When Taiwanese scholar Shih Cheng-feng was a boy, he was forced to speak a language that was not his own, and four decades later he still feels handicapped by his education.

He grew up under a nationalist regime that had fled China and now wanted him and everyone else to speak the dominant dialect of the mainland, with the right Beijing accent.

This included a difficult sound not common on the island that involves rolling up the tongue, and students who lapsed into their native Taiwanese were humiliated with a tag saying “I’m no good. I speak dialect”.