Ong Iok-tek
Taiwanese linguist (1924–1985)
Ong Iok-tek (Ikutoku Ō; 王育德/王育徳; POJ: Ông Io̍k-tek; Hepburn:Ō Ikutoku: pinyin: Wáng Yùdé; Wade–Giles: Wang Yü-te; 30 January 1924–9 September 1985) was a Taiwanese scholar and early leader of the Taiwan independence movement. He is considered to be an authority on the Southern Min language family and the Taiwanese language.
He was born in Tainan Prefecture (modern-day Tainan), during Japanese rule, of a prominent family. He attended Tokyo Imperial University in 1943 but the ongoing World War II compelled him to return to Taiwan after a year. Following the war and handover of Taiwan he took a critical attitude toward the Kuomintang, one accentuated by the killing of his brother, Wang Yu-lin, a Tokyo-educated prosecutor, in the February 28 Incident. His own life threatened by the new regime, he fled to Japan in 1949 and spent the rest of his life there in addition to various other places.
He resumed his studies in May 1950, and after completing his Ph.D. in 1969 at the University of Tokyo, he later taught Taiwanese at Meiji University in 1974.
He also played a leading role in garnering support for the Taiwan independence movement within Japan. As a student he had joined Thomas Liao's Republic of Taiwan Provisional Government but became dissatisfied with it after two years. He established the Taiwan Youth Association in 1960 and published the organization's influential monthly Taiwan Seinen in Japanese (later for a time in Chinese) and Formosan Quarterly in English.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3847105. VIAF identifies the subject as 317153745. The Library of Congress control number is n83237607. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1924, 1985, 1943 and 1949.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ong Iok-tek” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.