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Concept
Taiwanese indigenous peoples
Summary
'Taiwanese indigenous peoples, also known as Native Taiwanese, Formosan peoples, Austronesian Taiwanese, Yuanzhumin' or Gaoshan people, and formerly as Taiwanese aborigines, are the indigenous peoples of Taiwan, with the nationally recognized subgroups numbering about 569,000 or 2.38% of the island's population. This total is increased to more than 800,000 if the indigenous peoples of the plains in Taiwan are included, pending future official recognition. When including those of mixed ancestry, such a number is possibly more than a million. Academic research suggests that their ancestors have been living on Taiwan for approximately 6,500 years. A wide body of evidence suggests that the Taiwanese indigenous peoples had maintained regular trade networks with numerous regional cultures of Southeast Asia before the Han Chinese colonists began settling on the island from the 17th century, at the behest of the Dutch colonial administration and later by successive governments towards the 20th century.
Taiwanese indigenous peoples are Austronesians, with linguistic, genetic and cultural ties to other Austronesian peoples. Taiwan is the origin and linguistic homeland of the oceanic Austronesian expansion, whose descendant groups today include the majority of the ethnic groups throughout many parts of East and Southeast Asia as well as Oceania, which includes Brunei, East Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia, Madagascar, Philippines, Micronesia, Island Melanesia and Polynesia. The Chams and Utsul of contemporary central and southern Vietnam and Hainan respectively are also a part of the Austronesian family.
For centuries, Taiwan's indigenous inhabitants experienced economic competition and military conflict with a series of colonizing newcomers. Centralized government policies designed to foster language shift and cultural assimilation, as well as continued contact with the colonizers through trade, inter-marriage and other intercultural processes, have resulted in varying degrees of language death and loss of original cultural identity.
Official source
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