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Dialect signifies city鈥檚 accommodating spirit

By Hai Ge | December 28, 2015, Monday | Print Edition

鈥淣ong zonie yalixiang qi zusa la?鈥 my grandmother asked me, in Shanghainese, what I did the previous night when we were having lunch one day. Using my best Shanghainese, I answered that I went for a film with my friends.

Having heard my response, my grandma stared at me with a confused look. My mom, who was sitting next to us and heard the conversation, asked my grandma if she understood what I said. The answer was an honest, but disheartening, 鈥渘o.鈥 I had to laugh my way out of the embarrassment and we continued our conversation in Mandarin, as usual.

This incident is only one of the numerous daily situations in which I try to speak Shanghainese but can鈥檛 be understood. I, an eighteen-year-old born and raised in Shanghai, can鈥檛 speak fluent Shanghainese. Many of my peers can鈥檛 either.

The state of Shanghainese is looking grim. According to a 2007 research by municipal education authority, about 70 percent of local college students and about 35 percent local primary school students use Shanghainese in daily life. The report contends that students鈥 ability to speak Shanghainese improves as they age. However, I wonder if the statistics more accurately indicate that increasing members of young locals are failing to develop the ability to communicate comfortably in Shanghainese.

The decline of Shanghainese may have two causes. First, people鈥檚 perceptions of Shanghainese have changed. In earlier times, migrants learned Shanghainese to fit into the city better. As more migrants begin to gain high social positions, it is no longer necessary to learn Shanghainese to thrive. Mandarin, and sometimes English, have replaced Shanghainese in many urban commercial situations.

Second, Mandarin popularization has somehow weakened Shanghainese. For people across China to communicate easily, the government has introduced policies to spread Mandarin. As a result, Shanghainese is discouraged in some public places, such as schools.

Some may argue that unification of language serves Shanghai鈥檚 development, which should be prioritized over preserving collective memory. Such arguments forget that it is because of Shanghai鈥檚 inclusiveness that Shanghai achieved today鈥檚 prosperity, and the city still needs them for further development.

Shanghainese is a hotchpotch of dialects from east-southern China and foreign languages. After Shanghai opened its port in 1843, immigrants from surrounding regions brought in various dialects. These dialects were added to Jiaxing dialect to form Shanghainese. Further, Shanghainese represents the city鈥檚 embrace of Western culture. For example, the word 鈥渟mart鈥 is transliterated into Shanghainese shimao, meaning fashionable. The word was then adapted into Mandarin.

Signifying inclusiveness

Shanghainese is a signifier of Shanghai鈥檚 inclusiveness. Preservation of Shanghainese, therefore, is not an attempt to exclude people from other places; on the contrary, it is a reminder for people to include each other.

The situation now though is that Shanghainese, a language that is ready to accommodate other dialects and languages, is not being accommodated. I used to wander through a street in urban Shanghai without hearing Shanghainese.

My grandma and I can talk in Mandarin. But occasionally, when I manage to talk with her in Shanghainese, I feel closer to her. And she becomes much more talkative because she is more comfortable with Shanghainese.

There is a theory that younger and older Shanghainese can鈥檛 communicate easily because the dialect has changed over time. As new immigrants settle in Shanghai, more dialects are mixed into Shanghainese, resulting merely in differences in pronunciation.

I would love this to be the case. Even though I still wouldn鈥檛 be able to have those intimate conversations with my grandma, I would find a new sense of connection with my friends through shared conversations in this 鈥渃hanged鈥 Shanghainese. However, the fact is that we, the younger generation, are not speaking some new form of an old dialect. We communicate way more comfortably in Mandarin.

We are not supposed to speak Shanghainese at school, so after school we feel weird speaking it, as if we were speaking a foreign language. When a language or dialect disappears, it鈥檚 not just a means of communication that dies; the memory and culture carried with it die together.

In recent years, amid attempts to save the local dialect, Shanghainese textbooks and schools have emerged, but who would bother learning Shanghainese if it is not actually spoken in most places? At its roots, Shanghai is more than its modern, gleaming skyscrapers. At the heart of the city is a culture of inclusion, as represented by its local dialect.

The author is a first-year international student at Columbia University in New York. She can be reached at gh2435@columbia.edu.

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