Shanghai Today
Will Shanghai dialect become extinct? Efforts are underway to prevent that - August 28, 2024
上海话会灭绝吗?目前正在努力防止这种情况发生
Shanghai born and raised, Zhang Qing finds it weird that her 15-year-old son Zhou Jue can't speak the Shanghai dialect so commonly spoken by city natives.
Zhang's family of three lives with her parents, and all Zhou's grandparents are Shanghai natives with sometimes fitful grasp of Mandarin. Yet her son communicates with them all only in Mandarin.
The family reverted to speaking Mandarin to Zhou when he was young because all schoolchildren were required to speak China's official language.
"I didn't realize that Shanghainese wasn't an innate skill to people born in the city rather than a language that needs to be acquired," Zhang said.
She now speaks only Shanghai patois to her son at home, but her efforts at teaching him what is, in essence, a different oral language haven't been as effective as she hoped.
China's written language remains the same across regional dialects, but how the characters are pronounced can differ so dramatically that people in one region cannot understand the patois of other regions.
Across China, efforts are underway to keep local dialects from dying out. The governments of Jiangxi and Fujian provinces have called on parents to talk to their children in local dialects after school, and classes and hobby groups are held for children to learn the local lingos.
The future of dialects is also a concern in Shanghai and its neighboring provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Although there are no official statistics to measure the extent of local dialect use, regional surveys show that dialects are mostly the realm of older generations.
In 2022, Yang Yanwen, an official with Shanghai Wenqi Private Middle School, submitted a paper to the Minhang District Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference showing that most children in the district couldn't speak or understand Shanghai dialect.
Yang and her team carried out surveys in a high school, a primary school and a kindergarten. They found that only about a third of students could understand Shanghai patois at all and only about 5 percent could speak it fluently.
"This is not only a crisis of language, but also a crisis of local culture," said Yang in her submission. "In Shanghai, the city's own dialect is dying out in its schools."
A Shanghai-native standup comedian, who goes by his stage name "71," said that he remembers the sea change in public use of Shanghai dialect.
"71" is popular for his standup comedy shows in Shanghainese.
"When I was a teenager, there were still some TV shows performed in Shanghainese, and then, one day, they suddenly disappeared," said the 37-year-old performer with the SpicyComedy.
He left in 2007 to go to university and then worked for a few years in the southeastern city of Xiamen.
"When I returned to Shanghai in 2020, I found it weird that I seldom heard Shanghainese spoken in public anymore," he said. "Frankly speaking, it's not like that in other cities in China. Take Xiamen, for example, local dialect is heard more often on the street than Mandarin."
According to Yang's survey, most parents interviewed, no matter whether city natives or not, said they wanted their children to know the Shanghai dialect, and they wanted schools and communities to take steps to nurture it.
Many primary schools do now provide such courses.
Shanghainese comedy performer Qian Xiaotian has been a part-time teacher at three primary schools in Putuo District since 2020. He mainly teaches beginning conversational courses and traditional Shanghai nursery rhymes in the local dialect.
"The courses are very popular, and you can see that Shanghainese has its charm for children," he told Shanghai Daily. "I was surprised that even children whose parents are from outside Shanghai showed such a passion for the dialect."
Qian remembers one student, who regularly misbehaved in regular class, being told by his teacher that he wouldn't be allowed to attend the Shanghainese class if he remained obstreperous. That stopped his naughtiness.
"His parents were actually from a northern province and couldn't speak Shanghainese, but his eagerness impressed me very much," Qian recalled.
Some expats, too, are equally eager to learn the local dialect.
Apart from teaching Shanghainese at primary schools, Qian Xiaotian is a professional comedian performing in the local dialect.
The Shanghai Citizen Night School offers a course in Shanghai dialect, targeting foreigners. The curriculum comprises 12 sessions, each lasting an hour.
Chen Chuanqi, who teaches the class, said that most of the attendees are teachers, researchers and journalists interested in local culture.
When not teaching, Chen is a professional performer of pingtan, the iconic ballad singing and storytelling in the Suzhou dialect. He has recorded some of his storytelling into Shanghai dialect to share with his students.
Chen giving a lesson.
Eleonora Genen from Russia enrolled in Chen's class after living in Shanghai for a year. The postdoctoral researcher at the School of Journalism at Fudan University said she was inspired to start learning Shanghainese after viewing "Blossoms Shanghai," a popular Chinese TV series directed by Wong Kar-wai and broadcast in both Mandarin and Shanghai dialect.
Russian expat Eleonora Genen (back row, third from left) poses with classmates in a course on Shanghai dialect given by Chen Chuanqi (front row, second from left).
"I found it absolutely amazing," Genen told Shanghai Daily. "And since I'm living in Shanghai, I thought learning some basic local dialect would be a good way to better understand the city's culture."
She said the class didn't focus just on basic words and phrases, but also on city history and culture, especially food culture.
"Now that the course is over, I can speak some basic words and sometimes understand what older people are saying on the street," she said.
However, Chen said safeguarding the local dialect for future generations needs to go beyond "hobby" learning.
A living language, he explained, evolves as a society develops, but very few new words have entered the Shanghai patois since 2000.
He recalled how new buzzwords in dialect were created in the early 1990s, citing the example of dao jiang hu (捣糨糊), which means "messing around."
"But since then," he said, "I can't think of anything new. The past three decades were a period when entire society changed rapidly, but Shanghai dialect remained static. As a language, it has lost its vitality."
Reviving interest is probably the first step to reviving the dialect.
The performer "71" uses local patois in his acts, which are popular among people of his generation. They sometimes bring their children to his shows.
"My shows are often about daily life with the language people frequently use," he said. "I am hoping that people will be encouraged to include more dialect in cultural offerings."
He added, "If young people have access to videos, dramas, vodcasts and other cultural stuff using local dialect, they will get hooked and gradually speak Shanghainese more."
Source: Shanghai Daily
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