Shanghai dialect locked in tug of war with Mandarin
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E-mail China Daily, February 28, 2014
Reasons to be cheerful?
But Shen Lei, the anchor of the popular radio talk show A La Shanghai Ren (We Shanghai people) painted a less-gloomy picture.
The program, which has aired on Shanghai East Radio Station every day from 6 to 7 pm for nearly two decades, features a male and a female anchor chatting about domestic trivialities, speaking exclusively in the local tongue. The show has long been a favorite of office workers killing time as they travel home, and families looking for entertainment during dinner.
"The fluency and accuracy (of spoken Shanghainese) may be declining, but there is keen interest in learning it," said Shen, who has hosted the show since just after it began in 1995.
At an event hosted by the program in mid-January, children and adults were invited to participate in a dialect contest. The response was overwhelming: hundreds of families filled the sleek and spacious hall of a Shanghai shopping mall, babbling and bumbling as if they were attending a language school.
"Many people are talking about the authenticity of the dialect spoken today, but I think what matters more is the fact that it's still being spoken. There is also the law of 'survival-of-the-fittest' in terms of linguistics. What is considered standard today might have been pidgin decades ago," said Shen, whose Shanghainese was "standardized" when she studied at the Shanghai Traditional Opera School.
Shen added that the program has been on and off for the past two decades (there is a complicated bureaucracy by which radio or TV programs obtain official approval to use dialects as official languages), and the support and enthusiasm of the audience is one of the major reasons for its continuing popularity.
The 41-year-old Shanghai native recalled that during her early years at school, she was chosen as the "Mandarin popularizer" in her class, supervising her classmates in spoken Mandarin, both in and outside the classroom.
"It's quite interesting to see how the situation has reversed within less than half a century," she said.
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