Tainan City councilor calls for adopting RomanizationCHANGING IT UP: With Bopomofo rarely used outside of Taiwan, the lawmaker said that Romanization would help the government in its internationalization effortsBy Tsai Wen-chu and William Hetherington / Staff reporter, with staff writerTainan City Councilor Lee Chi-wei (李啟維) yesterday called for the use of Romanized spellings to make Taiwanese dialects and languages internationally recognizable. Tainan City Councilor Lee Chi-wei yesterday in Tainan points at a whiteboard with “Celebrate International Mother Language Day” and “Save the Taiwanese mother tongue” written in Romanized Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) and Chinese characters. Taiwan uses English letters for its license plates, because this is the international standard, so the country’s dialects should also be written according to this standard, he said. “Zhuyin fuhao has 37 symbols, which are usable only to describe Chinese phonetics. “Perhaps if it weren’t for missionaries who wrote down Taiwan’s dialects for use in proselytizing, they would not have survived until today,” he said.

Source: Taipei Times February 21, 2021 16:05 UTC