International Mother Language Day: China’s dialects are disappearing

There are 300 languages ​​and dialects in China, but many are threatened with extinction – also because the government wants everyone to speak standard Chinese. A report on International Mother Language Day.

Fewer and fewer young people speak Shanghai Hua, the dialect of Shanghai. Zhang Chunling, who lives in the city, says she finds this a shame: “You may not believe it, but I feel like my heart is broken. It’s like something has been taken away from me. What can I do for Shanghai do? The only thing I can do is teach people Shanghai dialect.”

For several years now, the 45-year-old and her husband have been running a recording studio with an integrated language school for those interested. They teach and dub films in Shanghai dialect so that more people want to hear it and perhaps learn it.

The CP wants everyone to speak the same language

In many regions of China, fewer and fewer children can properly speak the language or dialect of their parents or grandparents. They learn Mandarin Chinese at school because the Communist Party (CP) wants everyone in China to speak the same language.

There is a wide variety of languages ​​in China: around 300 different languages ​​and dialects, some of which are spoken by tens of millions of people. Some others, however, are threatened with extinction. Many of the languages ​​and dialects are forms of Chinese and are related to Standard Chinese, including the Shanghai dialect. However, the diversity of dialects and languages ​​in China is increasingly being replaced by standard Chinese.

Things used to be different, says Zhang Chunling. . “The teachers came from Shanghai itself. They spoke Mandarin during class and otherwise spoke Shanghai Hua.” But today’s children are not allowed to speak any dialect at school, only standard Chinese.

Critics see attempt Forced assimilation

But there are also languages ​​in China that have completely different roots than standard Chinese. For example, Uyghur, a Turkic language spoken primarily in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang. And Mongolian, which is spoken in the Chinese part of Inner Mongolia. There were protests there over Chinese education policy in 2020. People feared that if children were taught only Mandarin from a very early age, their language would disappear.

According to human rights activists, in the minority regions of Tibet and Xinjiang, children of kindergarten age are sometimes separated from their parents and sent to state boarding schools where they are supposed to learn standard Chinese. Critics see this as an attempt at forced assimilation. This means that the minorities have to adapt to what the majority dictates.

Repressive Education policy

In Tibet and Xinjiang, education policies are also accompanied by other repressive measures that suppress the culture, religion and identity of the Buddhist Tibetan and Muslim Uyghur minorities. In Xinjiang, it is estimated that at one point more than a million people were imprisoned in re-education camps.

In Shanghai, eastern China, the circumstances are different. It is estimated that more than 90 percent of the residents there belong to the Han Chinese ethnic majority population group. The fact that the Shanghai dialect is disappearing is also a social phenomenon there, says Zhang Chunling: “The children can’t speak the Shanghai dialect at school. They can only learn it at home. But if their parents don’t speak it, then they learn it neither.”