Why dialects are declining

Two years ago, Qi Jiayao visited his mother’s hometown of Shaoxing in eastern China. When he tried to speak to his cousin’s children in the local dialect, Qi was surprised. “None of them was able to,” recalls the linguist, who teaches Mandarin in Oaxaca, Mexico.

The decline in local dialects among the younger generation has become more apparent in recent years, as China’s president, Xi Jinping, has sought to strengthen a uniform Chinese identity. But the popularisation of a standard national language is often at the expense of regional ones, including Han majority dialects and ethnic languages such as Mongolian and Uyghur.

In 2016, Inner Mongolia’s local laws allowed ethnic schools to use their own language to cultivate linguistic skills and bilingualism. But four years later these were reversed to favour Mandarin, a move that saw protests.

It is not just ethnic languages that are being affected. In 2017, a survey showed that among the 10 dialect groups, Wu Chinese, which includes the Shanghai dialect and is spoken by about 80 million people in eastern China, has the smallest number of active users aged between six and 20, prompting concern among linguists.

In Shanghai, where Qi grew up, activists have campaigned to encourage dialects for years. In 2020, the Shanghai government upgraded the local Huju opera festival to a municipality activity to promote the local dialect. This success encouraged Qi. But he is realistic about what activists can accomplish. In 2014, TV programme Shanghai Dialect Talk on Shanghai Doco TV was taken off air after the government insisted on the use of Mandarin for the channel to broadcast nationally and laws prevent satellite channels from using local dialects.

Activists are turning to social media and local events. A group of volunteers has been recording Blossoms, by Jin Yucheng, one of the few novels written in the Shanghainese dialect of Wu. Every few weeks, the organisers upload chapters to WeChat and Himalaya, a Chinese podcast site. Qi is compiling a Shanghai dialect dictionary.

In 2000, China passed laws to standardise spoken and written language. In each province, a language committee advises, monitors and polices the use of Mandarin. Implementation varies, but it is easy for the government to enforce its policy. In September, the south-western province of Sichuan banned civil servants and party cadres from using the local dialect at work, a language used on national TV by Deng Xiaoping, the former supreme leader.

“The state has been telling people there are visible and tangible benefits to speaking Mandarin Chinese,” says Fang Xu, an urban sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley. A 2010 Beijing Union University study found nearly half of Beijing residents born after 1980 prefer Mandarin Chinese over the Beijing dialect.

But it is not all bad news, she adds. In the past, internal migrants from outside Shanghai often felt discriminated against and unable to speak the local dialect. Qi began noticing the change when studying in the north-eastern city of Harbin in 2002. “From a local Shanghai perspective, the marginalisation of the dialect is alarming. But thinking nationally, it may be inevitable at a time when a uniform Chinese identity trumps everything,” he says. “The diminishing of dialects seems only to be the price we pay for it.”