Ann Heylen explains the multipronged origins of the present-day Taiwanese language and the historical and social interactional influences upon its development and reforms. Ch. 1 illustrates Taiwan's historical sociolinguistic setting starting from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) in China. Through the Ming dynasty to the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), Chinese immigration increased and the government appointed bureaucrats and built educational institutions on the island, developing it into a province of China. In reading and writing, Classical Chinese, wenyanwen 文言文 (20), consequently became the official language and enjoyed the supreme status, like Latin in the premodern western world. In pronunciation, Southern Min was the major spoken language in Taiwan because of the dominant number of its speakers in the immigrant body. As a result, carried by language, Chinese cultural heritage and Confucian orthodoxy-based society were established and consolidated in Taiwan.

Ch. 2 reviews language standardization over the Japanese colonial period in Taiwan. After 1895, Taiwan was ceded to Japan as a colony for fifty years because of China's defeat in the Sino-Japanese war. Japan's annexation of Taiwan destroyed its Chinese-model economic constructs and cultural heritage. Due to the need to support the war and to consolidate its rule in Taiwan, Japan instituted linguistic and cultural colonialism and assimilation. In this period, Taiwan was in a very special multicultural and multilingual condition and the residents were using a variety of languages. Many local elites initiated remarkable literacy movements in order to preserve cultural and linguistic continuity in Taiwan, like establishing Chinese poetry societies and printing publications in Chinese.

After the May Forth literacy movement (1919), an overwhelming cultural and linguistic movement in China, some local intellectuals in Taiwan started to innovate upon the Taiwanese language in order to fuse it into the world and construct its own identity. In Ch. 3, Heylen discusses the Romanized Taiwanese movement. Its proponent was Cai Peihuo, who asserted that Chinese characters hindered Taiwan's development and proposed the use of Taiwanese pronunciation and a romanized script instead. Cai finally failed, and, as Heylen describes in Ch. 4, the rival Mandarin baihuawen movement prevailed, featuring its connections to traditional Chinese values. Mandarin baihuawen was a modern form and expression of Chinese traditional culture. The last chapter is devoted to the Written Taiwanese movement, which made an effort to tackle the unsolved ideological problems of the previous movement. This movement aimed to construct its own written system for Taiwanese, or taiwanhua. Nativist literature emerged that did not focus on content but on written forms. Proponents believed that Taiwanese was their authentic cultural legacy and its standardization would construct a boundary against Mandarin baihuawen's uniformity but not cut off its links to Chinese traditions.

The book is based on ample resources and develops in a logical and beautiful structure. The chronological style of narration and analysis is cohesive and very easy to follow.