Primary students recite poems at the National Putonghua Promotion Week on September 10, 2006 in Fuzhou, the capital city of Fujian Province. Photo: CFP

By Zhang Yuchen

He had his first taste of being an outsider at a kindergarten enrollment interview. Three-year-old Ivan Yu chatted with family members in Shanghainese, but could not understand his teacher's questions in Putonghua (Mandarin). From that day onward, little Ivan was embarking on a bilingual journey.

Ivan is 5 today. He works hard at Putonghua every day, both at kindergarten and at home. His parents help him practice. Children are ordered to use Putonghua at school. Any child who speaks Shanghainese is punished with low scores in their civil behavior rankings, according to Shanghai-based newspaper Wen Hui Bao.

Children at middle school today speak less Shanghainese with their parents, said a postgraduate student at a Shanghai university. Huang Huan said signs with "Please speak in Putonghua" are stationed in the halls of every teaching building.

Huang, a 25 year-old native Shanghainese, said it was not unusual to see parents speaking in Shanghai dialect and their children using Putonghua.

"I have seen parents ask questions in Shanghai dialect while their kids respond in Putonghua. In the end, both switched to speaking Putonghua for convenience."

Huang said she speaks local dialect to fellow Shanghainese: Like most Shanghainese born in the '80s, she still communicates better in her local dialect. But that is changing, and changing fast, she believed: those Shanghainese born in the '90s seemingly prefer Putonghua.

Ivan's parents work in multinational companies and consequently care much more about their son's English. "Many younger kids tend to mix Putonghua and English when they talk. Apparently they are a more fashionable generation," said Huang.

Mass migration into Shanghai in the mid-'90s by non-Shanghainese is the immediate cause of declining use of the Shanghai dialect, said Jia Yanyan, who works at the Youth Academic Exchange Center in the Institute of Literature at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

Before the '90s, outsiders who couldn't speak Shanghainese were regarded as provincials, even despised, said Jia. But talent from outside the city and Shanghai's broadening horizons have made Putonghua increasingly important, according to Zhang Ruiyan, one of Jia's colleagues.

The Chinese government committed to Putonghua as China's lingua franca in 1956 as the part of a nationwide literacy campaign. The 2000 Law of the People's Republic of China on the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language (Order of the President No.37) revised the original 1956 law.

"When the law was first published in the 1950s, it aimed at efficient management for collective action such as military exercises," said Li Lan, deputy chief of the Dialectology Office at the Institute of Linguistics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing.

According to the key items 13 and 14, people working in the service sector are encouraged to use Putonghua and broadcasting, films and TV shows must adopt a rigid standard spoken and written language. Practically speaking, the only interesting program on TV for children like Ivan are Putonghua-language cartoons.

"UNESCO once encouraged three levels of language use: mother tongue, official language and another communication vehicle.

"Besides learning English and mastering Putonghua, maybe we should keep in mind the root of our existence – our local dialects across the country," said Zhang Ruiyan.

Decline and death of opera

Ma Lili, 60, is deputy chief director of the Hu Opera Theater of Shanghai, whose actors perform in Shanghai dialect. Ma said the dialect was fast disappearing, hurting the opera and its nearly 200 years of history.

Born in Shanghai, Ma said she had noticed a disastrous decline among today's generation when she visited schools looking for fresh talent.

"Where we attempt to choose potential actors or actresses among Shanghai kids at primary schools, they can't even read a newspaper in their local dialect."
 
It had reached the point where chosen actors had to attend Shanghai dialect training. "Shanghai dialect seems a foreign language to these young people working in our theatre now," said Ma.

"They can speak Shanghai dialect, but they can't experience its character, not to mention convey the soul of the opera through a language they are not clear about."

Ma confessed her own 30-year-old daughter never went to the theater and chatted in Putonghua with colleagues, most of whom were non-Shanghainese.

"Once the dialect is lost," said Ma, "the culture will surely follow."

In Shanghai's public transport system, station names are announced in Putonghua and English only. Mobile media are forbidden from including local accent, flavor or characters in their content.

There are a few Shanghainese movies made a year, but no novels. Only one TV show broadcasts in Shanghai dialect, and according to Ma, the show not only uses incorrect pronunciation but also constantly gets basic vocabulary and syntax wrong.

Decline and death of diversity

"The ideal and aspiration of unification, the philosophy originating in ancient China that pursues conformity and unity of power and culture, is a consistent part of our national psyche," said Li Lan.

"And the reason for pushing ahead with Putonghua around the whole country goes back to all that."

Shanghai Dialect Dictionary, the only official dictionary of Shanghainese, was revised in 2009 to include linguistic transcriptions of spoken Shanghai dialect as a protection measure.

"It's no wonder cities that open their doors wide experience an increasing change of language more obviously," said Li. "Shanghai and other cosmopolitan cities in China are in urgent need of communicating with the outside on a more verbally convenient platform both home and abroad."

People who speak Putonghua more than their own local language believe dialects hinder their development, said Li.

"Promoting standardized spoken Putonghua is not the sole reason for the decline of the dialect during development and modernization, but some legal items should be considered for adjustment."

Nor is Shanghainese dialect the only dialect facing extinction. The traditional prestige dialect of Wu is not actually Shanghainese, but the ancient and historic Suzhou dialect.

In The ebb of Putonghua and the fall of Suzhou dialect in the city of Suzhou survey, Wang Ping, a linguist and professor at the School of Literature of Soochow University, found that in 2003 more than half of Suzhou primary and high school students could not discuss school life in their native dialect.

Ninety percent had parents born in Suzhou, but 70 percent felt Putonghua a much easier vehicle than their local dialect. Only 15 percent found their own dialect more convenient than Putonghua, according to a report in Guangming Daily last year.

Hangzhou has seen the same pattern. In the city center where elderly native Hangzhou people live, primary school students could not understand the word "pa" spoken in Hangzhou dialect, according to Qianjiang Evening News of March 31, 2009.

"My cousin lived in Suzhou her whole life and her family members are all Suzhounese," said Wang Ping. "I overheard a conversation between her and her little granddaughter. The kid was constantly complaining about her Suzhou accent."

Communication between generations is far more difficult in areas with these traditional and ancient local dialects. "Losing one's own dialect can create a loss of identity," said Li Lan.

At restaurants talking to waiters in Shanghai dialect, Ma Lili found they rarely responded in Shanghainese and often couldn't understand what she was talking about. As service staff were mostly recruited from outside of Shanghai, many hadn't a clue about the local language.

"I felt a stranger in my own city," said Ma.

About Chinese dialects

Classified as a Sino-Tibetan language, Shanghainese is a dialect of Wu Chinese spoken in the city of Shanghai and the surrounding region.

As one of the three major dialects of China alongside Putonghua and Cantonese, Shanghainese has fallen increasingly out of use, especially among the younger generation.

Shanghainese, like other Wu dialects, is largely not mutually intelligible with other Chinese dialects such as standard Putonghua, or even other sub-branches of the Wu language group.

Apart from Shanghai, Wu is spoken in most of Zhejiang Province, southern Jiangsu Province, as well as small parts of Anhui, Jiangxi and Fujian provinces.

Major Wu dialects include those of Shanghai, Suzhou, Wenzhou, Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Jinhua, Yongkang, and Quzhou.