"Yami people above 60 years of age are mostly monolingual in Yami, whereas those below 20 consider Mandarin Chinese their L1 and Yami their L2 (Chen 1998). Young adults code-switch between Yami and Chinese in communication. Iraralay is the only community of the six villages on the island where children still use Yami for daily interaction (Lin 2007)...

Although Yami has been offered as an elective in elementary school since 1998, Yami is gradually being replaced by Mandarin Chinese in daily use. Among the junior high school students on Orchid Island, 60% either believed Yami would die eventually or were uncertain about the fate of the language (Rau, 1995b).

Adult speakers use both Chinese and Yami in daily communication. The medium of education in schools is exclusively Chinese. Yami is used primarily in Christian church services and traditional ceremonies. Translation of the New Testament of the Bible into Yami was completed in 1995. There is a locally run radio station on the island, managed by a Christian organization, broadcasting programs in Chinese and Yami." (p.115)

"The more conservative Imowrod dialect is used as the basis for standard orthography... Three different orthographies have been proposed, all based on Roman alphabets with minor differences in the representations of trill vs. flap and glide vs. vowel. One is used in the newly translated Bible, developed in collaboration between SIL missionaries and local pastors. The second was announced by the Council of Indigenous Peoples in 2005 in an effort to standardize the writing systems of all Austronesian languages in Taiwan. The third was jointly developed by Dong and Rau during their collaboration and used in their texts, teaching materials, and Yami dictionary (Rau and Dong, 2006). Except in the teaching of Yami language in primary and secondary school and teacher training workshops, Yami orthography is not in general use by anyone in the speech community. The community has various degrees of literacy in Chinese (95%) while the most educated (less than 1%) are also literate in English (Rau, 1995b)." (p.115)