Aboriginal advocates demand name rightsBy Chien Hui-ju / Staff reporterAboriginal rights advocates yesterday protested in Taipei, demanding that their names be written in the Roman alphabet on identification cards and official papers, and that Chinese versions of their name be dropped. A restaurant chain recently had a big promotion for people whose names contained “salmon” (鮭魚), “but when we want to use only Aboriginal names with our own script system, we cannot do so, because the law does not permit it,” said Savungaz Valincinan, a Bunun graduate student at National Dong Hwa University. Members of the movement “Call me by my Aboriginal name” hold a news conference outside the Ministry of the Interior in Taipei yesterday. The Aboriginal Language Development Act (原住民族語言發展法) guarantees the use of “Indigenous scripts” to record Aboriginal languages, which covers Aboriginal names, she said. “Our people were forced to use Chinese to write our names, but Chinese characters cannot be transliterated to closely match the sounds and meanings of our Aboriginal names,” said Bawtu Payen, an Atayal.

Source: Taipei Times May 12, 2021 15:56 UTC