A student at the University of Victoria Dylan, who is currently studying at 华东师范大学, my old and future school, has a decent blog set up to chronicle his time in China. I just found it recently and am still working through the archives. One post in particular introduces the conflict between Mandarin and 方言. If I’m reading it right, it’s his topic for research being done while on a study abroad. Anyway check it out.
In the comments though, he suggests the potential longevity of Wu based on the number of speakers. I think I have to disagree with this. To quote my own comment on his blog:
That pretty much sums up my position. It seems that in a culture where accents matter and people are regularly teased at the workplace for sounding too much like they’re from the place in which they grew up and where clients truly judge the representatives spoken Mandarin, I can’t really see Wu lasting more than a couple more generations. Mandarin is already having a much greater influence on it than 20 years ago, and even English at that.
As to preservation, I’m not sure there’s really anything that can be done. It’s certainly not in the same boat as Manchu, nor do I think it ever will be. That would mean it would disappear abruptly as a dynasty fell. I think the situation is much more along the lines of it simply fading out and being replaced by a Mandarin that is heavily influenced by Wu slackness with a smattering of phrases left over from when it was still Wu. Doesn’t mean one can’t try. From what I read the other day, Gaochun dialect has been deemed a protected heritage language by the state. Not sure if it’s true, but I wouldn’t be surprised. And so I continue on my quest to learn some practical Wu.
“常州人怎么说晚会啊?” I asked the other day.
“Party”
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edit: I changed the wording, ever so slightly, in the sentence beginning with “In the comments…” for the purpose clarification.
I hesitate to say it, but perhaps “blended out” is a closed minded view of linguistic variation. A simple example can be seen between Shanghai and Beijing. Both clearly speak a dialect of Mandarin, varying in vocabulary “还可以 vs. 不错” (S vs. B) or pronunciation (à la syz). However, it is almost impossible for languages, that is pronunciation and grammar distinct from its neighbors (usually intelligibility), to blend this way. If we take look at Dutch and German, we can see that at one point in time these were the same language, however demographics, politics, commercial, social, etc. reasons forced these languages apart. Many of these same factors keep and will keep Wu a distinct language (numbers themselves not included, which honestly, keep languages afloat. Finnish survives with almost 8 mil. Wu will survive with almost 55 mil). Shanghai, Hangzhou, etc. are large centers of Chinese commerce and culture and thus gives a sense of pride to its civilians. We can also look at the more agricultural areas of the area that Wu encompasses. Agricultural areas are very resistant to linguistic change (look at Appalachia or Deep South in the US) meaning that at worst the farmers of the former state of Wu will be speaking Wu up until the very end.
Hmm…I had a lot more to say, but I’m up later than I planned and it’s not really formulating the way I wanted.
On the other, non-critiquing hand, A+ blog (I check it almost twice daily just to be on the safe side)! I’m traveling to Shanghai/Hangzhou this summer and it’d be nice to pick up on some local customs/language aspects (assuming that Changzhou parallels well)
I have to strongly disagree with you on this one.
First of all, it’s a numbers thing. Wu is something like the 10th most spoken native language in the world. You really think 80 million speakers can be phased out in a few generations? Imagine if everyone in Changzhou only spoke Mandarin with each other. You really think that’s going to happen anytime soon? Now imagine Shanghai, Ningbo, Hangzhou, Suzhou, etc.
Secondly, although I agree that having Mandarin as the standard language and a lot of people moving out of their Wu hometowns and working, maybe even marrying non-Wu speakers, will lessen the amount of Wu speakers, it is only slightly. The vast majority are marrying Wu and staying in Wu-land. They speak Wu everyday and will speak it with their children.
Also, having bad Putonghua and therefore not getting a job is not a sign of Wu being phased out, but rather companies not choosing to hire people who sound uneducated. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Wu accent, it just matters that you have an accent.
Besides, a lot of business in Shanghai is done in Shanghai Wu. In fact, so much that non-Wu speakers complain about the disadvantage.
I do think it will decline, but I don’t, by any means, think it will be gone entirely within a few generations. In fact, I think it will be around for a very long time.
Hooray or comments.
Ok I fully admit I was being a little to quick by calling it at a couple generations. And the blended thing may have been more hyperbole than it needed. I’ll try to clarify below.
@Perry, I’d argue that Shanghainese is not a dialect of Mandarin any more than I’d say Cantonese is under Mandarin. But that’s possibly a matter of taste and not something that can be definitively answered to the point of consensus, so I’ll leave my opinion as an opinion. More on blending after the @Jason part. And glad you like the blog.
@Jason, believe me I don’t want to see it go, and yeah it’s definitely not going to be “a couple” (my hyperbole again) generations before it’s end. Numbers do matter, but so do the great many projects by state agencies to get 普通话 to be the language of all public interaction. While most families in the area aren’t speaking Mandarin at home, plenty are and more will in the future, especially as more people are traveling and settling down in places other than their ancestral hometowns.
Ok this is the end of the @Jason part.
re blending: Perhaps I can clarify what I mean by blending, and give my reasons. If we look at non-written, non-standardised languages, there’s a significant change (but at an unpredictable and inconsistent rate) in vocabulary and pronunciation. It’s not that I think Wu will no longer be a language or dialect of it’s own any more than English is now French. It’s more to do with the influence from Mandarin really being pushed hard and accents being much more an issue to people than I would have thought. I admit that I was too brash with “blended out” though I didn’t mean it as seriously as it was taken. I’ll be more careful with my verbiage in the future.
What I think will protect it as well as numbers could: Civic pride. It’s like when you’re a kid and you make a secret code that no one can read but you because they can’t figure out that % really means the letter P. I walk into 可的 to buy a coke and the owners quickly switch to 方言 so that I don’t know what they’re saying, even though they’re still talking about restocking the potato chips. There was a debate about whether or not I would get paid for my overtime in the financial office the other day and when I responded correctly to something said in 常州话 that I wasn’t meant to understand, scowls appeared on faces. In fact they outright say “speak 常州话 so he doesn’t understand” which sounds enough like the 普通话 equivalent that it’d be hard to miss it.
Anyway, yeah number matter. No they’re not the biggest thing. Politics matters as well. Look at East Timor abruptly returning to Portuguese after a few generations’ pause or for that matter any country in which a large scale linguistic reform has occurred. I think what it would take is it needs to become enough of a problem for people to get their children formally educated in 方言 to the point that they just prefer to speak the standard language since for them, it’s more natural. We pick up out accents not from our parents but our classmates, and I doubt very much it would stop at accent.
Forgive the use of “out” after blended. I don’t think it will be wiped off the face of the earth in this manner. I just think there will be a strong enough Mandarin influence to cut a lot of what makes it Wu out. And I know that’s not how languages change. Naturally, they would continue to diversify based on a number of factors, until of course the Roman Empire takes over and enforces Latin. Maybe it will just be considered a Mandarin vulgate in the future, though by many that’s already the case.
@Kellen, check your wording better before posting next time.
Thanks for the plug, I already have links up to both of your blogs, which I must say I enjoy both (especially this one) immensely.
On this topic though, I have to categorically disagree (with the caveat that I can really only make a confident knowledge claim for Shanghai). There have already been a century of attempts to rid Shanghai of Shanghainese, yet baring some exceptions, the vast majority of youth speak it fluently. If it was going to “phase-out” that probably would have already happened. The thing is, they also speak Putonghua fluently, without a very strong accent. In general, the Putonghua of Shanghainese is considered to stand fairly high along the imaginary ranking system of accents in China. For the most part, Shanghainese speakers are native Putonghua speakers. If there’s a conflict, it’s not because they are unable to speak Mandarin, it’s because they choose to speak Shanghainese within the public sphere. The degree to which Shanghainese is spoken in the workplace and how it is felt that Putonghua speakers are “shut-out” by the second language is one of the main issues I’ve been looking at (blog posts to come…).
And there is a false assumption in your statement: speaking dialects necessarily equals accented Putonghua. Certainly it can. But the most discriminated against for their accents are not Wu speakers or even Cantonese, but speakers of Southern Mandarin, who’s accents are far less comprehensible then bilingual Wu Chinese.
I agree, Wu is on the decline, but I see a certain undercurrent of the kind of cultural conflict that could revive it’s flagging fortunes (hence my tie-in to the French Canadian language law).
Oh and when I wrote “cultural conflict” there, I had a beautiful daydream of Princess Leia saying to Darth Vader: “The more you squeeze your Putonghua, the more Fangyan will slip through your fingers.”
But seriously, I don’t see these clumsy campaigns for Putonghua as doing much other than aggravate Shanghainese. And as the first generation of “New Shanghainese” (children of waidiren who bought Shanghai hukou) come of age, I think this conflict is just starting to heat up.
@Dylan: I’d have put your name up but didn’t see it on your site. I’ll remedy that shortly. Are you the same Dylan who frequently comments on xiaoerjing?
I don’t think dialects mean accented Putonghua. I do however get pretty strong local accents from people here, and, if memory serves, I did in Shanghai as well, particularly obvious in the dropping of the SH in favour of S, e.g. 十 sounding like 四 short of tonal difference. It’s certainly true in Changzhou (or as the locals say (in Putonghua) Cangzou). I know they’re not at all lacking in the Putonghua department, and didn’t mean to imply they were.
Perhaps the numbers being as condensed as they are in Shanghai will do the job. It wouldn’t be hard to convince me if the decline in places like Wuxi and Changzhou was much faster than in Shanghai.
And don’t get me wrong. The death of Wu is not something I’d take well. I’m in no way saying I approve of the decline, real or imagined.
Yeah, I was actually surprised this post. But after making the few changes you mentioned, I can see more of your point.
However, although I agree that these factors effect the change of the dialect, the fact remains that the large majority of people don’t move and do pass Wu on to their children. I’ve met a lot of people who, as you described ‘understand Wu, (or whatever 方言) but don’t speak it’, but these people are the minority. The 老百姓 will always win the numbers game.(and hey, all Shangianese people never leave Shanghai. God forbid!)
I’d also go as far as to say that in Wu speaking areas, the majority of people spend most of their day speaking Wu not Mandarin. I think it’s pretty unlikely that will change anytime soon.
I do agree that it’s on the road out, but it’s a long ass road.
Oh and that’s funny about the ‘party’ thing. On a similar note, I love hearing old guys in the countryside say ‘OK了’. Gets me every time…
Jason you lucky bastard your comments are all going without needing to be moderated.
Anyway one thing I’d like to see would be numbers of 20-somethings who are 外地人 vs people who directly trace to 上海/宁波 ancestry. Since Shanghai is the Mecca of, well, everything, and it attracts so many people from all over, I’m curious to how it actually pans out. There’s no doubt that the elderly are very 沪 based.
Yeah… I think I’m just so used to the Shanghai accent I forgot about the S-SH thing. It used to bug me so much. But that’s a more of a class thing. How many middle class Wu speakers drop the SH sound in Putonghua? Not many, by my reckoning. I think here much of the conflict as far as discrimination is concerned goes the other way around, i.e. 外地人 being “shut-out” of conversations with Shanghainese. I also would like to know about the numbers for 20-something 外地人 vs. 本地人 in Shanghai. I wonder where we could find that out?
BTW, I may have commented on your Xiaoerjing blog a while back, I’m not sure, but I did notice another Dylan commenting quite a bit. Not me, I’m afraid. And sorry if I came on a little strong there, I think I understand your stance better now. Awesome to see this great discussion going.
To be honest I’m not sure how I’d know middle class, though I assume it’s not the guy selling cigarettes and mini baijiu bottles.
As for being shut out, that definitely happens here as well to both 外地 and 外国 folk. I haven’t got the slightest idea on how to find out the numbers short of writing a grant and doing the research myself. Since that’s not about to happen any time soon I suppose I must wait.
No worries on coming on strong. I’ll proof better next time before hitting “publish” to make sure i’m spoting nonsense.
Phased out in a few generations is probably going too far, but, not by much, I think.
It’s not just a numbers game, I think. Things are lot different now, language-wise in China, than they’ve ever been. Yuen Ren Chao writes about seeing it when he returned in the late-’70s, how the spread of standard Mandarin was changing how people spoke and how people spoke dialects.
The definitive book on Xuzhou dialect was published in 1982 and the majority of the language documented in it is incomprehensible to most people under, say, 50. Even people who would say, “Oh, I really only speak Xuzhou hua, eh.” They’re not speaking the same Xuzhou dialect as someone speaking it fifty or even fifteen years ago. It’s heavily influenced by Mandarin vocab and pronunciation. I assume Wu is a bit different– since Xuzhou dialect is a lot closer/friendlier to Mandarin than Wu dialects are, right?
@Other Dylan: It was Chao that I was thinking of when I originally wrote this.
Xuzhou is Southern Mandarin and as such would be, I’d imagine, more easily influenced by the pro-Mandarin campaigns. Shanghai is of course a big asset to the preservation of the language family, and I tend to think it would be a bigger problem for places like Changzhou and Wuxi which I’d think are fairly similar to Xuzhou in many regards.
@Other Dylan
Yeah, there’s a big difference. Xuzhou dialect isn’t just closer to Mandarin, it is a form of Mandarin itself. Wu is, for all intents and purposes, a separate language.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I agree that even Wu is subject to change, but that doesn’t mean it’s dying. I also still think that all the other factors that effect the evolution of the language, do little up against the numbers. Wu is the 10th most populous language in the world. It’s not just going to disappear in 100 years.
But, agreed, Changzhou and places like it will certainly have a lot more Mandarin going on in the future and will likely lose some dialect.
hey Kellen,
awesome blog! I stumbled across it from bjs.
I’m one of third generation Wu-dialect kids you mentioned and I definitely think that the long term survival of the Wu dialects is up in the air. While I can understand the dialects my parents and grandparents speak, I definitely don’t speak it and as far as I know, not many (urban) people born in the late eighties and afterwards are particularly comfortable or fluent in conversational Wu. Putonghua is much more likely to be the language of choice. (I was born in Jintan and my parents taught at the petrochemical college in Changzhou (!!) before heading overseas to Canada)
Something else to keep in mind is the range of sub-dialects within the Wu-dialect group and how far mutual intelligibility extends. Almost everyone in my parents’ and grandparents’ generations can switch between at least 2 to 3 different Wu dialects and can probably understand a bunch of others. I can only think of one person my age who can speak both jintanhua and jiangbeihua and I can only get the gist of an exchange in shanghaihua or changzhouhua if it’s spoken very slowly. I also don’t think most Wu dialects are comparable to shanghaihua in terms of prevalence in (semi)formal usage and social prestige. I’m not entirely sure, but a lot of these sub-dialects distinctions seemed to have had its roots in the different prefectories when most of the populations were rural. With urbanization and the rural/urban split becoming more pronounced, many dialects are seen as features of ‘being country’ with all of the regionalism baggage fully attached. The smaller the dialect range, the lower the prestige, and the less likely parents will speak it with their kids and expect their kids to speak it back. Like, all my cousins in shanghai speak shanghaihua, all the friends I have from sichuan speak sichuanhua, one or two friends from changzhou speaks changzhouhua and almost nobody speaks jintanhua. [granted my sample size isn't very large, and I left China in '94 so I'm no expert by any means]
I’ve been trying to learn bits of jintanhua the last few times I’ve gone back to visit during the summer and it’s really hard! There’s loads of sounds I just can’t make and my rhythm is off. I really wish that I’d gotten more exposure when I was younger and was expected to speak it, rather than just putonghua.
I’m a native Wu speaker, born and raised in the US, after the 1980’s, and what I can say is that as long as languages are passed down from generation to generation, it’s going to be fine.
All my cousins in Shanghai speak Shanghainese at home. The only Shanghainese that I know who don’t speak Shanghainese are whose parents often use English to speak to their children.
For the most part, I was raised in a non-English speaking household, and both of my parents are native Mandarin and Shanghainese speakers, but my parents feel comfortable speaking in Shanghainese, even though my real native language is English. I’m making the effort to learn more Shanghainese (ever since I eavesdropped on my mother’s convo with a famly member, telling her how my command of Shanghainese is horrible), especially old, literary Shanghainese. (I can read Tang dynasty poems in literary Shanghainese, or read a newspaper in Shanghainese, for example, unlike most Shanghainese my age)
Someday, I’d like to pass down my Wu Chinese dialect to my children, even if I marry a non-Wu speaker.
In my point of view regarding ‘outsiders’ and ‘natives’, is that I consider Shanghainese and other Wu-speaking peoples to be one people, that just speak different dialects of the same Wu Chinese language.
Why doesn’t the local government promote Wu Chinese, like how they promote Cantonese or Fuzhou dialect? It’s blatant hypocrisy, to be honest here.
There are even websites promoting Wu language culture out there.
So languages and dialects isn’t supposed to be an issue of one-or-the-other, but I’d like to see a multilingual society in China, but most Chinese families take it the other way around and limit opportunities for their children to take pride in their regional heritage.
Peace.
i wholly agree. I’ve listed a number of these websites on the links page. Just recently in Wuxi they held the fourth or fifth annual Wu culture festival which unfortunately I missed.
Thanks for the comment. I hope to hear more from you.