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Concerns mount over demise of languages
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LARRY Qiao, a 35-year-old native of Sichuan Province, started splitting his time between his home village and Shanghai five years ago when he married his wife, who met him while traveling in Sichuan.
It took the villager a while to get used to the city life, and now Qiao, an ethnic Yi, is facing an even more serious issue.
“How can I make sure the ethnic minority language and culture are to be learned and carried on through my son, now that he will grow up in this urban jungle, with nobody but me to speak the language to him?” Qiao tells Shanghai Daily.
Since his wife Zhang Ying was pregnant, Qiao has been reciting Yi poetry, an oral folklore literature that few know today, to his now 18-month-old son. He is worried there will be no reason for his son to learn the minority language or to carry on the colorful folk traditions that include worshipping fire, practicing martial arts and following a unique solar calendar, among others. Qiao himself doesn’t even plan to carry on this cultural lifestyle in Shanghai.
Back home in the village, many kids have moved to nearby towns and cities and stopped using the local language, adopting Mandarin and the prevailing lifestyle.
Regulations have been drawn up and announced in recent years to protect the rights of the Yi minority group to learn and use their own language. Yet as more people move out amid China’s urbanization, many give up.
The danger of extinction of various minority languages is hardly an issue unique to the Yi, as Liu Jinrong, a professor from Yunnan Minzu University, said at a recent press conference regarding protection of minority group languages in the southwestern Chinese province.
“It is very obvious that some languages are rapidly disappearing and in danger of extinction,” Liu said.
Richest cultural diversities
According to a report in 2007, China has about 120 minority group languages, about half of which are used by less than 10,000 people. More than 20 are used by fewer than 1,000, making their existence precarious.
Yunnan Province, which borders Sichuan to the south, has one of the richest diversities of minority cultures.
According to Liu, some of the languages there are spoken by fewer than 10 elderly people, and because many villagers no longer live together these people have fewer reasons to carry on the dialects.
“There is basically no reason for me to speak the language at all when I am in Shanghai,” Qiao says. “My wife and her entire family are Shanghainese. There is hardly any reason for them to learn my language. And I am really not sure if it is necessary to teach my son the minority language, since he will probably never use it here.”
In Yunnan Province, to save these languages, a language lab and database project was initiated more than two years ago, sending researchers into remote areas to record the languages. They have collected phonetic data from 19 languages facing extinction.
“The extinction of some minority group languages is irreversible and determined by social economic development,” Pan Wuyun, head of the language and archive data center at Shanghai’s Fudan University, told the media earlier.
Precious materials
“This makes it all the more crucial to collect these minority languages. As language is the textbook of human history, it is important not only to delay the extinction of these languages but also to save historical materials for research purposes in the future.”
Pan described how researchers could discover and confirm the route of the Silk Road by analyzing the geographic distribution of the different pronunciations of the character “si,” or silk.
“And there is much less outside influence on many minority languages, making them better at preserving ancient pronunciations, so they are precious and important materials to study history and its development,” Pan added.
Nationally, the Chinese Language Database project was initiated in 2008, starting from the eastern Jiangsu Province, which due to its geography and history contains both northern and southern Chinese dialects.
Over the years, the project has been gradually extended across the country. It was designed to get first-hand information on the current status of different languages in China, to further promote the use of Mandarin, and to rescue languages and dialects in danger of extinction.
Locally in Shanghai, many parents also fear their children will no longer speak the dialect, as kids are increasingly communicating only via Mandarin.
“I try very hard to talk to her only in Shanghainese, but it is useless,” says 29-year-old Wei Lin, who has a 5-year-old daughter. “They only speak Mandarin in the kindergarten.”
Local authorities and ordinary people have tried different ways to promote the dialect, including an app with Talking Tom speaking in Shanghainese to attract kids to learn, bus announcements in Shanghai dialect on some bus routes, and TV programs in Shanghainese, among many.
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