what language they speak in taiwan?
Standard Mandarin
entailment
 For centuries , Taiwan 's aboriginal peoples experienced economic competition and military conflict with a series of colonizing peoples . Centralized government policies designed to foster language shift and cultural assimilation , as well as continued contact with the colonizers through trade , intermarriage and other dispassionate intercultural processes , have resulted in varying degrees of language death and loss of original cultural identity . For example , of the approximately 26 known languages of the Taiwanese aborigines ( collectively referred to as the Formosan languages ) , at least ten are extinct , five are moribund ( Zeitoun & Yu 2005 : 167 ) and several are to some degree endangered . These languages are of unique historical significance , since most historical linguists consider Taiwan to be the original homeland of the Austronesian language family ( Blust 1999 ) . 

entailment
 With the ending of martial law in 1987 , the restrictions on " local languages " were quietly lifted , resulting in growing interest in Taiwanese writing during the 1990s . For the first time since the 1950s , Taiwanese language and literature was discussed and debated openly in newspapers and journals . There was also support from the then opposition party , the Democratic Progressive Party , for writing in the language . From a total of 26 documented orthographies for Taiwanese in 1987 ( including defunct systems ) , there were a further 38 invented from 1987 to 1999 , including 30 different romanizations , six adaptations of bopomofo and two hangul @-@ like systems . Some commentators believe that the Kuomintang , while steering clear of outright banning of the native language movements after the end of martial law , took a " divide and conquer " approach by promoting Taiwanese Language Phonetic Alphabet ( TLPA ) , an alternative to POJ , which was at the time the choice of the majority inside the nativization movement . 

neutral
 Taiwan 's Austronesian speakers were formerly distributed over much of the island 's rugged central mountain range and were concentrated in villages along the alluvial plains . The bulk of contemporary Taiwanese aborigines now live in the mountains and in cities . 

neutral
 Native language education has remained a fiercely debated topic in Taiwan into the 21st century and is the subject of much political wrangling . 

neutral
 To some degree the movement has been successful . Beginning in 1998 , the official curriculum in Taiwan schools has been changed to contain more frequent and favorable mention of aborigines . In 1996 the Council of Indigenous Peoples was promoted to a ministry @-@ level rank within the Executive Yuan . The central government has taken steps to allow romanized spellings of aboriginal names on official documents , offsetting the long @-@ held policy of forcing a Han name on an aborigine . A relaxed policy on identification now allows a child to choose their official designation if they are born to mixed aboriginal / Han parents . 
