Fundació Catalunya Voluntària promoted the meeting between the Consortium for Linguistic Normalization of the Government of Catalonia and the Government of Taiwan.
Fundació Catalunya Voluntària-FCV promoted a high level meeting between a group of 20 people, including the members of the Ministry for Hakka Affairs of the Government of the Republic of Taiwan, assembled by representatives of 4 ministries and one representative of the Taiwanese Parliament, and a group of 12 young students, members and representatives of this millenary culture, travelling around Europe as members of the Hakka International Youth Mission 2018.
The meeting took place on the 6th of August at the Centre of Linguistic Normalization of Barcelona in Ciutat Vella district, with the participation of Mr. Jordi Font, assistant manager of CNL of Barcelona, Mr. Carles de Rosselló, manager for the promotion of the Consortium for Linguistic Normalization, Mrs. Txell Pujol coordinator of promotion and counselling of the CNL of Barcelona and Mrs. Blanca Guillén, linguistic facilitator specializing in the Chinese community of the CNL of Barcelona.
The event was also attended by Mrs. Debbie Huang, director of Volunteering Taiwan and Mr. Lluc Martí, coordinator at FCV.
Hakka culture is native to an ethnic group from China, with 1.700 years of history and 80 millions of people who identify themselves belonging to it and who survived several migrations, mainly due to conflicts that they had suffered throughout the history. Today, this culture is not only in China, but in other places, such as Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand.
The Hakkas are a minority group who fight to keep its culture from disappearing. That’s why the group was really interested in visiting Catalonia, to learn more about its culture, language and traditions and especially how to preserve and normalise them.
Besides, Hakka culture has its own language, food, music and martial arts.
On August, the Hakka Council visited Madrid, Vilanova i la Geltrú (Barcelona), Paris (France) and Augsburg (Germany) to foster its language and culture, as well as to learn from other countries experience how to actively promote it.
As result of this meeting, the Government of Taiwan has decided to invite one representatives of CNL to take part in an international conference about the revitalization of minority languages, which will take place in Taipei and Taoyuan (Taiwan) from the 14th to 18th of December, 2018.
Barcelona 28th of August 2018