Professor Qian Nairong teaches a class on dialects at Shanghai University. Photos: Courtesy of Qian Nairong

By Qiu Chen

Entering Qian Nairong's dimly lit study, with the sound of the 1930s music and the ticktock of several old clocks, you could be forgiven for thinking you had been transported to old Shanghai. The 65-year-old Shanghainese professor is a collector of local culture. His collection of two hundred or so records sits stacked in a cabinet. Countless candy wrappers from the 1950s lay flat in an album. Books published a century ago are scattered around the room. But his true interest lies in the Shanghai dialect, or Shanghainese.

Qian, one of China's most influential scholars of Wu languages, including Shanghainese, has devoted his career to standardizing and preserving the dialect. He has compiled a Shanghainese dictionary with 15,000 words and phrases and designed the first electronic input system for the dialect. His work has elevated the dialect from a solely spoken language to one that can be written and typed, allowing it to be collected and preserved.

Shanghainese is still heard almost everywhere in the city, but it has been in decline since the central government began a campaign 20 years ago to promote Putonghua, or standard Chinese, across the country. The campaign's success has left many locals who were born after 1990 unable to speak fluent Shanghainese.

Qian's work has targeted young people through lectures, articles and the Internet, but although he has thousands of admirers, his endeavor to spread Shanghainese remains an uphill battle. It is one worth fighting, according to Zhu Zhenmiao, one of Qian's graduate students at Shanghai University. The 27-year-old feels his life would be incomplete without the local dialect. "The Shanghai dialect is the language I have used to express myself since I was born. When I talk in my sleep, it is in Shanghainese," Zhu said. "When I talk to my loved ones, I only feel comfortable when I speak in the local dialect. There are so many phrases that don't have an equivalent in Putonghua."

Researching Wu

Qian first began to research the local dialect during the latter part of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). At that time, he was working as a Chinese teacher at a middle school in Fengxian district. In his leisure time, Qian said he visited nearly all the villages in the area, recording how the locals spoke in the International Phonetic Alphabet. His research helped him get admitted to the graduate program at Fudan University's Chinese Language and Literature Department in 1979.

In 1984, Qian started one of his most important projects - studying the transformation of Wu languages. He went through 40 areas in which the Wu language was widely spoken, mostly in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. In each area, he spoke with about 100 people, recording their speech as they were asked to read 1,200 phrases, 3,000 words, 50 sentences or to tell a story in local language. His research became the basis for his 1992 book, The Study on Contemporary Wu Language, considered to be the most authoritative book on the subject.

Qian said his research was inspired by Zhao Yuanren, who was the first to travel where the Wu languages were spoken to research his book, The Study on Modern Wu Language. "Fifty years had passed when I followed Zhao's footsteps to research the language. Of the people he visited, some had died, some had got old, but the language still showed its vitality, passed down from generation to generation," Qian said.

Following the government's campaign for Putonghua, the Shanghai dialect went into decline. Schools forbid students from speaking the local dialect in class and Putonghua became the standard on television and the radio.

Qian quickly realized that the most effective way to keep the local dialect alive was to spread it to the young people. Qian gives open lectures and write articles about Shanghainese slang on the Internet.

According to Dong Ping, who manages shanghaining.com, an online community for Shanghainese, each article that Qian posts online gets 100,000 hits on average.

Zheng Xiaojun, a Shanghai University graduate, became a fan of Qian's after reading his articles and attending his lectures. His fascination with the language led him to help Qian design the input system for Shanghainese even though he was busy preparing for graduation.

According to Dong, the software has been downloaded more than 400,000 times from their website alone since it became available in August 2008. Qian pays a lot of attention to how young people react to his work. He counts how many hits his articles get and reads the comments to see what interests young people. "Unlike many scholars who only pay lip service to promoting the Shanghai dialect, Professor Qian has actually done something to see that it survives," Dong said.

Dong said Qian enjoys working with young people, which is one of the reasons he gives lectures at his university, and blogs for free on shanghaining.com, whose users are mostly in their early 20s.

Since May, Qian has been writing a column answering questions about the Shanghai dialect in the Xinmin Evening News, according to Lü Zheng, the paper's executive editor. Lü said Qian's name came up most often when she asked experts on the Shanghai dialect to recommend someone to write the column.

However, there is still a long way to go to restore the Shanghai dialect to its past popularity. Qian's own granddaughter cannot speak Shanghainese. The girl, who is in primary school, said that none of her classmates can speak it either. "Actually, learning Putonghua and local dialect are not incompatible," Qian said. "Society needs a looser environment for languages and ought to respect their diversity."

For all his work, Qian worries that no one will be able to succeed him studying and teaching dialects. Of the 25 graduate students he has taught, none of them went on to get a PhD. "Nearly all the universities in Shanghai are facing a shortage of young teachers who can take over from the elder experts," Qian said. "Still, I will do all I can to keep the study going."

Qian Nairong's books on learning Shanghainese.

Spreading Shanghainese