Dialect signifies city's accommodating spirit
- By Hai Ge
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E-mail Shanghai Daily, December 28, 2015
Signifying inclusiveness
Shanghainese is a signifier of Shanghai's 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't 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't 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 "changed" 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's 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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