No change in Xiangyin: Dialect protection and inheritance
China News Weekly reporter/Du Wei
Issued in the 954th issue of China News Weekly in 2020.7.06
"Shitai said, Shitai Ming dynasty, going to the "red house" of death to eat lunch ⋯ ⋯ first to get the death meal coupon ⋯ ⋯ Xiao Mao said, Shitai wants to eat western food, let me queue first. Shitai said , Yeah, good boy. Xiaomao said, I’ll talk to Mommy first. Master Zhang cut his hair and said, what to say, to be a man, you need to be active. The teacher said too, you can talk, just talk...” It is the scene of the first appearance of Xiao Mao, who lives in an alley in the west of Shanghai, in the novel "Fan Hua" published by Jin Yucheng in 2012. "Fan Hua" throughout the book is composed of short sentences of three to seven words, with Shanghai charm and rhythm of the body of the words, and lays out a picture of Shanghai on the Qingming River that spans nearly 40 years and shows the city and the world. .
Manchu Shanghai is the most interesting feature of "Fanhua". Jin Yucheng told China News Weekly that the choice of dialects and the ontological narrative of the dialect was his experiment in response to the long-running translation accent in China. The use of dialects can more vividly show people's richness and regional characteristics.
The dialect is derived from ancient Chinese and is a language variation formed during the process of population migration, settlement, and administrative divisions from north to south and east to west. In the thousands of years of human history, the emotional sustenance and identity of different groups of people have been maintained. It is a unique endorsement and special carrier of each local culture, and it has also continuously changed in the long course of time.
There are ten Chinese dialects in northern Mandarin, Jin, Wu, Min, Gan, Cantonese, etc., including 97 dialect films, a total of 101 dialect films. However, due to various factors such as the acceleration of the urbanization process, the intensification of population movements and the promotion of Mandarin, the influence and use of dialects are not as good as before. Today, many dialects including Wu, Min and Cantonese are in varying degrees Facing a crisis of survival.
Dialect is a flowing stream
When writing "Fan Hua", Jin Yucheng experienced a period of change from Putonghua thinking to Shanghai dialect thinking. He has been an editor of "Shanghai Literature" since 1988. He hasn't written novels for about 20 years before the creation of "Fanhua". "Fanhua" is the first attempt to write in Shanghai. But after adapting, he felt the unprecedented freedom to write in "hometown dialect". From the initial writing of the dialogue between two or three characters, to the end of the novel, he can control the noise of more than thirty people at the dinner organized by Merry.
Jin Yucheng called the writing of the dialect and the dialect narrative a gift from God. In his view, language is the most important element of a work, and dialects can give the author a unique creation. In addition to the accidental use of Shanghainese by mistake, he also hopes to use Shanghainese writing to show readers a Shanghai with not only the labels of "Shiliyangchang" and "Qipao".
"Fanhua" draws on the gossip of dozens of ordinary people, depicting the changes in Shanghai's current situation and the material desire under the market tide in the 1960s and early 1990s. In the novel, there are common words used by Shanghainese people, for example, the expression of "squeak" that expresses silence is more than 1500 times. When he heard that neighbors Betty and Granny were going to become goldfish, Abao “did not sound”; during the “Cultural Revolution”, when Abao’s delicious lazy uncle cooked rice, everyone “did not sound”; when Mei Rui and Mr. Kang were dating, Mr. Kang I don’t know how to answer "No Sound" ⋯⋯ In order to let non-Shanghainese readers understand the "Fanhua", Jin Yucheng will also modify the unfamiliar places, and retain the expressions and vocabulary that highlight the unique charm of Shanghai dialect, for example, Uncle Abao After a full meal, I swallowed when I went to Abao's house for dinner. Aunt Abao called it "a beggar eats a dead crab, only fresh"; Shanghai people call "things" "body" and "time" as " "Chenguang", "sweater" is called "knotted yarn", "things out of nothing, unfounded" are called "thousands of nonsense", "dullheadedness, words and deeds are not in line with common sense" is called "13 o'clock". Non-Shanghainese readers can enter that unique time and space in their dialectal narrative, and local readers in Shanghai will naturally read it in Shanghainese after reading a few sentences of the novel.
75-year-old Qian Nairong is a professor at Shanghai University. He used to be the head of the Chinese Department at Shanghai University. He is also a well-known Wu dialect researcher and an expert in Shanghainese. He told China News Weekly that one of the characteristics of dialects is that they have a more precise, detailed, and rich expression when describing things. For example, in the Shanghai dialect, “wearing” means “wearing”, “wearing clothes” means “wearing”, “shipping on the shore” means “leaning”, and“ leaning against the wall” means “隑(gāi)”, which means “station”. The word "li".
In Jin Yucheng's view, dialects are like a happy stream, which has evolved in people's word of mouth and flows forward vividly, while providing literary creators with a continuous supply. Before Jin Yucheng, there were many examples of unprecedented success in using dialect narratives, such as Han Bangqing's "The Biography of the Sea Flower", and Zhang Ailing's "Golden Lock" also had many Wu dialects.
The charm of dialects is more three-dimensionally reflected in various operas and folk cultures. In Shanghai, there are Shanghai operas that were originally called "tan springs"; in Suzhou, there are critics and Kunqu operas; in Shaoxing, there are Yue operas known as "the second largest drama in China"...like the Shanghai opera "Thunderstorm" and Yue opera "Liang Shanbo and "Zhu Yingtai", "Huang Mei Opera" "Tian Xian Pei" and other works can all show the personality and regional characteristics of the characters through dialects, and also provide samples for researchers to analyze the pronunciation and vocabulary changes of dialects in different eras. More fundamentally, dialects are the carriers through which these dramas can be spread. "Without the skin, Mao will be attached." In the comedy art form, dialect is more irreplaceable. In the Shanghai comic "Guangdong Shanghai Dialect", because the salesperson speaks a Cantonese accent of the Shanghai dialect, "Mr." sounds like "orangutan" and "things" are heard as "Wooden comb" and "touch mold head" are heard as "eating steamed buns", making a lot of jokes. In the works "Drama and Dialect" of the masters of crosstalk, Hou Baolin and Guo Qiru, the different characteristics of different dialects are vividly interpreted. In art forms such as sketches, dialects have an immediate effect on quickly portraying characters and bringing the audience into the story.
In addition to the regional characteristics, from another perspective, dialects are also a scale to record and express the characteristics of different eras in a place, reflecting the spiritual characteristics of a city. The strength of the dialect is closely related to the local political and economic status. Dialects are the product of population migration and settlement. Taking Shanghai dialect as an example, the old Shanghai dialect originated from the formation of a settlement called "Shanghai" during the Southern Song Dynasty. At that time, dialects in Shanghai were based on Songjiang dialect. In the Qing Dynasty, due to the prosperity of Suzhou, the entire Wu language area, including Shanghai, was influenced by the Suzhou dialect; while the modern Shanghai dialect originated after the opening of Shanghai in 1843. Therefore, the authoritative dialect in Shanghai can be described as "Three Changes and Its Owners".
Qian Nairong said that after 1843, more than 80% of the migrant population flowed into Shanghai, including many immigrants from Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Since then, the unique expressions in Suzhou dialect, Ningbo dialect and other local dialects have been enriched in Shanghai dialect. For example, the “Peugeot” and “One Top (Awesome)” in the Suzhou dialect, and the “Well-being and Long Winter (very remarkable, terrific)” in the Subei dialect entered the Shanghai dialect, which is now the most popular among the Shanghai dialects. The iconic, "Allah (us)" instead of "Wuji" comes from Ningbo dialect. The reason why foreign dialects did not have a "subversive" effect on the Shanghai dialect is an important reason because the foreign population came to Shanghai in batches, and the influence of language between the five lakes and seas canceled each other out. By the 1920s and 1930s, Shanghai was a modern and international metropolis. The blending of East and West also brought a large number of foreign things into Shanghai, such as "tram", "ship", "train", "sofa", "road", "flower water", and "blackboard" "Tap water", "tap fire (match)", etc., these words were first created in Shanghai dialect and then absorbed into Mandarin, and are still used today.
For more than 100 years since the port opened, Shanghai dialect has gradually become one of the three major dialects alongside Beijing dialect and Guangzhou dialect. After the reform and opening up, Shanghai dialect has once again ushered in rapid development. Words such as "lock-in", "excellent stocks" and "primitive stocks" born in the stock market were first born in the Shanghai dialect. By the end of the 1980s, the Shanghai dialect maintained a strong radiating power in the Wuyu District. On the Shanghai-Nanjing Railway, people from Suzhou, Wuxi, and Changzhou can often be heard talking in Shanghai dialect.
The Shanghai dialect, which belongs to the Wu dialect, still retains some ancient sounds, ancient words, and grammar in ancient Chinese. For example, the "positive" word formation in ancient Chinese is still reflected in Shanghai dialect today, such as "stick ice", "biscuits" and "floss", and there are also ancient Wu language features in Shanghai dialect, such as "wash" It is called "dà" and "Tibetan" is called "kang".
Dialect connects ancient times with reality
Another dialect called the Living Stone of Ancient Chinese is Min Nan. Like the other major dialects, the Southern Min dialect is also formed by the migration of the northern Central Plains Han people to the southern Fujian area due to war avoidance and fleeing in different eras. Because of the relatively closed mountain barriers, the Southern Min dialect was retained. More ancient language features. The industry has not yet reached a consensus on when the Minnan dialect will form, but it is probably during the Southern and Northern Dynasties. By the Song Dynasty, the people of southern Fujian went south and sent their population to the Chaoshan area. The migration routes of southern Fujian people also showed distinctive characteristics along the coastline, from Hailufeng on the east coast of Guangdong, Maoming in western Guangdong, Zhanjiang and other places to Hainan The east coast of the island, and then set foot on the island of Taiwan across the sea from Fujian. During the Qing dynasty, the policy of "moving borders and forbidding the sea" allowed people from southern Fujian to enter Wenzhou, Pingyang, Cangnan, and Taizhou. In Fujian, the Minnan dialects distributed in Xiamen, Quanzhou and other places are more powerful than the Fujian dialects and northern Fujian dialects distributed in Fuzhou and other places.
Born in 1954, Wang Jianshe is a native of Quanzhou. He once served as the dean of the College of Liberal Arts of Huaqiao University, where he mainly studied ancient Chinese and Minnan dialects. In 1980, when he went to Beijing to participate in the first central Putonghua refresher course organized by the Ministry of Education, Wang Jianshe became interested in dialect-related courses. In 1985, after being admitted to the Master of Ancient Chinese in Xiamen University, Huang Diancheng, a famous linguist and instructor, said to him, "Xu" in "Shi Shuo Xin Yu" could mean the distant pronoun "na", which is the same as the current Quanzhou dialect. Similarly, he is suggested to study the vocabulary of the book.
In "Shi Shuo Xin Yu", Wang Jianshe discovered a world unique to Hokkien, which connects ancient times with reality: the personal pronouns "I", "ru" and "Yi" in the book have been used in Hokkien dialects until now, "Agua "Along" and "Axiong" are popular in the Han and Wei dynasties. They are still spoken in Hokkien, and like the Shanghai dialect, Hokkien (hen) is still reserved in the Hokkien language. )" "calendar (calendar)" is a common word formation in ancient Chinese, "wei" and "wu" are also very close to the usage of ancient Chinese. The most typical example is that the theme song titled "Wine Dry If Selling Nothing" in the once-popular movie "Take a Wrong Car" in Taiwan is a phrase in Hokkien. "None" is placed at the end of the sentence, indicating the tone of inquiry, meaning "there is a wine bottle" Can it be sold?" Through the study of "Shishuo Xinyu", Wang Jianshe finally completed the 100,000-word master's thesis "Shishuo Xinyu Quanzhou Dialect".
In addition to preserving ancient words, Hokkien also preserves ancient sounds from ancient and middle ancient times. Wang Jianshe explained that there are a large number of vernacular readings in southern Fujian dialect, that is, a word in southern Fujian dialect has both spoken pronunciation and pronunciation as a written language, which is similar to "peel" in Peking dialect. (bāo) skin", and read "peel (bō) peeling". The pronunciation of Bai in the Minnan dialect can be traced back to the pre-Qin period 3,000 years ago, symbolizing ancient times, and the pronunciation of Wen has the sound of Jin and Tang dynasties, and sounds elegant.
In Min Nan, the word "Chen" has both a pronunciation (dín) and a white pronunciation (dán). When reading "Chen Pi", use the pronunciation of the text. When reading the name "Chen Yuanyuan", the surname should be read in white. , The name should be read in text, pronounced [dán uán uán] (pronounced "dán finished"), if "Yuanyuan" is read in white, it is pronounced [in] (pronounced "silver"), then there is This means that this person is round and round. Huang Diancheng also wrote an article "Ancient Jin and Tang Dynasties in Quanzhou", which states that if people follow the pronunciation, today's Quanzhou people can sing poetry with ancient sages like Li Bai and Du Fu. The Nanyin and Liyuan operas in Minnan culture can make people feel the singing tunes that originated in the Tang and Song Dynasties.
A major feature of dialects is that with the migration of people, they can form an accent that is different from other places and retain the ancient sounds of different historical stages. For example, during the Southern Song Dynasty, a large number of immigrants entered Lingnan, forming a Cantonese area. Later, because they were blocked from the Central Plains, they were rarely affected by the war. Therefore, Cantonese retained some of the sounds of Middle Chinese. 'S rhythm is almost perfect. Like Shanghai dialect, Hokkien and Cantonese also have a loanword tradition for loanwords, such as "game (quantifier, bureau)", "whistle (whistle)" and "bus".
Behind the lack of dialect ability
When Jin Yucheng wrote "Fan Hua", he didn't slowly jump out of the Mandarin thinking that he had been used to for decades until he wrote 100,000 words. In his view, Mandarin words are to be entered into the dictionary, so they have their stability, and dialects are constantly changing, which also provides the possibility of the richness of literature. In the flowery "Postscript", he wrote such a sentence: the wavelength of contemporary written language lacks "tonality". If you can find strength in the tradition, you will have a "shiny charm" in an instant. He believes that in the current literary creation, the use of Mandarin is closer to an "artificial" language, lacking the foundation of traditional culture, which also makes it difficult to produce rich works and meaningful works like the 1930s and 1940s. Everyone with a unique style.
Putonghua, which was based on Peking dialect since 1956, undoubtedly played an important role in solving basic communication barriers, promoting the flow of people, and accelerating economic development. At the same time, it also had an impact on the development of dialects, and schools became an important position for promotion.
In the impression of Qian Nairong, Mandarin was rapidly popularized in Shanghai in the 1970s. His daughter was born in 1976. He speaks Mandarin at school and speaks fluent Shanghainese outside the classroom. Both languages can be spoken very well. However, this situation of harmonious coexistence of Mandarin and dialects in Shanghai only lasted until the late 1980s. Since 1992, Shanghai has stipulated that all primary and middle school students are not allowed to speak Shanghainese after class. Some radio and TV programs hosted by Shanghai dialect were asked to stop, and the inheritance of Shanghai dialect was in crisis.
This rule has been in effect in Shanghai for more than ten years. Qian Nairong said that this has caused children born in 1985 and later to fail to learn and use Shanghai dialect after entering primary school, making it difficult for peers to use Shanghai dialect. communicate with. By 2000, Qian Nairong had opened a school-wide elective course called "Shanghai Dialect and Folk Culture Course" at Shanghai University. Each final exam had a topic in which new Shanghai buzzwords were written. In the first few years, some students could write more than 80 on a test paper, for example, the popular "sounding tone" and "粢饭糕 (a girl who is obsessed, annoying, and engaged in making girls)" popular in Shanghai in early 2000" "Girls are boys" and so on. Qian Nairong also published these buzzwords as "2500 new buzzwords in Shanghai dialect". But around 2004, Qian Nairong could only be used as an example on the test paper. The students explained that if students were allowed to write their own words, they could not write one. "This means that from the age of 85 onwards, there has been a fault in the inheritance of Shanghai dialect."
According to the “2012 Shanghai Newest Survey Report on the Growth of Primary and Secondary School Students” released by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, only 60% of Shanghai’s local students are surveyed by 21 elementary school classes and 24 junior high school students in 7 schools in the city Can fully understand and basically speak Shanghainese. Lu Ying, who is a kindergarten teacher in Suzhou, conducted a survey of more than 2,000 Suzhou children aged 5 to 13 from 2008 to 2009. The percentage of three generations of ancestors, middle generations, and children who can use Wu language proficiently and naturally is 96% , 92.8%, 65.6%, the dialect mastery fell sharply between the children and middle generations. According to the UN Endangered Language Assessment Index, the disconnection and breakage of intergenerational inheritance is a clear signal that language is endangered.
Even without mandatory intervention, there are fewer and fewer places where people use dialects. Wang Lining, a professor at Beijing Language and Culture University and a deputy director of China Language Resources Protection Research Center, is from Nanning, Guangxi and is a post-80s. Since she was a child, she was more inclined to speak Putonghua which is not standard and with local accent when she was in school or even talking with her parents. She only considered speaking close to Cantonese when she was playing with her friends in the community. The local Cantonese dialect known as "Nanning Vernacular".
Such a phenomenon has spread and continued everywhere. Chen Yanling, a professor at Quanzhou Normal University, etc., conducted a survey on the use of dialects among urban and rural primary and middle school students in Quanzhou from 2010 to 2011. The percentage of urban students using dialects was only 24%, while the use of Mandarin was 76%; Only 9% of urban students in the same age talk in dialects, only 5% use both, and 86% only communicate in Mandarin. Wang Lining regards this as the necessity of the crowd in the process of urbanization, that is, to go to a larger place and speak the universal language of a larger area. Wang Lining said that middle-class parents now living in Nanning rarely use their native language to teach their next generation, especially in larger cities. This iterative change means that dialects are directly passed on to the next generation. disappear. Wang Lining said that the drastic change of dialects in the process of urbanization is the phenomenon that dialectists are most worried about, which means that there is no time for rescue and recording.
The main body invading the weak dialect is not only Mandarin. During the formation of the dialect, the people who spoke A dialect entered the territory of the B dialect crowd and were surrounded by the B dialect crowd. Such a language ecology is called a dialect island.
In 2016, Wang Lining led students to conduct a survey of Hakka in Jinniushan Village, Tashi Township, Wucheng District, Jinhua, Zhejiang. Investigators should first look for male speakers over 60 years of age and below the high school level. After the pronunciation, use the international phonetic alphabet to record the pronunciation. The reason for choosing this type of speaker is that it was born before and after the founding of New China, and its voice is more pure and less affected by Mandarin. Men mean that they are mostly born locally and have not left the country for a long time. The Hakkas in Jinniushan Village have moved from the Shanghang generation in Fujian since their ancestors. The current population is 118 people, and the resident population is only about 20 people. The middle-aged and old people are the main people. Their current social communication language has gradually shifted to the surrounding Wu language. The parents lived in Jinhua and learned Mandarin from an early age, and they didn't even speak the local Jinhua dialect.
At the end of 2018, Wang Lining and his tutor, director of the Chinese Language Resources Protection Research Center, and Cao Zhiyun, a professor at the College of Humanities of Zhejiang Normal University, took students to another prestigious dialect island in Dashi Township-Dakeng She Dialect Dialect Island. She dialect is a Chinese dialect used by the She nationality. Dakeng (administrative village) has two natural villages, Dakengkou and Mengkengkou. It has migrated from Guangdong and Fujian. There are about 14 generations and more than 140 residents. She people under the age of 25 basically can't speak She. Even if the She people who live in the village now speak She, the daily communication often prefers to use local Wu rather than She. In the gap of the investigation, Wang Lining waited to visit Mengkengkou Village and saw that the village was empty, and only one or two households still lived with the elderly. The phenomenon of rural hollowing out in such a village with only old people and dogs is quite common in Wang Lining's investigation.
Young people's ability to know and apply dialect words is also declining. In 2009, Wang Jianshe visited Shishi City, Quanzhou, and found that the post-90s young people can only literally translate many Hokkien words in Mandarin. For example, "military ant" is said to be "ant", and "flea" is said to be "flea". ","Firefly"is pronounced "Firefly". As for the pronunciation, during the period from 1995 to 2015 for undergraduates, Wang Jianshe repeatedly asked local students to recite Li Bai’s poem "Moon Moonlight in Bed" with the Quanzhou dialect pronunciation. None of the classmates can read it completely correctly. It is also rare to read three words accurately. Affected by Putonghua, young people often translate the pronunciation of Putonghua vocabulary, for example, reading "car accident" as "car goods" and "breeding" as "fanzhi" (Quanzhou dialect has different pronunciations, and "fanzhi" does not constitute words).
Liu Danqing, director of the Institute of Linguistics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said in an interview with China News Weekly that this is because many native speakers of dialects have lost the ability to establish a phonological correspondence between common vocabulary words and native dialect words, and have lost common sentence patterns. The ability to convert into dialect expressions. For example, to read the word "Shanghainese" in Shanghai dialect, many people have to write it as "Shanghai Ning" to pronounce it.
Compared with the crisis facing Wu and Nannan, Cantonese has always been in a strong position in people's minds. In the process of growing up, due to the influence of popular culture such as Hong Kong and Taiwan music, popular film and television dramas, compared with the "Nanning vernacular" in his hometown, Wang Lining has always had "respect" for the Cantonese-speaking representative represented by Guangzhou dialect, and she once thought that His native dialect is not a proud language variant, and he maintains a "relatively inferior, intimate, and casual" attitude towards the Nanning vernacular.
Zhuang Chusheng, chief expert of the Guangdong project of the Chinese Language Resources Protection Project and now a professor of the Chinese History Research Center of Zhejiang University, told China News Weekly that the strength of Cantonese actually refers to the strength of Cantonese in a narrow sense. On the one hand, the reason lies in the open and inclusive culture of Guangzhou, and the locals have a strong psychological recognition of the local culture, "do not feel the soil". Guangzhou used to do business alone in the Qing Dynasty. After Hong Kong became a British colony, a large number of Cantonese people from the Pearl River Delta centered on Guangzhou moved to Hong Kong. Among them, there are many high-profile social figures such as businessmen and intellectuals, making Guangdong with Guangzhou as the standard. Dialect quickly became a lingua franca in the urban area of Hong Kong. After the reform and opening up, a large number of immigrants came to Guangzhou to work, and the booming economy has made Cantonese an authoritative local language. Cantonese also has written characters. At the same time, the prosperous popular culture of Hong Kong was exported to the Mainland, and Cantonese had a huge influence among the people. But in recent years, the phenomenon that young people do not speak Cantonese has also begun to attract attention.
Wang Lining said that if we look at the population of several large dialects, it seems that they are all safe, but specific to small dialects subdivided under a certain dialect category, they may be in an endangered state. For example, Zhuang Chusheng said that the Cantonese dialect of Dongguan is in a state of rapid disappearance. The “Nanning vernacular” is also being replaced by the stronger Cantonese. There are also smaller dialects, such as the “Northern Guangdong dialect” in northern Guangdong, the Pearl River The "Duanjia dialect" in the delta and the Danzhou dialect in southeastern Hainan are struggling to survive.
Protect our voice "identity card"
In 2015, the Chinese Language Resources Protection Project was launched. This is a corpus collection project covering more than 1,700 Chinese dialects and minority language survey sites and thousands of Chinese dialect points. In Wang Lining's view, 2015 was an important node for the protection of dialect culture and inheritance. This is a nationwide survey of the current state of language resources in 60 years, and the goal is the same as the survey carried out 60 years ago to promote Mandarin. For different.
In 2017, the “Opinions on the Implementation of the Project of Inheriting and Developing Chinese Excellent Traditional Culture” issued by the General Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the General Office of the State Council mentioned “vigorously promoting and standardizing the use of national common language and characters, and protecting the culture of inherited dialects”.
Before the launch of the national operation, all localities were exploring the protection of dialects. In 2007, Minnan established the first experimental zone of cultural and ecological protection in China. In the same year, Quanzhou TV station’s Minnan language channel was officially launched. In August 2011, Suzhou took the lead in joining the Suzhou News Station on five tourist bus lines, becoming the first large city to join the dialect newspaper station in the Jiangnan area. In Shanghai, the "Xinmin Evening News" has launched a special edition of "Shanghai Gossip" since 2010. In 2014, 20 pilot kindergartens in Shanghai used Shanghai dialect to communicate between classes. In the past few years, Shanghai has also hosted the city’s children’s Shanghainese. In June of this year, a dialect talent show called "The King of Popular Shanghainese" landed on Shanghai Metropolitan Channel.
Qian Nairong said frankly, in the past ten years, through various activities, the atmosphere of learning Shanghai dialect has been created, which has changed the attitude of many parents, but the status quo of Shanghai young people who speak Shanghai dialect has not improved.
The contestants participating in the Shanghai language contest sang a song of "Tuk Tuk Tuk selling sugar porridge (Note: Shanghai snack red bean porridge)" from kindergarten to junior high school. "The participating programs are all rehearsed, and there are several people performing back and forth," Qian Nairong said, "I can't help but ask a child what'Sugar Porridge' is, the child doesn't know. If you ask him what he just performed "Three pounds of walnuts and four pounds of shells, eat Nong meat, return Nong shells" what the hell is saying, the child can't answer it out of ten."
Qian Nairong also declined his alma mater’s invitation to Ming Middle School Senior High School to invite him to speak at the upper class. In his view, “teaching without speaking is equal to not teaching”, and it became Mandarin after class. Qian Nairong believes that the most important thing for learning dialects is to create an environment where people of the same age speak dialects, so that they can increase their vocabulary and language proficiency in communication. The key is to allow students in kindergartens and primary and secondary schools to teach Let's speak Shanghainese.
Guangzhou has a good experience of young people's Mandarin and Cantonese "bilingual" acquisition. Zhuang Chusheng said that local parents will teach children to learn Cantonese when they are young. When they are in kindergarten or school, the children will learn Mandarin again, and the school will There is no rule that you cannot speak Cantonese after class, which gives children the space to use dialects after class.
The intergenerational inheritance of dialects is also a difficult problem facing Wang Jianshe. The "I Love Minnan" he hosted was originally intended for young people and children, but when he went out, he often encountered "fans" of the level of aunts of 50s and 60s. He admits that under the current background of rich choices and basic popularity of Mandarin, such a program "Young people don't like to watch."
In June 2019, the first phase of the Chinese Language Resources Protection Project was completed, and the project's landmark achievement, "China's Endangered Languages", was officially published. As the organization and implementation unit of the project, Wang Lining and the team are thinking about how to present the collected data resources on the Chinese language resource collection and display platform in order to attract more young people. This is also the thing to be done in the second phase of the language protection project. .
In 2016, Hunan TV program host Wang Han approached the Wang Lining team, hoping that it would provide academic support for the newly launched dialect song singing program "1.3 Billion Decibels." This show aroused the interest of many young people in dialects. In Zurong Village, Leizhou, Guangdong, in the past few years, the presenters Wang Han and Cui Yongyuan also launched the first domestic dialect film festival, with 500 to 800 films submitted each year, and the organizing committee selected 50 or 60 awards Films and film festivals are set up to attract young directors to participate, and the team of Wang Lining also gives academic support and guidance.
In Zhuang Chusheng's view, the protection of dialects should be classified. Some dialects with a population of only three or four hundred people will eventually disappear. "The big river goes east, there is no alternative." All that can be done is to take a "posthumous picture" of them by means of sound, video, etc., and keep it for research, and For some relatively more powerful languages, such as Minnan dialect, Shanghai dialect, Cantonese, etc., we must spare no effort to inherit and protect.
Wang Jianshe explained that protecting inherited dialects does not mean promoting dialects. It does not mean that everyone can speak a standard dialect. This is neither possible nor necessary. The key is that dialects are not discriminated against and have their own survival. space. In the future, it should be "multilingual", in private and informal occasions, you can use dialects and speak Mandarin in formal occasions.
Qian Nairong analyzed that the language and vocabulary of dialects are constantly changing with time, which is a natural law. In the past 170 years, the vowels of Shanghai dialect have merged from 63 in 1853 to 32 in the new voices of today, and the tone is also from 8. Merged into 5, reducing by nearly half. The development of language should follow its nature, and don't expect to pull it back to its original appearance. There are two principles of clear and economic use of language. Nowadays, the merging of some vocabulary and pronunciation of Shanghai dialect has run ahead of Mandarin. For example, the “pot” for cooking and the “melon” for eating are the same in Shanghai dialect.
To what extent the dialect can be protected, Wang Lining has no answer in mind. But she often said to her students, "Maybe you didn’t realize that your hometown dialect is a resource, it is precious, but we can think that if we can hear Zhuge Liang’s voice, Qin Shihuang’s voice, Tang Minghuang’s voice today, How shocking would it be a historical scene?" "Maybe the work we are doing today is for people to feel shock and do some accumulation after 1000 and 2000."
After devoting himself to language research, Wang Lining gradually gained greater recognition of his native dialect. "Nanning, Guangxi's most prominent logo, you might say it is old friend powder, sour papaya, various soups. But today through developed logistics, these objects can be obtained by people everywhere. In the end, the only thing that is different is the Nanning vernacular. No matter how close it is to Cantonese, there is no substitute for each other. When our children are slowly speaking a standard Mandarin, the city of Nanning will lose its most distinctive culture, like all cities on the Chinese territory. In the eyes of Wang Lining, the dialect is "an identification card with a voice inherent in an area and people living in this area", "What happens if we lose this ID card?"
(The bibliography of this article includes "<Fanhua> Language Notes", "Shanghai Dialect", "Dialects and Chinese Culture", "Xuanyuan Messenger: A Field Story of Linguists", "Southern and Northward Tune: Rediscovering China in Language". Special thanks to Zheng Zining and Suzhou University (Help from Professor Wang Ping of the College of Liberal Arts)
"China News Weekly" No. 24, 2020
Statement: The publication of the "China News Weekly" manuscript is subject to written authorization