Siraya language revival secures Indigenous
A family's decades-long work to revive the Siraya language helped the community gain recognition as Taiwan's 17th Indigenous group in July.
The Siraya people were officially recognized as Taiwan's 17th Indigenous group on July 30, a status secured after more than 20 years of language revitalization work led by activist Uma Talavan and her family. The community's legal recognition followed the passage of the Pingpu Indigenous Peoples Status Act in October 2025.
Uma Talavan, 62, began the quest to revive her ancestral language nearly 200 years after it was considered extinct. She describes language as an extremely important part of a people's soul. The breakthrough came when her husband, Filipino musician Edgar Macapili, 63, recognized similarities between Siraya texts and his mother tongue, Bisaya, both Austronesian languages.
The couple deciphered a 17th-century Dutch missionary's Siraya translation of the Gospel of Matthew word by word. They published the first Siraya dictionary in 2008. Macapili, a composer, set Siraya texts to music to help children learn. According to Uma Talavan, 45 teachers they trained now teach Siraya at 26 schools across Taiwan.
A generational transmission
The revival has become a story of generational transmission within the Talavan family. Lici Talavan, the couple's 28-year-old daughter, is now a Siraya-language teacher. She notes that her elder sister, Euphony Talavan, speaks Siraya to her children, who are the first generation to speak the revitalized language from birth. Lici Talavan says the language is very young and is mostly spoken by children, not yet used in daily life.
For the wider community, the recognition allows people to apply to register as Indigenous. Silia Pan, a 54-year-old Siraya-language teacher, recently filed an application. She had to trace her lineage back to Japanese colonial registries, where Siraya were classified as shú (cooked), meaning assimilated. The Tainan city government recorded more than 11,800 people as Siraya in 2016.
Overcoming academic skepticism
The revitalization faced initial skepticism from academia. Linguist Karl Alexander Sander Adelaar, an honorary principal fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Asia Institute, says some Taiwanese researchers saw reviving Siraya as a big joke. Adelaar, who specializes in Austronesian languages, was convinced the language was doomed until Macapili contacted him for help in the 2000s.
He traveled to Taiwan and helped compile a 100-page Siraya grammar book for the community. Adelaar recalls people crying when presented with the book, overwhelmed at having a piece of their history returned. He acknowledges the revived Siraya is not identical to the language spoken centuries ago, as phonology cannot be fully reconstructed from texts. However, he believes the emotion, sense of belonging, and rediscovered community soul are what matter most.
Teaching language to parents
Silia Pan, who teaches at the 106-year-old Koupi Experimental Elementary School, says the revival has created an extraordinary dynamic where children teach the language to their parents. After learning Siraya from Uma Talavan and Macapili, she taught it to her son and her father. She says learning their ancestors' language together brings the family closer.
The community's linguistic work was among the arguments presented to Taiwan's Constitutional Court. In October 2022, the court issued a landmark ruling that paved the way for the Siraya and other Pingpu groups to gain official status. Activists hope the new recognition will help them access more state support to further develop the Siraya language.
