LÜCY and Formosan languages
- Supernaturegirl
- Mar 27
- 2 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
This song comes with a creative video and is from a new artist named LÜCY. 🌗
LÜCY is a Taiwanese singer-songwriter born in 2000. She plays guitar, piano, and began writing her own songs at the age of 19. In 2021, she released her first single and video. Her first album was self-titled and came out the year after. The song below is from that album and called ‘Isahini’, translating to "Right now, at the moment’". The word is in the Saisiat lanaguge, which LÜCY sings in along with Mandarin and English. Saisiat is also spelled Saisiyat and is the language of the Saisiyat, a Taiwanese Indigenous people. The video for this song was filmed in her family’s Saisiat village. LÜCY’s mother may also be Atayal (Tayal or Tayan are other spellings). The Atayal people number around 90,000 and make up 15.9% of the total Indigenous population in Taiwan. The population of the Saisiyat is much smaller at 6,743 or 1-2%.
There are about 600,000 Indigenous peoples in Taiwan. “Academic research suggests that their ancestors have been living on Taiwan for approximately 15,000 years”. Today’s Indigenous population could be higher than a million with mixed ancestry and if/when the Plains Indigenous peoples receive official recognition. There is a lot to learn, but it seems there is a Council of Indigenous Peoples who determine qualifications and represent the different people groups. As of June 2014, there were 16 people groups recognized.
The Formosan languages are the geographic grouping for all the Indigenous languages of Taiwan, of which there are 26 recorded. However, at least 10 are sleeping, another 4 or 5 are moribund or endangered, and it’s said all others are to some degree endangered. It looks like the 2000s was when Indigenous languages here were incorporated more into education. The Saisiyat language that you can hear in the song has about 4,750 speakers. There are two main dialects based on northern and southern regions. Formosan languages belong to Austronesian language family, which contains 1,257 languages and the second most of any language family!
~ Enjoy the song~
** Information above was found by searching the internet and sources like Wikipedia.
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