Thursday, March 28

Chinese dialects in decline as the government imposes Mandarin | World News


Two years ago, Qi Jiayao visited her mother’s hometown of Shaoxing in eastern China. When he tried to speak to his cousin’s children in the local dialect, Qi was shocked. “None of them could,” recalls the 38-year-old linguist, who now teaches Mandarin in the Mexican state of Oaxaca.

The decline of local dialects among the younger generation has become more apparent in recent years, as Chinese President Xi Jinping has sought to strengthen a uniform Chinese identity. Mandarin is spoken by more than 80% of China’s population today, up from 70% a decade ago. Last month, China’s state council promised to increase the figure to 85% in the next four years.

But the popularization of a standard national language often comes at the expense of regional languages, including majority Han dialects and ethnic languages ​​such as Mongolian and Uyghur. In Inner Mongolia, for example, local regulations in 2016 allowed ethnic schools to use their own language to teach. This policy aimed to develop students’ language skills and cultivate bilingualism. But four years later it was reversed to favor the Mandarin, a move that sparked protests from the ethnic population.

It is not only ethnic languages ​​that are affected. In 2017, a survey circulated online showed that among the 10 dialect groups, Wu Chinese, which includes the Shanghai dialect and is spoken by about 80 million people in the eastern part of the country, has the fewest active users. between six and 20. It caused concern among linguists in the region.

In Shanghai, where Qi grew up, activists have campaigned to encourage the use of their dialect for many years. In 2020, a local political representative urged the Shanghai government to invest in promoting the local dialect. The government responded by upgrading the annual local Huju opera festival to a municipal level activity. This success encouraged Qi. But he is realistic about how much activists can achieve. In 2014, the TV show Shanghai dialect talk in Shanghai Doco TV was taken off the air after the government insisted on the use of standard Mandarin for the channel to be broadcast nationally. Chinese laws prevent satellite TV channels from broadcasting in local dialects.

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Activists are turning to social media and local events. A new group of volunteers has been doing a recording of flowers, by Jin Yucheng, winner of the prestigious Mao Dun literature prize and one of the few novels written in the Shanghainese Wu dialect. Every few weeks, the organizers upload episodes to WeChat and Himalaya, a Chinese podcast site. Qi is now compiling a dictionary of Shanghai dialects.

In 2000, China passed laws to standardize spoken and written language. In each province, a linguistic committee advises, supervises and controls the use of Mandarin. The strength of implementation varies, but it is not difficult for a given government to enforce its policy. In September, the southwestern province of Sichuan banned civil servants and party cadres from using the local dialect in the workplace, a language Deng Xiaoping, the former paramount leader, used on national television before his death in 1997. .

“The state has been telling people that there are visible and tangible benefits to speaking Standard Mandarin Chinese,” says Fang Xu, an urban sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Silencing Shanghai: Language and Identity in Urban China. “Since then, many regional languages, including Shanghainese, have suffered the same fate.”

A 2010 study by Beijing Union University found that almost half of local Beijing residents born after 1980 prefer to use Mandarin Chinese instead of the Beijing dialect.

But it’s not all bad news, he adds. In the past, internal migrants from outside Shanghai often felt discriminated against and excluded for not being able to speak the local dialect. Today social exclusion no longer depends on discourse or residential status but on wealth. “The richest people in Shanghai today are not even Shanghainese.”

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Qi first noticed the change when he was studying in the northeastern city of Harbin in 2002. “Looking from the local perspective of Shanghai, the marginalization of the dialect is alarming. But thinking nationally, it may be unavoidable at a time when a uniform Chinese identity trumps everything,” he says. “Dialect decline seems to be just the price we pay for it.”


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