Illustration: Peter C. Espina/GT

Despite the fact that I have lived in Beijing for 10 years, I remain proud of my hometown: a small city named Jiexiu in Shanxi Province, whose inhabitants speak their own, distinct dialect.

So it was heartbreaking for me when I found out that many of my hometown friends have deserted our unique language. Those who still live in my hometown have ceased speaking our dialect, and refuse to pass it on their children because they believe it to be useless and out of fashion. Others, who have settled down in other parts of China, also refrain from speaking the dialect, for fear that people from their adopted provinces will look down upon them.

Last month, a childhood friend of mine who has been living in Shanghai for the past five or six years visited me. We tried to speak in our own dialect, but she had already forgotten most of it. Her 4-year-old daughter could not understand a single word of our hometown dialect, but she was fluent in the Shanghai dialect.

It is difficult for me to find the words to describe my feelings at that moment: it was something between disappointment, anger, and sadness. 

Local dialects are one of the only remaining things we have to preserve the unique identities of people from different parts of China. In the other areas of life, owing to mass production and modernization, local customs and ways of living have been erased: in most cities around the country, people wear the same clothes, furnish their houses with the same furniture and appliances, and go to the same restaurants.

The dialect of my hometown exists only as a spoken language. As a spoken language, it differs quite a lot from Putonghua, as well as from other dialects in Shanxi. Whenever I speak Jiexiu dialect in Beijing when I'm on the phone with people back home, those around me always show great interest. Sometimes, strangers even ask me what foreign language I'm speaking.

The Jiexiu dialect is now only spoken by around 410,000 people, scattered around China and the rest of the world. Fewer and fewer people are comfortable speaking it.

Even in my hometown, people are encouraged to speak  Putonghua in schools and at offices. Soon, it will be only elderly people who can speak the dialect. If nothing changes, when their generation passes away, the language will disappear with them.

What will be lost is not only a language, but a culture and a way of being. It will cease to mean anything to say that one is from Jiexiu; people from the town will no longer feel the kinship forged by a shared language when they meet a fellow Jiexiu person in another part of the country. Traditions like the Jiexiu Opera, which is performed in the dialect, will also disappear forever.

The disappearance of local dialects is a major problem in China. Some people, working in linguistics, have called to establish a national dialect bank, to try to record and preserve these dialects. Other attempts to salvage these dialects have included efforts to create games in local dialects, which are then sold online. Puzzles and comic sketches are also being made in local dialects and distributed online. 

But I think all of these attempts are inadequate. The only way to prevent these dialects from disappearing is if the government acknowledges their value, and starts to take some real actions to protect them.

This article was published on the Global Times Metropolitan section Two Cents page, a space for reader submissions, including opinion, humor and satire. The ideas expressed are those of the author alone, and do not represent the position of the Global Times.