Pardon my language!

By Wang Zhefeng Source:Global Times Published: 2014-2-13 18:38:08

Students sing songs in Shanghaihua in a Shanghai high school. Photo: CFP

"Nowadays, Shanghai children really can't speak Shanghaihua (the Shanghai dialect)," representative Qian Cheng said at this year's two sessions of Shanghai Municipal People's Congress and the Shanghai Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in January.

When Qian, who is also the deputy director of the Shanghai Farce Troupe, went to schools to talk to local students, he found even Shanghai-born children were unable to speak Shanghaihua fluently. "Sometimes they just translate Putonghua (Chinese) into Shanghaihua which isn't the right way."

On February 7, the Shanghai Municipal Statistics Bureau released the results of a survey on language proficiency in the city. This showed that while 97 percent of the 1,008 people surveyed could speak Putonghua, only 81.4 percent could speak Shanghaihua. The survey suggested that younger people had less ability with the dialect.

In the survey, 89.4 percent of those aged over 71 could speak Shanghaihua, 93 percent of those aged between 61 and 70 could speak Shanghaihua, and 86.2 percent aged between 41 and 60 could speak Shanghaihua. But only 68.8 percent of those aged between 21 and 40 spoke the dialect and the number who could understand it aged under 21 was the lowest of all.

International day

Friday February 21 is International Mother Language Day. This was launched by UNESCO in 1999 to promote awareness for linguistic and cultural diversity.

UNESCO lists six degrees of progress of language extinction and they are safe, vulnerable, definitely endangered, severely endangered, critically endangered and extinct. Safe means the language is spoken by all generations and extinct means there are no speakers at all left.

"Shanghaihua is listed as definitely endangered which means children no longer learn the language as the mother tongue in the home and it is close to becoming severely endangered, which means the language is spoken by grandparents and older generations and although the parents might understand it, they do not speak it to the children or among themselves," Qian said during the two sessions.

Qian's fears are borne out by the survey but there are Shanghai parents making every effort to ensure their children learn Shanghaihua as their mother tongue.

"Every Shanghai person has to learn Shanghaihua. I speak Shanghaihua to my 14-month-old son and tell everybody in my home to speak Shanghaihua to him," said Ms Tang, a manager at an international accounting firm. But it is difficult - although she and her surgeon husband were both born in Shanghai, her husband's mother comes from Tianjin, so her husband used to speak Putonghua at home.

"My husband can understand Shanghaihua as he was born here, but he was brought up in a Putonghua home so he was not confident speaking Shanghaihua. I don't want this to happen to my son," Tang said.

But home efforts are not enough. Qin is the mother of a 4-year-old girl who had been brought up speaking Shanghaihua. "But at the kindergarten they only speak Putonghua. After two weeks she got used to speaking Putonghua and now that's all she speaks."

Children perform in a Shanghaihua club. Photo: CFP

Teachers penalized

Qin is a teacher in a leading junior high school in Shanghai and explained that every qualified teacher in any of the schools in Shanghai has to have a certificate in Putonghua and only Putonghua is allowed as the teaching language. If a teacher is found speaking a dialect in class he or she will be penalized.

If there is no Shanghaihua allowed in class there is apparently no Shanghaihua in the playground either. Official figures showed in 2012 more than 40 percent of the children in primary schools and junior high schools in Shanghai, had parents from out of town and in grades one and two more than 50 percent had out-of-town parents and the numbers are growing. There are also many children who have been born in Shanghai but whose parents come from other places and do not speak the dialect.

Fang Li, a 12-year-old Shanghai student told the Global Times, his desk mate came from Jiangxi Province, so he only spoke Putonghua with him. Nowadays he doesn't think of speaking Shanghaihua when he is with friends or family.

He said that now he was speaking better Putonghua and even English than Shanghaihua. "My English pronunciation is much better than my crappy Shanghaihua." Asked whether he thinks Shanghaihua was his mother tongue, he hesitated for a while and shook his head.

The threat to Shanghaihua has been attracting a good deal of attention with experts saying that if the dialect is not encouraged and spread to young children it will face a serious crisis.

The Shanghai Municipal Education Commission is now trialing a Shanghaihua education program in 20 kindergartens. Yuan Wen, the deputy director of the department, told Youth Daily, "This year, we will have 20 kindergartens using Shanghaihua as the language of choice in play times."

Several primary schools have also started Shanghaihua programs. Zhao Yingqun, the principal of the Tianyuan Foreign Language Primary School, said that every Tuesday at noon the school has 35-minute Shanghaihua classes at its two campuses in Minhang district.

"It is a mini class of one teacher and two students, which makes it very personal and interactive. Every week, we invite two students to join the teacher in the classroom and the lesson is broadcast on the school television to 2,000 pupils who watch it live."

Zhao said the classes have been going for two years accentuating conversational Shanghaihua. At first, only Shanghai-born children applied to take the classes but since then newcomers to the city have joined and some even try to teach the Shanghaihua they learn at home to their parents.

Student activities

Yu Zhen is the principal of the Shanghai Penglai Number Two Primary School, and told the Global Times that every Friday afternoon the school turned into "Penglai town" with a range of 40 different activities for students to choose. They can choose, among other things, to work in a police station, be a fireman, a gardener, or learn to make dumplings at Chinese restaurant. There is one group learning Shanghaihua.

"In the group, along with conversational Shanghaihua, students learn children's songs and playact real-life activities like catching buses or buying things in a shop," Yu said. The popular Shanghai opera star Ma Lili once came along to teach the children some songs.

But Yu admitted the Shanghaihua group was not most popular. "Other groups let the students use their hands like making dumplings or becoming policemen but here they just get to open their mouths."

The Zhongshan North Road Primary School offered Shanghaihua classes until last year but it stopped because there were not enough students enroling. The principal Que Fen explained, "30 percent of our students are the children of migrant workers so to try to involve them more in the city we offered Shanghaihua lessons but this did not work out."

Que said, every third week in a school semester was Popularizing Putonghua Week where schools must promote the language in different ways using posters or speech contests. All schools are tested for the use of Putonghua and try to achieve the "model language school" award. As a Shanghai-born senior educator, Que believes Putonghua has been over emphasized. "Although people want to protect Shanghaihua, there are no official moves or regulations so, it doesn't look that promising."

Qian Nairong is a professor of Chinese Language and Literature at Shanghai University and a respected researcher and enthusiast for Shanghaihua. He agrees that if the approach to saving Shanghaihua is to be changed, it should be changed from above not below.

"In 1992, the education commission regulated that students were not allowed to speak Shanghaihua even after class and some schools even awarded those who did not speak Shanghaihua. The dialect has been falling into disuse since the 1990s," he said.

This was not Shanghai's own initiative, he said. To some extent the education commission was just enacting the law and following instructions from China's State Language Commission.

A small shift

Qian said that nowadays the education commission had realized the importance of protecting Shanghaihua - if people under 20 keep losing the ability to speak it will become extinct. He said it only needed a small shift to help.

"Just encouraging children to speak Shanghaihua during the breaks between classes would be great," Qian said. "Singing songs in class or listening to older people speaking it does not help a student master a language."

Talking about the large number of migrant worker children in schools who cannot understand Shanghaihua, Qian said that he attended primary school soon after 1949, at a time when many school friends came from other provinces and spoke other dialects. He said children could pick up a new language quickly.

"Don't worry about whether speaking Shanghaihua will make the other students feel isolated - just let them speak it, let them communicate in the breaks at school. They will learn it from the Shanghai kids."

Qian holds that learning a language is a culture itself as well as being a carrier for culture. As part of the local culture, children who inherit Shanghaihua also inherit the culture of Shanghai.

"If all languages become one, there will be no diverse cultures and our thinking will become oversimplified."



Posted in: Metro Shanghai

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