s system is quite simple to those familiar with the languages of this family. For others, it can easily feel complicated. It took me some time to recognize what the below table meant but once I did, it all made sense.

This Mandarin textbook, more recent shows that the letter ‘i’ when preceded by a consonant and followed by another vowel is now written as ‘y’

In short, Tao uses bound and free pronouns. Free pronouns can be used on their own. They can also be implied if the context is clear. Bound pronouns are connected to the word they refer to.

In many languages, these bound pronouns appear as prefixes or suffixes but Tao uses them around the word they refer to, as prepositions or postpositions.

The Genitive form is to refer to possession so these could be translated as my/mine, your/yours, etc.

As for the locative one, this is what you would translate as “at me” or “to me”, etc. depending on the context.

Like other Polynesian languages, Tao differentiates between the inclusive “we” (meaning two or more people including the listener) and the exclusive “we” (meaning two or more people but not the listener). While this was something I had never heard of a few years ago, I’ve since then found this common in a number of languages around the world all the way to South America’s Aymara or Ch’ol.

Tenses

When it comes to tenses, Tao relies on affixes like most other Polynesian languages. In short, here’s how to do:

Add the affix (can be a prefix, suffix, or even infix) to the verb
Add the bound pronoun around the result.
Done

Simple, right?

In reality, this can get even easier because the past or future tenses are often unmarked if the context makes things clear.

Here are a few examples with the tenses marked for questions

no ka-ngo o k-ai mo? → When was your arrival (when did you come?)
si ma-ngo am, m-ai ka? → When will you come (in the near future)?

The distant future could also be expressed by changing si into no, according to the 2006 research paper.

Tao sometimes does make some distinctions expressing the perfective (ie. finished vs. not finished), repetition, and continuation throughout time.

Repetition, like many languages in the area, is done through reduplication.4

Affixes everywhere

Ka- (or k- if the following term starts with a vowel) is actually a particle with many potential uses. Figuring out in which meaning it is used in a particular sentence is therefore crucial. Like most languages, I reckon what helps most is getting a feeling for which one is meant in which sentence.

Not the most useful explanation, I know, but even seeing example sentences didn’t help me notice the difference.

Here’s a list of uses:

“and then” as in ka-kan “then eat..”
for comparisons, meaning “very” as in ka-tavatava (very fat)
“just now” or “only” as in:
- k-ai an am, mi-’oya-’oya → No sooner had he arrived than he got angry.
- ka-kan mo a ji ka manotong? → Would you only eat but not cook?

These are sentences along with their translation from the paper but I don’t see why the first should be translated as “no sooner” (ie. just now) rather than “only.”

Ka- can then also be used as a nominal prefix to express “company”, as in ka-kteh (siblings, the company of siblings). In short, it can be a way of expressing plural.

If a reduplication happens in the sentence, ka- can come right before it and be coupled with the term kman (like) to express “as…as”:

ya man jiaken so ka-tav-tava. → He is as fat as I am.

You can find more uses (with no explanation though) of this affix on the Wikipedia page.

Sample sentences

The hyphens written in previous sentences are actually supposed to not be written (and served as a way to show words being combined) so the following sentences will not have hyphens.

All the following sentences come from this Mandarin textbook with the English translated by me and names changed.

si Mathias ko. → My name is Mathias.
dehdeh si Mathias.→ Mathias is an outsider. (ie. from outside the island)
kagagan ko si Jean. → Jean is my friend.
ikongo o ya mo nimacita? → What do you see?
ko macita imo. → I see you (sg.)
mo macita yaken. → You see me.
ya matavatava a ka nimo. → He is fatter than you.5
sino o koman so sya? → Who wants to eat this?
ala a mangay ko simaraw do Jimowrod → I might go to Hongtou village tomorrow.
ko koman so wakay. → I am eating sweet potatoes.
koman ko so wakay. → I want to eat sweet potatoes.6
nimi’oya’oya a kato an rana angayan a. → He left because he was angry.

Where to learn

Like most lesser-known languages, there’s no better place than where it is spoken. Indeed, no matter how much easier learning other languages is nowadays with the internet and even AI, lesser-known languages lack resources easily available online.

Tao suffers from two extra problems:

The fact it has two names still in use. While Yami should be left behind, even the Wikipedia and Ethnologue pages refer to it first as Yami.
The fact both of these names are short enough to be words found in other areas (Tao can be a name, a concept of Taoism, and many more while Yami is a word in Japanese, a Hindu goddess’ name, and probably more).

This means researching anything about this language becomes difficult.

Hell, even the official website that safeguards indigenous languages of Taiwan refers to it as Tao in English but as 雅美語 (Yami language) in Chinese.

The Taiwanese Indigenous Ebooks website has two sections: one for the “Yami people” (雅美族) and one for the Tao language (達悟語).🤦

Talking about this website, the only resource in the Tao language section is a complete document about the language’s grammar, with examples, and so on. And it’s free!

This might be the best resource to learn the language… if you speak Chinese.

And that’s a common feature of the language. Even the website with English content mentioned above lacks actual updates and care. The English version still relies on old flash-like pages and learning using this would be a real challenge. The Chinese version is better but still not so convenient. I’d rather use this PDF from the Council of Indigenous Peoples since it contains the same information.

In short, good luck learning this language without speaking Mandarin!

If you don’t, all you’ll have will be the website, and finding a way to use the Yami Texts with Reference Grammar and Dictionary published in 2006. It’s a paid document but every part of it is available on the Web Archive of the official website of Providence University.

Oh, and if you want to hear the language, this page has a list of links to YouTube news videos in Tao (among others)!

Final thoughts

I originally chose to dive into Tao for two stupid reasons and one more practical:

I wanted an indigenous language of Taiwan that tickled my curiosity and its language family did just that
I liked the name Yami
I loved the fact there’s an island called Orchid Island

In the end, finding information about Tao ended up being much harder than I predicted.7

Still, it was good practice for my Mandarin skills, and discovering a language so simple yet so complicated to figure out was a pleasant journey.8

One thought I’d like to leave you with is its status as an endangered language.

With only about 4,000 people speaking the language today, it makes sense to consider the language as endangered. And yet, as a very thoughtful comment on this blog article mentioned, it’s a bit of an oversimplification of the facts.

Orchid Island currently has about 5,000 inhabitants and never truly had more. Yet the language survived without problem for hundreds of years. Taking this into account, we could consider it still going strong.

But then comes the matter of new generations.

According to the same commenter, Langdao village “is currently the only place where full fluency is achieved by children, whereas other villages have switched to Mandarin.”

If true, this is indeed a sign the language is now endangered.

I think this is a very good point we ought to think about more regularly: Endangered languages’ populations are usually not enough to state the status of the language.

Thoughts?

The Average Polyglot

Discussion about this post