By Miranda Shek

Local authorities said they are committed to preserving the Shanghai dialect yesterday while experts expressed concern over the dying tongue yesterday, as the city marked the 11th International Mother Language Day.

But renowned expert Qian Nairong, a professor of Chinese language at Shanghai University, said that even Shanghai People's Congress delegate Hu Min's calls to integrate Shanghai dialect classes into university courses and have more operas performed in the local dialect are not enough to reverse the serious situation.

"The Shanghai dialect carries the city's cultural identity and heritage," he told the Global Times yesterday. "It is therefore immensely important we teach our children the dialect. If we fail, our dialect will disappear within 20 years time," he said.

Qian said that the answer lies in introducing Shanghai dialect lessons to students at an early age, saying that the school system should teach students the dialect from kindergarten through elementary school.

According to the Shanghai Language Work Committee, an estimated 14 million people in the city speak Shanghai dialect, but only a selected group of residents over the age of 60 know the pure Shanghai dialect, which can be further divided into as many as 17 similar but separate dialects.

Linguistic expert Qian said that archiving authentic Shanghai operas, radio broadcasts and other audio recordings can help preserve the dialect, and give its livelihood a fighting chance against Putonghua, which has been dominating schools, the workplace and the mainstream public since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, when the government began promoting Putonghua to make communication easier nationwide.

But Qian said that such efforts would require more funding from the government, finances that Cao Yijun said yesterday that he has been lucky enough to receive for his Shanghai dialect pilot.

The high school Chinese language teacher in Fengxian district has a 30,000-yuan ($4,568) government grant that he has been using since September to provide some 350 local students with weekly Shanghai dialect lessons.

"The biggest problem is that children born after the 1990s can only understand their local dialect," he told the Global Times yesterday. "They hear it at home a lot, but they can't really speak it."