Writing in Two Scripts: A Case Study of Digraphia in Taiwanese

Three writing systems are currently available for writing Taiwanese, the variety of Southern Min Chinese which is spoken in Taiwan. Traditionally, it is written either in choan-han 'all character writing' or choan-lo 'all Roman script'; however, a mixture of these two scripts, called han-lo, has been developed in recent decades. This article evaluates these three writing systems from linguistic and socio linguistic perspectives. It is argued that han-lo can efficiently achieve the goals of corpus planning: graphization, standardization, and modernization. The educational implications of a mixed writing system are also discussed.